Arrested American Diplomat

U.S. Embassy Calls for Release of American Diplomat

Islamabad, January 29, 2011 – The United States Embassy in Pakistan calls for the immediate release of a U.S. diplomat unlawfully detained by authorities in Lahore.

The diplomat, assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, has a U.S. diplomatic passport and Pakistani visa valid until June 2012.

On January 27, the diplomat acted in self-defense when confronted by two armed men on motorcycles.  The diplomat had every reason to believe that the armed men meant him bodily harm.  Minutes earlier, the two men, who had criminal backgrounds, had robbed money and valuables at gunpoint from a Pakistani citizen in the same area.

When detained, the U.S. diplomat identified himself to police as a diplomat and repeatedly requested immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.  Local police and senior authorities failed to observe their legal obligation to verify his status with either the U.S. Consulate General in Lahore or the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.   Furthermore, the diplomat was formally arrested and remanded into custody, which is a violation of international norms and the Vienna Convention, to which Pakistan is a signatory.

We regret that this incident resulted in loss of life.

We greatly value the cooperation and partnership between Pakistan and the United States, which is vital to the interests of both countries.  The U.S. Embassy is committed to working closely with the Pakistani government to secure the immediate release of the diplomat, as required under Pakistani and international law.

Dial-up to the Rescue in Egypt

This week has seen me sitting on the foreign desk of The Sunday Telegraph, which mean basically monitoring Egypt. There was a moment of panic yesterday when we lost contact with our two correspondents in Cairo. With mobile phones down and the internet taken off air (or however it works), the only means of contact was their hotel landline. And the operator there wasn’t picking up.

We made contact a couple of hours later. All was fine.

But it wasn’t supposed to be like this was it? I thought the whole point of the internet was that it was untakedownable. Sure you can take out servers with denial of service attacks and so on. But to black out an entire country… As data from Abor Networks show, that is exactly what happened in Egypt yesterday.

It couldn’t stop the protests though. Demonstrators knew to head to the mosques and take it from there. And, by last night, dial-up numbers were circulating on twitter, offering means of connecting via servers in Sweden or France.

@telecomix Telecomix We are now providing dialup modem service at +46850009990. user/pass: telecomix/telecomix (only for #egypt, respect that please!).

So long as the international lines stay open, internet access is possible. And an almost obselete technology becomes vital. Although I’m still unclear how these messages were being passed around in Egypt…

A Fool and His Money

George Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel Project is beaming back information from the border between north and south Sudan. The first details provide a vivid insight into what is happening there that could have been obtained by, er, just asking someone who knows about Sudan

• SAF deployments near Muglad, Kadugli, Kharassana and other areas appear to be deployed at company strength, in groups of 75 to 225 troops, equipped with helicopter transport, light armor and artillery.
• Importantly, these troops do not appear to be preparing to move in the near future. SSP has documented roadwork near known and suspected military bases, but the images do not show major movement of fuel trucks, supply convoys, and troop transports consistent with imminent forward operations.
• The report documents checkpoints reported by the U.N. north of Abyei Town on the road to Diffra in the oil-producing northern part of Abyei’s territory.
• These images demonstrate SSP’s ability to monitor the movements and activity of armed actors. SSP is watching all actors in Sudan and both sides of the border.

No news yet on the arboreal toilet arrangements of bears.

How a Fire Extinguisher Might Have Doused the Tunisian Protests

The spot where Mohamed Bouazizi sold his fresh fruit. He was known for having the best apples, bananas and tangerines

The guards and clerks gathered on the steps of the governor’s headquarters in Sidi Bouzid, laughing and shouting at the fruit peddler outside. As Mohamed Bouazizi climbed atop his fruit cart clutching a plastic bottle of paint thinner they urged him on, according to his brother Salem. “They never opened the gates to him, they just stood looking and laughing,” he said. “Some of them shouted, ‘Go on, Do it!”

Mohamed flicked his lighter and disappeared in a ball of flames, falling to the road.

They stopped laughing then. One of the guards grabbed a fire extinguisher and rushed from the gate to douse the flames. But the extinguisher was empty. It probably hadn’t been serviced in years.

The death of Mohammed Bouazizi almost three weeks later sparked a wave of popular protests that eventually brought down Tunisia’s president. The government could sense the rising danger: President Ben Ali’s people offered Bouazizi’s family two billion dinars (£880m) if they didn’t take his body back to Sidi Bouzid for a funeral, knowing that the outpouring of grief would rapidly turn to anger. “My brother is not for sale,” was Salem’s response.

