From Evian to Taliban

Musharraf’s mess

What a week!

Bush and Chirac shake hands, the US President jets off to Sharm el-Sheikh to solve the Middle East crisis, and soldiers in the Afghan army get their first pay cheques.

What more do you want?

Well, the Diary starts in Pakistan, or, to be precise, in Peshawar, the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), possible hiding place of Osama bin Laden.

This week, the provincial assembly passed a bill introducing sharia law in the region.

For those of you who haven’t checked out a map recently, the NWFP borders Afghanistan. The talk now is of a return of the Taliban.

The province is governed by the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), an alliance of radical religious parties who took power following elections last October. The sharia bill passed unanimously and without debate. The assembly building erupted with shouts of “Allah is great! Allah is great!”

Law minister Zafar Azam told Reuters that “Sharia will be the supreme law. We will preach to people to adopt good things and give up bad things.”

Neatly put.

The government is likely to establish a Department of Vice and Virtue. The province’s education, judicial and economic systems will be run on Islamic principles. Last month, vigilante groups tore down posters and billboards that depicted women (or cricketers tempting women with Pepsi).

Azam told Reuters that the government is considering sexual segregation in universities and encouraging men to grow beards. Youngsters will be forced to obey their parents. Laws already exist banning male doctors from examining women and forbidding men from coaching female athletes. Civil servants are required to pray five times a day, and there are reports of crackdowns on the sale and performance of music. Cinemas have been closed down and video sales restricted.

“Our society is gradually being pushed towards religious totalitarianism – a system that was practiced by the Taliban in Afghanistan in a crude form, which is carried out here in a more sophisticated way,” Afrasiab Khattak of the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan told the BBC.

But Azam disagrees. “The Taliban were totally different,” he says. “They were uneducated and revolutionary. We are doing things though through democracy.”

The pressure is on President Pervez Musharraf.

(Various sources, including several reports from BBC Online)

Wheels of fortune

From the NWFP to southern Pakistan, and the enchanting story of one man and his bicycle.

This week, following a row with his family, Mohammed Ishfaq, an angry 20-year-old Pakistani man, rode off on his bike after an argument.

The next thing he knew, he was in custody of the Indian police.

Ishfaq’s home is in Pakistan’s Sialkot district. Lost in his own thoughts, he rode twenty kilometres, somehow crossing the Kashmiri militarised zone undetected and straying into Indian territory.

Ishfaq claims it was a mistake and that he had no idea where he was. The Indian border guards are not so sure and suspect he may be a spy.

His two-wheeled passage across the international line is an embarrassment to India.

If nothing else, Ishfaq was lucky not to have cycled over a mine.

Reuters reports a senior Indian police official as saying, “He seems to have lost his way and crossed over to this side cycling through fields and muddy tracks. He says he fought with his parents and left home angry and was just cycling around.”

The maximum penalty for crossing the frontier is seven years in jail.

One voice?

Despite the awkward Bush-Chirac handshake (Bush looked like he was swallowing a cactus), it appears that the Atlantic is wider than ever.

The US seems genuinely baffled by Europe.

First, to the G8 summit itself. “One more time,” wrote John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune, “there was not anybody around at a G8 gathering who could speak in the name of Europe.”

This, of course, is an age-old confusion for the Americans. Henry Kissinger famously asked who he should call if he wanted to speak to Europe. The question goes to the heart of the European project. There is still no answer.

In fact, an answer has never seemed further away. Currently, Europe is as divided internally as it is with the US. Further referenda on membership this coming weekend, plus various national decisions on referenda for the new EU constitution and the single currency, may make things worse.

“We can have disagreements but that doesn’t mean we have to be disagreeable to each other,” said President Bush about President Chirac, picking at his escargot, and mentioning the word “Iraq” a few thousand times.

But Bush upstaged Chirac, who clearly hoped to pose as the champion of the world’s poor, and friend of the protestors. Chirac’s invitation to leaders of (non-G8) poorer nations to attend a special session on Sunday was carefully calculated, though not quite carefully enough. In another article, entitled “The France-U.S. pas de deux”, Vinocur wrote that “Refracted through a carefully controlled French prism, [Chirac] meant to gleam as a beacon for a multipolar world of peace, generosity and concern.” Unfortunately for Jacques, Dubya went and announced his $15 billion pledge to help fight Aids in Africa. “I urge our partners in Europe to make a similar commitment,” said the unilateral Texan.

“Europe” lost its voice again. Vinocur for one was amazed to watch South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, pledge $1 billion a year for five years to a global Aids fund on Europe’s behalf (when Mbeki is your spokesman on Aids, something must be wrong). The best “Europe” could do (in the form of Chirac) was to get “an impression that Europe will take up [Bush’s] challenge.”

All this goes to the heart of the EU constitution, currently being drawn up and squabbled over in Brussels. It is due in a couple of weeks and in its current draft would require unanimous voting on foreign policy and security issues. While, to appease Britain, the word “federal” has been dropped, Germany’s foreign minister Joschka Fischer has already called the united community aspect of foreign policy voting “a great backward step”.

