Muslim India

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

IS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, STILL THE PRIVATE PROPERTY OF RACISTS?

Without holding any brief for United States’ UN ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, or for that matter for Asif Ali Zardari, a New York story on how State Department officials, like Richard Boucher and others had ganged up on a US citizen of Afghan origin, does show up the racial and ethnic divide that rules in Bush administration. The Anglo-Saxons, Europeans and Jews hold first class citizenship, while Asians and Africans are treated like dirt. Even though laws on US books are very stringent on any such discrimination, this real life story will bring out how even a Newspaper of the status of New York Times, does not feel any qualms in reporting open discrimination in Administration ranks.

The story also shows up; in comparison, how blatantly American Jewish officials keep their private communications open with Israelis authorities and nobody gets any wiser.


Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com
www.ghulammuhammed.wordpress.com


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/washington/26diplo.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin


U.N. Envoy’s Ties to Pakistani Are Questioned

By HELENE COOPER and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: August 25, 2008
WASHINGTON — Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, is facing angry questions from other senior Bush administration officials over what they describe as unauthorized contacts with Asif Ali Zardari, a contender to succeed Pervez Musharraf as president of Pakistan.
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Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, a longtime friend of a leading Pakistani politician.
Mr. Khalilzad had spoken by telephone with Mr. Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, several times a week for the past month until he was confronted about the unauthorized contacts, a senior United States official said. Other officials said Mr. Khalilzad had planned to meet with Mr. Zardari privately next Tuesday while on vacation in Dubai, in a session that was canceled only after Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, learned from Mr. Zardari himself that the ambassador was providing “advice and help.”
“Can I ask what sort of ‘advice and help’ you are providing?” Mr. Boucher wrote in an angry e-mail message to Mr. Khalilzad. “What sort of channel is this? Governmental, private, personnel?” Copies of the message were sent to others at the highest levels of the State Department; the message was provided to The New York Times by an administration official who had received a copy.
Officially, the United States has remained neutral in the contest to succeed Mr. Musharraf, and there is concern within the State Department that the discussions between Mr. Khalilzad and Mr. Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister, could leave the impression that the United States is taking sides in Pakistan’s already chaotic internal politics.
Mr. Khalilzad also had a close relationship with Ms. Bhutto; flying with her last summer on a private jet to a policy gathering in Aspen, Colo. Ms. Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan in December.
The conduct by Mr. Khalilzad, who is Afghan by birth, has also raised hackles because of speculation that he might seek to succeed Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan. Mr. Khalilzad, who was the Bush administration’s first ambassador to Afghanistan, has also kept in close contact with Afghan officials, angering William Wood, the current American ambassador, said officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter of Mr. Khalilzad’s contacts. Mr. Khalilzad has said he has no plans to seek the Afghan presidency.
Through his spokesman, he said he had been friends with Mr. Zardari for years. “Ambassador Khalilzad had planned to meet socially with Zardari during his personal vacation,” said Richard A. Grenell, the spokesman for the United States Mission to the United Nations. “But because Zardari is now a presidential candidate, Ambassador Khalilzad postponed the meeting, after consulting with senior State Department officials and Zardari himself.”
A senior American official said that Mr. Khalilzad had been advised to “stop speaking freely” to Mr. Zardari, and that it was not clear whether he would face any disciplinary action.
In 1979, Andrew Young was forced to resign as the American ambassador to the United Nations over his unauthorized contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Administration officials described John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, and Mr. Boucher as angry over the conduct of Mr. Khalilzad because as United Nations ambassador he has no direct responsibility for American relations with Pakistan. Those dealings have been handled principally by Mr. Negroponte, Mr. Boucher and Anne W. Patterson, the American ambassador to Pakistan. Mr. Negroponte previously was the United Nations ambassador, and Ms. Patterson the acting ambassador.
“Why do I have to learn about this from Asif after it’s all set up?” Mr. Boucher wrote in the Aug. 18 message, referring to the planned Dubai meeting with Mr. Zardari. “We have maintained a public line that we are not involved in the politics or the details. We are merely keeping in touch with the parties. Can I say that honestly if you’re providing ‘advice and help’? Please advise and help me so that I understand what’s going on here.”
This is not the first time Mr. Khalilzad has gotten into trouble for unauthorized contacts. In January, White House officials expressed anger about an unauthorized appearance in which Mr. Khalilzad sat beside the Iranian foreign minister at a panel of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The United States does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, and a request from Mr. Khalilzad to be part of the United States delegation to Davos had been turned down by officials at the State Department and the White House, a senior administration official said.
Richard C. Holbrooke, a former ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, said the administration was sending conflicting signals. “It is not possible to conduct coherent foreign policy if senior officials are freelancing,” he said.
It has long been known that Mr. Zardari, who has been locked in a power struggle with Mr. Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister whose party left the governing coalition on Monday, planned to run for president, administration officials and foreign policy experts said.
“I know that Zardari’s interest in becoming president has been clear for quite some time,” said Teresita C. Schaffer, a Pakistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The Bush administration has long been uneasy with the idea of Mr. Sharif as a potential leader of Pakistan, and now that Mr. Musharraf is out of the picture, the administration, despite public protestation of neutrality, is seeking another ally.
“It distresses me that the U.S. government has not learned yet that having ‘our guy’ is not a winning strategy in Pakistan,” Ms. Schaffer said. “Whoever ‘our guy’ is isn’t going to be the only guy in town, and if we go into it with that view, we’ll bump up against a lot of other guys in Pakistan.”
A senior Pakistani official said that the relationship between Mr. Khalilzad and Mr. Zardari went back several years, and that the men developed a friendship while Mr. Zardari was spending time in New York with Ms. Bhutto.
The Pakistani official said the consultations between the men were an open exchange of information, with each one giving insight into the political landscape in his capital.
“Mr. Khalilzad, being a political animal, understood the value of reaching out to Pakistan’s political leadership long before the bureaucrats at the State Department realized this would be useful at a future date,” the official said. The ambassador “did not make policy or change policy, he just became an alternate channel,” the official said.
Of Mr. Khalilzad’s Pakistan contacts, Sean I. McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said, “Our very clear policy is that the Pakistanis have to work out any domestic political questions for themselves.” Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman, said, “The Pakistani elections are an internal matter for the Pakistani people.”
Helene Cooper reported from Washington and Mark Mazzetti from New York.