But, dictators take note, Bouazizi might be still alive were it not for an empty extinguisher… and an autocratic, kleptocratic regime might still be in power.

Tunisian Food (Part 1, depending largely on how long I am here for)

When it arrived in the empty Tunisian hotel restaurant, looking like an oversized samosa, I was put in mind of nothing more exciting than a Findus Crispy Pancake. Not a great start. But closer inspection revealed that the shell was so thin that it had gone transparent, revealing irony greens around a white, egg centre. It was cooked perfectly, and as I bit through the crisp pastry the runny yolk oozed out, dripping down my shirt. Nice. So not a Crispy Findus Pancake, but a brik - possibly the best potatoey, tuna and egg pasty in the world.

Turabi’s Web

So Hassan al-Turabi is once more back in prison, something of a home from home for him since he fell out of bed with President Omar al Bashir. Still, it gives him a chance to catch up on his reading.

What got him into trouble was an interview with AFP in which he suggested that Sudan – where the Southern referendum is certain to end in secession, and with a president already wanted for war crimes – was ripe for a Tunisian-style revolution.

“This country has known popular uprisings before,” Turabi said, referring to revolts which toppled military regimes in 1964 and 1985.

“What happened in Tunisia is a reminder. This is likely to happen in Sudan,” he said, referring to the month-long deadly protests that prompted Ben Ali to take refuge in Saudi Arabia after 23 years of iron-fisted rule.

“If it doesn’t, then there will be a lot of bloodshed.”

Government security forces swooped hours later, claiming his party was planning protests. All trumped up of course. But one intriguing twist to this tale is the figure of Rachid Ghannouchi, exiled leader of Tunisia’s Islamist al Nahda party, who is watching events unfold from London as he considers returning to his homeland. Today he calls himself a moderate, progressive leader who has argued that women’s rights are central to modern Islam. Remind you of anyone?

Yes, Ghannouchi considers himself a student of Turabi, the man who plotted the rise of an Islamist government to power in Sudan and who invited the world’s most dangerous terrorists to Khartoum, including Osama bin Laden.

All of that is largely historical. Turabi is clearly not the threat he once was. But it’s just a reminder of how far his web extends – and what a fascinating character he remains.

South Asia Reading Challenge: 1. Curfewed Night

Is there a future for foreign correspondents – outsiders who parachute into a war zone, report on what they see, hang around for a bit and then go home? Now that anyone with a laptop and an internet connection (or a pencil and a phonecard) can file to anywhere in the world, in real time, is there any need for London or New York to shell out for the vast expense of housing, feeding and educating the offspring of a staff reporter in the field? Local journalists are better educated and trained than they were when the current model of foreign reporting was developed. And they come with generations of context, a grasp of the local lingo and more modest salary expectations as standard.

Basharat Peer’s at times brilliant and at times exasperating account of his life and travels in Kashmir is a reminder of the dilemma. At times his stripped-down prose lets the horror of the region speak for itself in all its miserable detail. At other times, though, his close personal connection to the conflict in Kashmir prevents him asking the money question: the question that an outside can get away with because no-one expects anything better, but which Peer flunks for fear of causing offence or re-opening old wounds.

The book is at his strongest as he describes his childhood, growing up surrounded by Pakistani-trained militants. His spare descriptions of carrying cricket bats like Kalashnikovs “in imitation and preparation” capture the wide-eyed mix of innocence and world-weariness that comes from growing up in a war zone, where schools become army bases and cricket pitches are turned into parade grounds. His pen portraits of family, friends and the butcher build into a picture of the ordinary lives that so many an outsider might have treated as scenery.

But his powerful writing falters occasionally when he returns from life as a reporter in Delhi on a mission to understand and document the land where he grew up. He might have got away with it once, sitting by the side of the road and letting a bus drive away, rather than clambering on board and travelling to Kunan Poshpura, a village where Indian soldiers raped 20 women in 1990. It’s a powerful metaphor for a horror perhaps best left forgotten.

But it happens too often: the militant who might have killed someone and the school teacher who left for some unspecified, unexplained problem. The problem is that they are old friends, and with old friends sometimes you prefer not to pry.

For all that though, the precise descriptions of lives lost in “encounters” (boys made to carry mines and then shot), the massacre at Gawkadal bridge and the sense of fear that grips his family make an evocative and thoughtful commentary on a land caught between warring nations.

Curfewed Night is a powerful memoir which just falls short of brilliant.

