On Sept 11, 2001, I was in Washington DC when the Pentagon was attacked, while in New York, the Twin Towers were destroyed. This May, I found myself again in Washington DC, watching the White House being demolished from within by its latest tenant, President Donald Trump.

F.S. Aijazuddin

In many ways, President Trump sees himself as an elected Captain Han Solo, determined to fight Star Wars in every galaxy. He is confident of his supreme authority and invincible prowess. Doesn’t he have the force of the presidency behind him?

Only someone with limitless confidence would have dared dismiss the head of the FBI, James Comey. Was it because Comey had made an unprecedented disclosure about Hillary Clinton’s emails? Now even her Republican adversaries concede it cost her the presidency. Was it because Comey had been ‘grandstanding’ before a congressional intelligence committee, out-trumping even Trump? Was it because Comey refused to pledge personal loyalty to him during a private dinner for two in the White House? Or was it because Comey tunnelled too close to the sensitive vein of Trump’s relationship with Russia and refused to call off his hounds?

Trump sees himself as an elected Han Solo.

Trump’s brazenness knows no bounds. He has ‘threatened’ Comey against leaking tapes of their conversations which both know exist. Trump has derided North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s nuclear ambitions, and then tweeted that he would be ‘honoured’ to meet him. And only Trump would, the day after firing the head of FBI (which for generations had scared Americans with the warning: ‘Reds are under your beds’), receive in the sanctum of his Oval Office the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his ‘spymaster’ Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

The US press corps bristled at being excluded from the meeting. They were apoplectic after the Russian news agency TASS which had been permitted entry released photographs of the three beaming ‘conspirators’. “They tricked us,” one White House centurion complained. “That’s the problem with the Russians — they lie.” President Putin could not have asked for more from his Manchurian candidate.

Russians, though, are not the only masters of this sleight of hand. Pakistanis will remember a similar coup in January 2015, when our DG ISPR instantly uploaded a picture taken in 10 Downing Street when COAS Gen Raheel Sharif met an unsuspecting Prime Minister David Cameron.

In today’s world, optics is king. No one knows this better than the media-savvy Donald Trump. “He who reigns within himself,” Milton wrote, “and rules passions, desires, and fears is more than a king.” Trump’s “passions, desires and fears” are citizens in his realm, the TV remote his sceptre, the mobile phone his Twitter orb.

If the denizens of Washington’s ‘swamp’ had their way, President Trump would be facing impeachment proceedings already. That is still a possibility. The ongoing investigation by the FBI — graded internally as ‘significant’ — into Trump’s subterranean dealings with the Russians (which his lawyers admit spread over a decade) may well become Trump’s Watergate. Though, like Nixon, Trump will not concede without a fight. He will battle to his last pawn. Trump has no intention of being told: ‘You are fired!’

Meanwhile, Trump could do worse than consult Nawaz Sharif on the art of survival. Nawaz Sharif, now into the home stretch of his third tenure as prime minister, has positioned himself so that his re-election in 2018 seems inevitable. By taking a team of senior ministers and all four chief ministers with him to China to laud President Xi Jinping’s One Belt, One Road initiative, he has assured himself of continuing Chinese support. His entertainment at Murree of Jindal (an emissary from his Indian counterpart Modi), could not have been done without a discreet nod from the army brass. Does this mean that the two men in Pakistan’s civil-military kayak have at last realised that they must paddle in the same direction?

It is a pity that neither Nawaz Sharif nor army chief Gen Qamar Bajwa was in New York to attend the Lahore Literary Festival, held at the Asia Society on May 6. There, on one concentrated Saturday, the LLF organisers compressed Pakistan’s culture, literary, musical and artistic talent into one glorious cornucopia, from which flowed mellifluous sessions on ‘Fake News’, on Lahore’s heritage, on ‘Populism and the Global Rise of Strongmen’, ‘Satire and Escapism in Fiction and Beyond’, and a memorable finale titled ‘Notes from a Raga’ featuring two US-based, musically obsessed cancer specialists.