Ahmed Faraz died in Islamabad - Daily News

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008%5C08%5C26%5Cstory_26-8-2008_pg7_21

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Ahmed Faraz: poet of love and defiance
By Khalid HasanWASHINGTON: Ahmed Faraz, who died in Islamabad on Monday night after a long struggle with a host of ailments, having taken ill in the first week of July while on a visit to the United States, was a classicist like Faiz Ahmed Faiz who, like him, produced poetry of great lyrical beauty and who, like his mentor, never hesitated to stand up against oppression and never was afraid of suffering for his beliefs.Faraz, steeped in the classical tradition, was the true inheritor of Faiz's mantle. Like Faiz, he suffered prison and lived in exile during the dark days of military rule in the 1980s. Like Faiz, he was loved by the people, especially the young, and nobody wrote with more intensity about love than Faraz. He gained fame as a young man – he was teaching at Peshawar University at the time - and while much in the way of comfort and the easy life forsook him on more occasions than one, his fame and his popularity never languished. Few poets have had more of their work set to music and performed by the great singers of the age than Faraz. Almost always, he found himself on the wrong side of the government of the day. From Ayub, through Yahya, through Bhutto and down to Musharraf, Faraz was always viewed by the establishment as the rebel he was. He was never afraid to write what others only whispered about and he never let adversity stray him from the path he had chosen for himself. More of his poetry is remembered and recited by his admirers in his own country, in India and wherever Urdu is loved and spoken, than that of any other poet of modern times. The journalist Iftikhar Ali recalled in New York as the news of Faraz's death broke, "Faraz was a year senior to me when I joined the Islamia College Peshawar, in 1954. He was remarkably handsome, full of life but very much into poetry. He would gather students around him and read out his mostly romantic poems. There was no open mixing of male and female students in those days. But somehow his poems managed to reach girl students who felt greatly attracted to him. He would receive dozens of hand written letters from them, not only those at the university but from a women's college in the city as well. The well-to-do ones would have their servants deliver their letters while others would drop them in front of Faraz at bus stops. At that time, he loved to watch hockey and would lead slogans at the annual match between the two old rivals -- Islamia College and Edwards Collge."During Bhutto's days, Faraz was sent home by Maulana Kausar Niazi for writing a couplet that some considered heretical, a misstep that was soon rectified. He lost his job under the Zia regime and he spent many years in exile in Europe and America, quite a few of them in London. His great poem Mohasra (The Siege) remains one of the most powerful indictments of military rule. Faraz told the BBC in a recent interview that he would never like to leave Pakistan because he wanted to live in the country, which was his home, because it was there that he would want to continue his struggle against dictatorship. "I am against dictatorship and military rule. The time has not yet arrived when I should escape from the country out of fear. I will stay home and fight." He was actively involved in the movement that has built itself around the ousted chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Faraz used his influence to urge writers and poets to join the protest. Few people know that in 1947 when the uprising in Kashmir against the Maharaja's rule began, among the volunteers who went in to fight on the side of the Kashmiris was the teenager Ahmed Faraz from Kohat. He said in a recent conversation that his heart bleeds at the military aggression to which the people of Waziristan and Balochistan have been subjected. He said what we know today as Azad Kashmir was not liberated by the army but by Wazir tribes who went into the state to fight the Maharaja's forces. Faraz, asked why he had returned the Hilal-i-Imtiaz conferred on him by the Musharraf regime, felt that he could not keep the award because it was given to him by a military regime, although many people had told him that it was an honour conferred on him by the people of Pakistan. He said whenever the country has come under an army rule, it has suffered grievously, to the extent of being rent asunder, as in 1971. Ask why he had not written another poem like Mohasra, he replied, "Because I do not want to write the same poem again. In Pakistan, things do not change and, consequently, the poems I wrote in the past have not become dated."