This is the first review in my South Asia Reading Challenge

Postcards from Hell 8: Water Features

In my admittedly limited experience, failed states tend not to go in for water features (Somalia’s coastline not being admissible as I’m fairly certain it was there when the country had a functioning government that stretched as far as the seafront of Mogadishu). So I always enjoy the fountains on the corner of E7 in Islamabad for their science fictionish depiction of shimmering globes propped up by shining fronds of steel – part palm tree, part flying saucer. Of course, this segment would work better if there were currently water issuing forth, but it’s the ambition that counts here.

Postcards from Hell is my ironically titled list of things that are cool about Pakistan, my new home, or which contradict the notion that the country is some sort of failed state

South Asian Reading Challenge: Bina Shah’s List

Author Bina Shah has signed up to the South Asia Reading Challenge. Here is her list

1. Granta Pakistan
2. The Scorpion’s Tale by Zahid Hussein
3. The Cloud Messenger by Aamer Hussein
4. The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmed
5. Claire Chambers’s book on British Muslims (I don’t know the title as it isn’t published yet)
6. Footprints in Time: Reminiscences of a Sindhi Matriarch by Ghulam Fatima Shaikh.

And first review:

Granta Pakistan

Given the media attention on Pakistan due to its continued significance in world affairs, combined with the “literary boom” that four or five Pakistani writers seem to have managed to create in the last two or three years, Granta decided to publish a special edition on Pakistan in the fall of 2011.  John Freeman, Granta’s editor, said in an interview with the Hindustan Times that they “simply wanted the best of writing from and about Pakistan”; the end result stirred up quite a bit of controversy amongst the literary community of Pakistan for being a skewed reflection of the country and its literary aspirations.

The edition opens with a fifty-page novella from Nadeem Aslam, award-winning author of Maps for Lost Lovers.  “Leila in the Wilderness” traces the uncertain fate of lovers Laila and Qes, and draws upon the folk legend of the Punjab via Persia, Leila and Majnoon, in which the couple cannot marry, driving Majnoon to madness. In Aslam’s retelling of the story, Leila is a village girl married into a rich, cruel family, and Qes and his brother search high and low to find and rescue her from her prison. Aslam has set the story in modern times, juxtaposing the old themes of love, separation and longing, within a country where mobile phones and satellite dishes exist side by side with a particular South Asian brand of cruelty to women. Aslam’s prose becomes overwrought at times, and the violence at the end of the story threatens to turn into caricature, but the descriptions of the Pakistani countryside and the sincerity of emotion within the characters remain strong points of the piece.

Other prose offerings from Mohammed Hanif (“But and Bhatti”) and Uzma Aslam Khan (“Ice, Mating”) offer lively portraits of relationships within contemporary Pakistan, while Mohsin Hamid’s “A Beheading” trots out a story of terrorism and violence that seemed fresh in The Reluctant Fundamentalist but by now has become the tired old trope of Pakistani literature.  Jamil Ahmed’s “The Sins of the Mother”, on the other hand, revisits the theme of honor killings but portrays one such incident in Baluchistan with such starkness and lack of sentimentality that the story, stripped and naked, becomes as harshly beautiful as the unforgiving black mountains in which it is set.

Two personal memoirs stand out in the collection: “Restless”, in which master storyteller Aamer Hussein recounts his days as a young student in London of the Seventies and Eighties, remarkable for its ability to evoke a time of personal change and turmoil set against a backdrop of geographical transition as he moves from a childhood in the Subcontinent to adolescence and early adulthood in the West.  Sarfraz Manzoor’s “White Girls” is a humorous personal recollection of his upbringing in Luton, with his family’s injunction that he stay away from white girls and his own fatal attraction to the same species., which ends on an unexpectedly sweet note of hope and optimism amidst the comical fretting of the hormonal protagonist.

But it’s the journalists who grab the spotlight in this collection: Declan Walsh’s “Arithmetic on the Frontier”, an incisive look at a Pashtun politician’s life in Lakki Marwat is a tour de force that describes not just a man but an entire way of life, endangered by the War on Terror and the forces that are battling for control of the entire region.  Jane Perlez’s “Portrait of Jinnah” is a subtle examination of the nation’s vision of Pakistan’s founder and how Jinnah himself was willing to “run with the hare and hunt with the hound” when it came to utilizing the power of Islam to help create Pakistan, while maintaining a secular, Westernized lifestyle in his private domain.  “The Trials of Faisal Shahzad” reports on one of Pakistan’s most demonized sons, yet portrays him as confused and misled, but does not compromise on addressing the heinousness of his crime. It is the complexity of these journalistic pieces, the layering of good and evil, the observation and perspective that is free of judgment, which most strongly draws and captivates the reader to this section of the journal.