That unforgettable day ended with a qawwali, proving that Pakistanis can not only sing in harmony but work in unison. The LLF NY revealed a glimpse, a tantalising vision of that grace and peace which diminishes Star Wars into petty squabbles.

The writer is an art historian.
www.fsaijazuddin.pk
Published in Dawn, May 18th, 2017

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

IN Japan, ritual suicide is known as hara-kiri. In Great Britain, the equivalent is a referendum.

On Wednesday, June 22, the United Kingdom stood confidently astride the Channel, with one foot in the British Isles and the other in the European Union. At 9am the morning after, the referendum called by Prime Minister David Cameron opened.

It asked 46.5 million of his British electorate (which had voted him in a year earlier) whether Britain should remain in the EU or opt out. It was suspected that the real reason for his decision was to pre-empt a coup within his own Conservative party.

By 4pm, 33.5 million UK citizens (a 72pc turnout) had cast their ballots. By early Friday morning, just over 17.4 million Britons had decided the future of 65 million of their fellow citizens. They voted to leave the European Union.

Mr Cameron found himself quite literally out in the street. He stood in Downing Street, announcing his resignation. He had lost the job he had held for six years with ease and skill, forfeiting it in a single fool-hardy throw.

It seemed as if they regarded the referendum as an opinion poll.
David Cameron was barely seven years old, not even in his teens, when in 1973 Great Britain gained admission into the European Union. Since then, over 43 years, Britain’s relationship with the EU has been less a marriage than an uneasy cohabitation: Britain being regarded by EU partners as fickle, abrasive and often arrogant, and in retaliation Britain viewing the other 27 EU countries — many smaller and insignificant by comparison — as hiding behind the petticoats of Germany and France.

Suddenly, dramatically, all that has changed. The Britain where a week ago one would be driven around by a Bulgarian in Penzance or for an interview with the BBC by a Lithuanian or served by a Polish waiter in Leeds is now ethnocentric. Xenophobia from being a British pastime has hardened into national policy.

Today’s Great Britain is determined to remain insular, even if that means shrinking into Little England, especially now that Scottish secession and Irish reunification have moved a notch closer to reality.

Astute face watchers detected a fleeting expression of incredulity on the face of Mrs Samantha Cameron as she watched her husband announce his resignation. What was the need for a referendum? she seemed to ask.

That is a question millions of Britons are asking themselves the morning after. It is a question only they can answer, for they have no government left to interrogate. They have only themselves to blame, and the blame game in the UK has begun in earnest.

The under-50s blame the over 50s for being limpets to the past. The educated blame the semi-literate for heeding populist slogans. The Labour party blames its leadership for a lacklustre, indecisive campaign. And everyone other than determined loyalists now blames David Cameron for making a serious miscalculation, the sort that clever lawyers are taught to avoid when asking a witness a leading question.

In hindsight, it seems unbelievable that a British government should not have been prepared for a ‘leave’ vote. Was it hubris, left over from the success of the Scottish referendum? Certainly, there was an air of complacency among the British public, perceptible among both camps — for or against.

It seemed as if they regarded the referendum as an opinion poll, designed to elicit their individual preference. No one — none of the warring party leaders, none amongst the divided public, none of the bureaucrats in Whitehall, not even it would seem the EU commissioner in Brussels (who has since resigned) — had prepared a checklist on the steps that would follow the invocation of Article 50 — the request for withdrawal from the EU. It is too late now.

Mr Cameron may want to wait until his successor is chosen at the Conservative Annual Conference in Blackpool in October. Two and half million Britons may sign a petition demanding a second referendum. But the Brexit juggernaut has begun its doleful journey, pulled by spurned members of the EU.

Germany would like Britain out sooner than later; France wants to see a British prime minister — any prime minister — take the first, inexorable step to give formal notice of withdrawal. All the 27 EU members are planning to meet in a few days to assess the implications individually and collectively on the EU. It is a wake they had not expected to attend, certainly not so precipitously.

Tradition requires Mr Cameron to tender his resignation to the Queen in private audience. It is not the 90th birthday present she expected from her 12th prime minister. With her sharp sense of history, she must feel like King Canute, seated on a throne of sand, watching the tides of secession erode her once united kingdom.