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1185295&pageid=0

Please, set Kashmir free

Malavika Sangghvi
Saturday, August 23, 2008 21:56 IST

As the daughter of a Kashmiri Hindu, whose family left its ancestral home in Srinagar during the turmoil that followed Partition, I would like to express a sentiment that I still haven't heard in the rhetoric about Kashmir.

I speak for those for whom Kashmir is not a symbol of one-upmanship with Pakistan, not a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that is intrinsic to the sovereignty of India and not a football to be kicked around by cynical politicians, but as the daughter of a family in whose very lifeblood Kashmir courses every moment.

Cut our hearts open and you will see Kashmir, put your ear to our sighs, and you will hear our yearning for the land where our family spent its last days intact and happy before Partition scattered us to the winds, rendering us refugees.


Growing up dislocated in Mumbai, as a child, it never failed to surprise me when people who often hadn't so far stepped out of their suburb, would say: "Kashmir is ours! We will never give it up! Let them try and take Kashmir from us!"

Even at that early age, when I could have mistaken their jingoism for kindred sentiment, I realised that their virulence had nothing to do with my family's love for Kashmir, but was misguided machismo.

And I would find myself seething with rage at the audacity of their presumption. "But Kashmir was never yours," I'd say in my mind. And sometimes, when more provoked: "You don't deserve Kashmir!" And then I'd go home to my mother, whose ever present, unshed tears for her homeland were a leitmotif of our life in Mumbai.

Throughout my childhood, my family would go back to Srinagar (the ancestral home in Vazir Baugh had to be sold when my widower grandfather became too old to live alone) to stay with Muslim friends, with whom we shared a poignant empathy: we had lost Kashmir because we had moved away; they were losing it everyday, living there, witnessing its destruction. Over kawha, we would watch as the elders of our family weep for what had been.

Like a woman too beautiful for her own good, Kashmir was a tragedy even then. It produced an ache in our hearts when we heard its name and thought of its ill fate: and then, because you cannot sit weeping over lost Valleys all your life, when we returned home we put Kashmir on the backburner.

And on that backburner, Kashmir fermented Sheikh Abdullah, a man whose commitment to India was unquestionable, was humiliated, jailed, alienated. The most unimaginable genocide was committed on the people. Entire generations of its sons were mowed down by an army whose presence was as large as it was unpopular. And in its knee-jerk, misguided, ill-conceived approach to Kashmir the Indian polity revealed its shallowness.

But through this all, intrinsically, those of us who have Kashmir in our bloods, know that the Kashmiri Pandits who have been driven out of their homeland are not enemies of the Kashmiri Muslims, in fact they are both victims of the historic blundering of the Indian government's Kashmir policy.

Take away Delhi's political brinkmanship, take away the Hindutva sentiment that has played so neatly into the hands of Pakistan and its fishing-in-troubled-waters game and you may be surprised at how harmoniously Kashmir's Hindus and Muslims can live.

So, on behalf of my mother, my family, and all those who have loved and lost
Kashmir, I beg: Please. We have done enough damage to and in Kashmir. Enough to last many lifetimes. The chinars are tinged with too much blood. We have failed Kashmir and we don't deserve her anymore. Leave Kashmir alone. Set her free.


Email: s_malavika@dnaindia.net
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