While the editors of Granta Pakistan have saluted Intizar Hussein by including a translation of his classic essay “The House by the Gallows”, they have committed a grave error by omitting writing by Bapsi Sidhwa, the grande dame of Pakistani literature.   There is a “love it or hate it” reaction to the art in the issue as well, with Green Cardamom, a London-based visual arts organization contributing a photographic essay called “High Noon”, which avoids a pedestrian focus on the geographical beauty of Pakistan’s terrain or the comeliness of its children, concentrating instead on avant-garde photography and visual art from contemporary Pakistani artists.  The poetry, by Hasina Gul, Yasmeen Hameed, and Hasina Gul, almost seem like afterthoughts; Pakistani poetry deserves a greater highlight than the one given in this collection.  These flaws give Granta Pakistan a choppy feel, in which the consistency of the edition as a whole is endangered by the weak links in an otherwise strong chain.

Critics have noted that the issue is overrun with violence and terrorism, possibly because that is currently what is “sexy” to Western readers.  John Freeman would call this a “refraction” rather than a “reflection” of Pakistan’s current state, and it’s hard to disagree that these themes of hatred and violence are foremost on contemporary Pakistani writers’ minds these days. But at the same time, it’s impossible to ignore that Granta Pakistan is full of hatred and violence’s polar opposite, love, perhaps as a counterbalance to the tensions and conflicts that grip the country so completely.  Perhaps the most telling statement of the journal’s success is the fact that it has topped the Indian bestseller list for months since its publication.  This proves that Granta Pakistan has achieved what it set out to do – stimulate, provoke, and draw attention to the conundrum that is Pakistan, a rough diamond with fundamental flaws that prevent it from shining with the brilliance for which it was originally destined.

 

Bina Shah 

Given the media attention on Pakistan due to its continued significance in world affairs, combined
with the “literary boom” that four or five Pakistani writers seem to have managed to create in the
last two or three years, Granta decided to publish a special edition on Pakistan in the fall of 2011.
John Freeman, Granta’s editor, said in an interview with the Hindustan Times that they “simply
wanted the best of writing from and about Pakistan”; the end result stirred up quite a bit of
controversy amongst the literary community of Pakistan for being a skewed reflection of the country
and its literary aspirations.

The edition opens with a fifty-page novella from Nadeem Aslam, award-winning author of Maps for
Lost Lovers. “Leila in the Wilderness” traces the uncertain fate of lovers Laila and Qes, and draws
upon the folk legend of the Punjab via Persia, Leila and Majnoon, in which the couple cannot marry,
driving Majnoon to madness. In Aslam’s retelling of the story, Leila is a village girl married into a rich,
cruel family, and Qes and his brother search high and low to find and rescue her from her prison.
Aslam has set the story in modern times, juxtaposing the old themes of love, separation and longing,
within a country where mobile phones and satellite dishes exist side by side with a particular South
Asian brand of cruelty to women. Aslam’s prose becomes overwrought at times, and the violence
at the end of the story threatens to turn into caricature, but the descriptions of the Pakistani
countryside and the sincerity of emotion within the characters remain strong points of the piece.

Other prose offerings from Mohammed Hanif (“But and Bhatti”) and Uzma Aslam Khan (“Ice,
Mating”) offer lively portraits of relationships within contemporary Pakistan, while Mohsin
Hamid’s “A Beheading” trots out a story of terrorism and violence that seemed fresh in The
Reluctant Fundamentalist but by now has become the tired old trope of Pakistani literature. Jamil
Ahmed’s “The Sins of the Mother”, on the other hand, revisits the theme of honor killings but
portrays one such incident in Baluchistan with such starkness and lack of sentimentality that the
story, stripped and naked, becomes as harshly beautiful as the unforgiving black mountains in which
it is set.

Two personal memoirs stand out in the collection: “Restless”, in which master storyteller Aamer
Hussein recounts his days as a young student in London of the Seventies and Eighties, remarkable
for its ability to evoke a time of personal change and turmoil set against a backdrop of geographical
transition as he moves from a childhood in the Subcontinent to adolescence and early adulthood
in the West. Sarfraz Manzoor’s “White Girls” is a humorous personal recollection of his upbringing
in Luton, with his family’s injunction that he stay away from white girls and his own fatal attraction
to the same species., which ends on an unexpectedly sweet note of hope and optimism amidst the
comical fretting of the hormonal protagonist.