The writer is an art historian.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

There is only one way of dealing with corruption. Make it legal. Better still, make it mandatory. Why should the poor be denied opportunities the corrupt enjoy with such insouciant impunity? Corruption is the pestilence that leaves pockmarks of a Clive, a Capone, a Noriega, a Suharto, a Marcos, a Duvalier, an Abramovich.

Our society is no less disfigured. In its brief history, there has never been a time when corruption has not been `unearthed`, when disapproving tongues did not click, fingers wag in censure, and then, our public made to watch helplessly as incriminating evidence was swept under an increasingly threadbare carpet, and pursuable cases pickled.

Socialists once regarded corruption as the inseparable twin of capitalism. They held their credo to be the antidote to both. They thought they could create a society free of personal avarice. Tombstones to socialism testify otherwise. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, within a generation, Russia has reverted to a tainted tsardom, oily oligarchs replacing greedy grand dukes.

Its Marxist-Leninist neighbour the People`s Republic of China (PRC) through strenuously enforced discipline achieved a level of social equality for its citizens. It copied the best in the West, and then imitated its worst. Espousing entrepreneurship, it has also wedded corruption.

A generation ago, no one in the PRC men and women alike would have worn anything other than a uniform Mao suit.

Today, an agreement between the PRC and Pakistan on Lahore`s Orange Line is cloaked in secrecy, too sensitive, the Lahore High Court has been told, to be disclosed except in camera. Yet soon Ling Jihua (aide to retired president Hu Jintao) will stand trial for corruption in China`s courts.

Corruption was not unheard of before Panama sprang a leak. Like global warming, though, it has begun to be discussed at a global level because it has assumed gargantuan proportions with international ramifications Corruption sans Frontières. Ironically, the recent Anti-Corruption Conference 2016 (the latest of too many of its kind) was hosted in a country that produced Clive and the East India Company, and encouraged wealthy Arabs and Croesus Russians to hyper-inflate the UK property market.

What should be expected from such a conference? Teary admissions of guilt by offenders? Lachrymose remonstrances of innocence by suspects? Conscience-stricken repatriation of stolen assets? The Conference`s outcome a lengthy 34-paragraph communiqué emphasised the need to `minimise` (not eliminate) corruption, and of course expressed the iron, inflexible determination to hold more such conferences. Bribery is in effect a social contract, in that it requires both parties to give their consent, voluntarily. When bribes are demanded or given, each party becomes equally responsible, equally guilty. Both become accomplices.

The person giving the bribe knows why, to whom, and for what reason the payment is being made. So does the recipient. The go between pockets his fee for his silence. One does not need an international conference to understand the mechanics of corruption.

Is there a way of eliminating such pecuniary inducements? A solution was applied once in a public-sector corporation during Zulfikar Ali Bhutto`s time in the 1970s. The corporation was responsible for awarding contracts worth millions of dollars for the procurement of equipment for three large fertiliser plants. The corporation alerted its vendors that no invoices would be processed without an accompanying undertaking, executed by the supplier, that no commission, kick-back, or gratification in cash or in kindhad been given in connection with the transaction. It worked. That particular corporation was the only one out of 11 under the ministry of production not to be subjected to an official inquiry by Zia`s subsequent government.

Can such an undertaking be demanded nowadays? Why not? Even though such an undertaking is no more than a slip of paper, yet it underscores a serious commitment by all parties to observe standards of integrity and probity. One could ask: Why do people then succumb so easily to temptation? Their answer, of course, would be the same as that proffered by tired harlots who swear they would quit their profession, if only young bucks would stop importuning them.

Daily, the list provided by Panama leaks is lengthening. Daily, innocent intent is being misconstrued as evil evasion. Daily, many more people are wishing that they had not taken the advice of inventive lawyers to park their undisclosed wealth in offshore havens.

These embarrassed souls have a soul-mate in the scientist who made Pakistan a nuclear power. He denies owning a Bahamian company, accusing his late brother (a banker) of fiscal wizardry. He claims: `You know, bankers are always up to their tricks and hankypanky.` Too true! Only a devious banker would have advised his naïve brother to invest in a hotel in Timbuktu, rather than Park Lane.