In other words, still no single European voice, still no one on the end of Kissinger’s European hotline.

In awe of the US’s own founding fathers – Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, and company – the IHT points in amazement at how uninterested the European public are in their constitution. The convention’s website, it pointed out this week, is visited by only 45,000 people each month. That’s one in every 10,000 people whose lives the constitution will govern in the enlarged EU.

Former Irish prime minister John Bruton worries that “less than one per cent” of Irish citizens can define the word “subsidiarity”. Even my computer thinks I’ve made a spelling mistake.

Away from the headlines, and to the surprise of many European officials, the US has postponed plans to hand over the Nato-led mission in Bosnia to an EU-led force by the middle of 2004. A US official told the Financial Times that “anyone who says it is a dispute is trying to causing trouble.”

Before arriving in Evian, Bush went to Poland, America’s favourite country right now, and symbol of “new (pro-American) Europe”. “New theories of rivalry should not be permitted to undermine the great principles and obligations that we share,” he told his audience in Warsaw. “[This] is no time to foster divisions in a great alliance.”

Clearly, Chirac wasn’t listening. After Bush had escaped to Jordan, speaking at the final G8 press conference, the French president said that “we consider that all military action not endorsed by the international community, through, in particular, the Security Council, was both illegitimate and illegal, is illegitimate and illegal. And we have not changed our view on that.”

As The Economist said recently, it is “highly unlikely, unless there is a regime change in Paris, that the United States and France will enjoy any swift reconciliation.”

As for the United States and Europe, or France and Europe, who could possibly say?

(Don’t Miss! Views of a Changing World 2003, the latest survey by the Pew Research Center, which, among other things, shows a sharp drop in favourable views of the US across the globe.)

(Also read about “the poor people’s summit”)

Building bricks

However, if the US needs to rediscover its multilateral instincts, help may be at hand.

A theme park will open this week in the (US) state of Georgia. It is named the Global Village and Discovery Center.

There are no rollercoasters. Instead, visitors can try their hand at “brick and tile making, as well as other fun activities”.

The park is backed by Habitat for Humanity, a Christian charity, and, in the words of the BBC “aims to teach wealthy Americans how the world’s poor really live.”

Disney World has the World Showcase, the Global Village and Discovery Center has a slum, modelled on housing in Africa, Asia and Central America.

How about some free passes for the White House?

Ritual hilarity

Finally, to Swaziland, and more strange words from Diary favourite King Mswati III.

Interworld Radio reports that the King thinks “women and trousers are the cause of the world’s ills”. Writing in the Times of Swaziland, Mswati quoted the bible, saying that women wearing trousers was the reason the world was in such a dire state.

Oh, so that’s why we had the second Gulf war.

The absolute monarch also condemned human rights. As far as he’s concerned, you can’t change what God created, so why even try?

Then, in a televised address this weekend, Mswati said, “During election times, we tend to lose our grandmothers, grandfathers and young children. They just disappear. But I want to warn you that you should not resort to ritual murder.”

This leading candidate for Quote of the Year referred to the Swazi habit of murdering relatives in the name of democracy, and using their body parts in magic charms.

It makes US campaign finance reform sound distinctly tame.

The King unveiled a new constitution this week that disappointed democracy campaigners by banning multi-party elections.

Who needs democracy when you’ve got God’s approval?

Quotes of the week

“There is no excuse for making a reference to ancient Greece, Rome and the Enlightenment without making reference to the Christian world and the Christian values so important to the development of Europe.”
Polish president, Alexander Kwasniewski, on the new EU constitution.

“I can’t understand those Poles who fought for democracy and freedom and have these values but are not interested in taking part in this referendum.”
Kwasniewski again, worrying that Poland won’t get the required 50% turnout in the referendum on EU entry this weekend.

“I never vote in any election. Whatever happens will happen, and I’ll kind of slide through.”
Wojtek Widmanski, a Polish vegetable seller in a Warsaw market. (Quoted in the New York Times)

“There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It wasn’t a figment of anyone’s imagination.”
US secretary of state Colin Powell (See last week’s Diary)

“I stand absolutely, 100% behind the evidence, based on intelligence, that we presented (to) people.”
British prime minister Tony Blair on those weapons of mass destruction.

“I defamed hamburgers ... but I have not insulted anyone.”
Edoardo Raspelli, Italian food critic and hero to the “slow-food” movement who is being sued by McDonald’s for “defamatory and offensive” remarks about their cuisine.

“The death camps still bear witness. They remind us that evil is real and must be called by name and must be opposed.”
President George W. Bush

“We do not ignore the suffering of the Jews throughout history. It is time to bring all this suffering to an end.”
Palestinian prime minister Abu Mazen

Contact the Diary Editor: dominic.hilton@openDemocracy.net