But it’s the journalists who grab the spotlight in this collection: Declan Walsh’s “Arithmetic on
the Frontier”, an incisive look at a Pashtun politician’s life in Lakki Marwat is a tour de force that
describes not just a man but an entire way of life, endangered by the War on Terror and the forces
that are battling for control of the entire region. Jane Perlez’s “Portrait of Jinnah” is a subtle
examination of the nation’s vision of Pakistan’s founder and how Jinnah himself was willing to “run
with the hare and hunt with the hound” when it came to utilizing the power of Islam to help create

Pakistan, while maintaining a secular, Westernized lifestyle in his private domain. “The Trials of
Faisal Shahzad” reports on one of Pakistan’s most demonized sons, yet portrays him as confused and
misled, but does not compromise on addressing the heinousness of his crime. It is the complexity of
these journalistic pieces, the layering of good and evil, the observation and perspective that is free
of judgment, which most strongly draws and captivates the reader to this section of the journal.

While the editors of Granta Pakistan have saluted Intizar Hussein by including a translation of his
classic essay “The House by the Gallows”, they have committed a grave error by omitting writing
by Bapsi Sidhwa, the grande dame of Pakistani literature. There is a “love it or hate it” reaction
to the art in the issue as well, with Green Cardamom, a London-based visual arts organization
contributing a photographic essay called “High Noon”, which avoids a pedestrian focus on the
geographical beauty of Pakistan’s terrain or the comeliness of its children, concentrating instead
on avant-garde photography and visual art from contemporary Pakistani artists. The poetry, by
Hasina Gul, Yasmeen Hameed, and Hasina Gul, almost seem like afterthoughts; Pakistani poetry
deserves a greater highlight than the one given in this collection. These flaws give Granta Pakistan a
choppy feel, in which the consistency of the edition as a whole is endangered by the weak links in an
otherwise strong chain.

Critics have noted that the issue is overrun with violence and terrorism, possibly because that is
currently what is “sexy” to Western readers. John Freeman would call this a “refraction” rather
than a “reflection” of Pakistan’s current state, and it’s hard to disagree that these themes of hatred
and violence are foremost on contemporary Pakistani writers’ minds these days. But at the same
time, it’s impossible to ignore that Granta Pakistan is full of hatred and violence’s polar opposite,
love, perhaps as a counterbalance to the tensions and conflicts that grip the country so completely.
Perhaps the most telling statement of the journal’s success is the fact that it has topped the Indian
bestseller list for months since its publication. This proves that Granta Pakistan has achieved what
it set out to do – stimulate, provoke, and draw attention to the conundrum that is Pakistan, a rough
diamond with fundamental flaws that prevent it from shining with the brilliance for which it was
originally destined.

Stick to Basketball George

Sometimes, even I get sick of my own cyncism. Sometimes I make a deliberate effort to be more positive. I bite my tongue when a well-meaning gap year student tells me they’ll be digging latrines in Uganda, where manual labour is not in short supply. Or I applaud the notion of sending goats to a poor village, where they will help destroy the vegetation. And sometimes I say how wonderful it is that movie stars have decided to use their star power to help worthy causes.

And then something happens that just makes all my warm, woolly thoughts evapourate. Usually it is someone being pompous. And usually it is George Clooney…

“He’s very predictable. We know all the moves. If you play basketball with somebody three times, you know that they’ve got no left hand…. We know how Bashir acts. He helps arm one of the rebel groups that are in disagreement with other groups in the south and tries to foment violence to destabilize the government. That’s what he’s always done.”

Ah yes, George Clooney, who understands Sudan and Omar al-Bashir so well that in order to persuade the world to send peacekeepers (forgoing the prospect of a peace deal for at least two years) he either exaggerated or plain made up the possible death toll if they weren’t deployed. The peacekeepers didn’t arrive for a couple of years, and nothing like his 2.5m people died.

George Clooney, who is such an expert on Sudan, that he has repeatedly confused Darfur, Chad and South Sudan, and his visits there.

And when he finally did make it there, he was struck down with such severe diarrhoea he very nearly had to be flown out by an emergency helicopter. Nothing wrong with that of course – happens to the best of us – but getting your publicist to force Reuters to withdraw the story makes him look like a dilettante, using Sudan to burnish his image. Movie stars don’t get diarrhoea, presumably.

Anyway, the biggest problem is that Clooney emphatically does not understand Bashir. If he did, he would not have worked so hard to get Bashir indicted by the International Criminal Court or campaigned for peace keepers when the world should have concentrated on getting a peace deal.

He would have understood that criminalising Bashir would only provoke a bitter backlash and make it harder to remove him from power.

Had he understood Bashir better, then Sudan may well have had a different president by now. In 2008 Bashir was telling confidantes in the governing party and at least one other head of state that he was planning to retire. Now thanks to Clooney and his chums he is a wanted man – and still in power.

And it’s not just me who feels this way