The writer is an art historian www.fsaijazuddin.pk

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Is nothing sacred anymore? Has privacy lost its sanctity? Why cannot our prime minister go to London for an urgent medical check-up, drop in on his tailors Scabal in Savile Row for a fitting, and then treat himself and his acolyte ministers to a lunch at Churchill Hotel, without also being photographed by amateur paparazzi on their ubiguitous mobiles? Now that Swiss bank counters and Panamanian desktops have been converted into unscreened confessionals, is nothing secret or sacrosanct? One`s sympathies reach out to our nouveau-riche rulers. They thought they had buried their money long enough for it to acquire the patina of `old money`. (`Old money` is what a ruler makes in his/her first administration.) As aspiring arrivistas, they felt that they had finally `arrived`. However, our elected Noriegas have found themselves sharing the predicament of the wife of the general-industrialist whose automotive companies were nationalised by Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in January 1972. `Life is so unfair, she moaned. `Just when we thought we had made it into the 22 families, Bhutto goes and does this to us.

She had a point. In the game of politics of the time, Bhutto`s nationalisation constituted foul play. Perversely, it was not the assailant but the victim who was sent off the field. In today`s matches, the spoilsport is accountability. It is the asp coiled in a basket of figs.

Our leaders amass wealth not as a precautionary nest egg, as an insurance against a predictably insecure future. They do it to provide their future generations with a financial security they themselves never enjoyed. It is a fact that no president or prime minister of Pakistan has ever left office poorer than when he or she entered it, with the possible exception of our 15th prime minister Shaukat Aziz who did not become rich.

He came rich. He was heard to boast that he did not need to be corrupt: as a former Citibanker, he had enough money to last three generations.

Should the public be surprised therefore that leaders when elected and their scavenger minions when unleashed should see governance not as a responsibility but as an opportunity? Greed whets an appetite; the fear of accountability should 1(ill it. But it doesn`t.

Our law libraries in Pakistan have no shelves lef t to accommodate the tomes of legislation passed to hold the corrupt accountable. Our courts are clogged with corruption cases that suppurate and decompose but never die, and are left unburied. NAB has become a watchdog-turned-leech, sucking diseased blood, bloated beyond original purpose. Files containing crucial evidence ofpursuable cases have vanished. Our sovereign parliament has misplaced its dentures.

Is corruption, as the historian Edward Gibbon would have us believe, `the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty`? In our case, yes. Democracy in Pakistan is not so much a vote-for-all as a free-for-all.

Today, it would seem that the media in Pakistan is the last spokesman of the public`s conscience. Television channels scour tirelessly for information of illicit transactions.

TV anchors itch for an opportunity to catch and expose wrongdoers. Newshounds sniff like inquisitive foxes, ferreting out stories that cower, hidden in warrens, afraid of discovery. Today`s media is the hunter, the corrupt its prime quarry.

`The press is a sort of wild animal in our midst restless, gigantic, always seeking new ways to use its strength,` Zechariah Chafee, a commentator, once wrote. What he said 70 years ago is as valid today even to the applicabilityofthe tellingnextsentence:`The sovereign press for the most part acknowledges accountability to no one except its owners and publishers.

At a LitFest recently, during a discussion on the social responsibility of the media, a view was expressed that nowhere in the world is the press anything other than an aggregation of powerfulcommercial interests. Stories sell newspapers and airtime, their aftermath does not.

Media moguls prefer surgery to post-op care.

Traditionally, the media has always had three discrete roles: it can hold a mirror to society, it can be its voice, and it can (and should) act as its conscience. And it is in this latter capacity that the Pakistani media has attained what some might argue is a belated maturity.

The voice of our media has shifted from a shrill alto to a deeper bass. Having added timbre to its voice, has it also developed muscles to match? Disgruntled Pakistanis would like to believe it has. The targets of the Panama leaks know that it has not, perhaps never will. Hell will freeze over before Pakistan becomes another Iceland where a tainted prime minister resigns rather than continue in of fice.

