My latest article, which appeared in today's The Nation, follows. Your
comments would be appreciated.
Warmest regards,Dr. Haider MehdiRise and Seize the Moment!
By Dr. Haider Mehdi
"He was instructed to advise people that
death and hardships are tests. And when
people asked for reasons and proof, he was to lay down the cleric's ultimate
trump card: 'God works in mysterious ways.' [He] decided that if he ever heard
himself use that phrase, which amounted to taking an easy way out, he
would give up
…A bent toothless woman, wedged against a wall and smelling of sepsis, raises a
gnarled hand and asks, 'Where is God's mercy for the poor?'"
From Dave Boling's
novel Guernica
Let us seize the moment to put an end to
hunger, poverty, deprivations and human suffering in our beloved country of
pious and pure people. Let us stop taking
the easy way out. Let us stop blaming God for His mysterious ways to
inflict death
and destruction on us. Let us give up this inhumane and destructive "friendship"
with the US and its Western allies that has plunged this nation into horrifying
endless violence with its dreadful horrors and consequences.
Let us get a hold of ourselves: Let us
put and end to the politics of vested interests and, in a true spirit of Muslim
cultural and Islamic values, get to work to serve the people. Let us
rise above petty issues of sectarian
conflicts and unite in solidarity to defeat our enemies. Let us
realize that we are one people – we
might speak different languages, we might look different, we might have diverse
faith orientations, we might belong to different ethnicities and religious
sects and yet, our fate, our destiny is common, first and foremost.
Let us identify our enemies: let us get
to know them as thoroughly as we can.
Let us comprehend their political behavior. Let us figure out how and in
what ways they operate and plan to "nullify" us. Let us understand
the goals of our enemies
and their strategic approach to accomplish these objectives.
Let me blatantly state: Our number-one
enemy is our own entire contemporary political leadership, its criminal apathy
to the plight of this nation's people, its dreadful political
ignorance, its unmatched
and unprecedented political incorrectness, its absolute disregard of our
socio-cultural-religious values, its paralyzing and disgraceful obsession with
self-preservation, its complete dependence on foreign patronage, its abysmal
political-economic management skills, its massive corruption, its absurd and
autocratic absolutism in governing tactics, its oppressive methods in handling
dissidents, its disrespect for constitutional norms, its flawed national
political priorities, its lack of total concern of impending chaos and
the political
abyss that is about to abrade the face of this nation. Our ruling
elite is a shameless and a
humiliating sham.
Let us understand this clearly: No
amount of US-West patronage of our ruling junta, their so-called
friendship with the
Pakistani people, their conditionally concealed flow of dollar aid, IMF loans,
Asian Development Bank's project financing, military aid and massive rhetorical
media blitz for secularization can offer life-saving resolutions to the
Pakistani problematics. The truth is that neither the aid packages,
nor the IMF bailouts nor the American influx of dollars will radically change
the nature of the present politically misshapened structure of politics and
resultant ground realities in Pakistan. The poor will still be poor, the hungry
will still be hungry. "Growing
inequality combined with a flawed, economic and political system has been
turning Pakistan into a travesty of Justice," wrote an eminent political
analyst recently.
The fact is that the American-West
alliance with successive Pakistani military-civilian regimes has been
counter-productive to the interests of the Pakistani people. It is so
because this entire edifice of
Pak-US-West political discourse and engagement has always been based on a
flawed conceptual and ideological premise (read it as US-West expansion of
capitalist culture and imperialism) and has only resulted in consolidating
backward, regressive and corrupt regimes in Pakistan. This entire
structure of politically
contaminated, perverted, and bribed political culture has to be totally
dismantled before national reconstruction based on self-reliance and national
dignity can begin. We will have to obliterate
this repressive, outdated, internal political system and its
intrinsically-linked
tentacles to the US-West's decades-old alliance.
This is the moment to seize such an initiative:
Already throughout the Muslim world, there are fresh, strong,
courageous, politically-determined
and precisely focused civil society movements managing change and
transformation of regimes in several countries.
There is a heroically provoked vitality to these movements alluding to a
massively increased political awareness of the common people and their
demonstrated will to force political change.
"There was a magical quality to Tunisia's uprising, which transcended
religious and political divides and united a population – young and
old, educated
and not – resentful of years of unemployment, hopelessness and oppression…Bin
Ali's fate is evidence of the dangers that…rulers face by clinging to hollow
ideologies and losing touch with the aspirations of their citizens,"
wrote Jeffrey
Fleishman and Amro Hassan in the Los Angeles
Times. Echoing the same feeling regarding Hosni Mubarak's pro-US/West
regime in Egypt, Ayman Noor, former opposition candidate in the 2005 Egyptian
election, said, "I do not think that we need nation-wide protests to reach the
same results as in Tunisia. We only need
demonstrations to erupt in a few main cities like they did in the 1919
revolution
against the British." Such is the
eruption of sentiment against the Western-supported regime in Egypt.
There is also a growing pervasive feeling
throughout Muslim nations that the support of the indigenous ruling elite in
selective countries by the US-West works and is strategically managed
against the
interests of their own citizens. "Civil
society groups say that governments friendly towards the United States and
Western European nations are some of the most dogged opponents of democracy,
repressing peaceful Islamist groups which seek power through democratic
elections," reported Reuters. Francis
Ghiles, Senior Research Fellow at the Barcelona Centre for International
Affairs, contends that "The mantra of the battle against Islamist terrorism has
meant that, even more than we used to, we have closed our eyes in the last ten
years to what these rulers are up to."
Widespread disenchantment with the
US-West's counterproductive global engagement with Muslim nations is being
echoed in every Islamic country – it has taken the proportion of a household
sentiment with the exception of those people who are directly benefitting from
the West's political and financial favors.
"Enemies of Arabs [and Muslims] want to destroy human values of our civilization
and replace them with Western values based on war, oppression, assassination and
torture by taking advantage of [our] weaknesses," opined Bouthaina
Shaaban, Political
and Media Advisor to the President of Syria.
Indeed, we, in Pakistan, are completely
familiar with war, oppression, assassination, torture, missing persons, NROs,
drone attacks, poverty, hunger, deprivations and human suffering – courtesy of
our ruling elite, covertly and overtly supported by our "friends" in the US and
West. As the charismatic, progressive and dynamic Turkish Prime Minister said
recently, "We do not need a third party to reform and improve our ties …we must
stand together…by joining forces, we can overcome all our problems."
Seize the moment – join contemporary
civil society movements in Muslim nations against hunger, unemployment,
oppression, and death squads!!
Save your civilization!! Rise!!
Mobilize!! Take charge of your destiny.
The
writer: professor, political analyst, published author and conflict-resolution
expert
Email:
hl_mehdi@hotmail.com
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