Our politicians are made of sterner stuff.

They will not be besmirched by such inky allegations. Their Savile Row suits are lined with Teflon.

The writer is an author. www.fsaijazuddin.pk

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Spring has not shed its bloom, yet its roses have turned the colour of congealed blood. The latest massacre of our innocents took place this time at Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park Lahore on March 27. Over 75 children, their parents and other holiday-goers died. More than 340 were injured. It was a cruelly premature Easter resurrection for the Christians amongst them, and a hellish holiday for their Muslim co-victims.

Surviving Lahoris did not need to proclaim: `Je suis Lahore.` Over centuries, that slogan has been repeated with less grief in the adage `Lahore Lahore hai` (Lahore is Lahore). L ahore did not need to illuminate its Minar-i-Pakistan in mourning colours. That eastern Eiffel tower stood shrouded already in white, which on our national flag symbolises our terrified minorities.

Who, it could be asked, amongst those who lost their lives on that Easter Sunday, secured martyrdom the suicide bomber or his hapless victims? A contemporary Oxford historian Peter Frankopan, speaking recently in Lahore, provided an answer. He differentiated between a martyr sacrificing his/her own life in the name of faith, and those who commit suicide as an act of faith, to gain martyrdom, but murder unwary martyrs around them.

Did that suicide bomber in Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park believe that there are discrete heavens, as there are separate graveyards on earth, for Muslim and Christian martyrs? Surely, divinity does not contain discrimination in its DNA.

Whichever heaven those martyrs have gone to, it is certainly not in Panama. That heavenly haven was once thought secure and inviolate. Instead, e-leaks have disclosed reams of secret offshore transactions by luminaries such as Putin, the Bachchans, and the Sharifs. They all assumed that they would take their secrets (if not their money) with them to the grave. Instead, their financial fandango has been exposed. Their fiscal tomfoolery has become known to the public, and probably also to their spouses. The last thing these well-known names expected to see was their laundered money being washed again like dirty linen in public.

Money laundering is not a new phenomenon. Nations have been doing it for centuries.

Imperial Athens and Rome, Beijing and Moscow, London and Paris transferred regularly the portable riches of their colonies to swell their treasuries at home. Immoveable assets were kept abroad, in kind.

For example, in the 1880s, King Leopold II effectively owned the Congo Free State. That allowed him to exploit its enormous mineral resources and then divert the proceeds to his personal benefit. Victorian Britain became Great Britain riding astride the elephantine economies of its colonies. Even a minnowcountry like Holland expanded its lungs breathing in oxygen provided by the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).

By contrast, the rulers of today prefer to denude their own nations and instead window-dress the economies of foreign ones. One single super-rich Russian oligarch, for example, can prop up London`s property market on his littlest finger, like Krishna did Mt Goverdhan. The post-Gorbachev perestroika of the 1980s made the island economy of Cyprus a sanctuary, to cool red-hot Russian money. Dubai`s property boom soared after Arab oil shifted from beneath the sand and transmuted into skyscrapers built above it.

Now that Panama has destroyed its reputation (who needs a tell-tale bank manager?) and damaged those of its trusting clients, one wonders how newer 21st-century Nadir Shahs will hide their troublesome wealth? Will they solidif y it into gold? Each would need a private Fort Knox to safeguard that. In property abroad? As Rockwood Estate once showed, there is always the danger of having to disclose beneficialownership. Through shell companies? Sea clams are more reticent than Panamanian lawyers. In overpriced jewellery? Not any longer. Even majesties dress like frugal republicans. The maladies of the overrich are peculiar to their own species. That is whythey invent their own antidotes.

Strange as it may seem but plausible in its perversity, perhaps the safest haven for our Muslim magicians is to make their money disappear into Israeli banks. Who would think of searching there? How could NABeven if it was so inclined retrieve assets that have been squirreled away in a country we do not even recognise? Only a myopic optimist or a naïve parliamentarian would believe that money that has been taken out of the country will ever find its way back. Black money has no such homing instincts. Similarly, there is little to be gained from moral finger-wagging and social tut-tutting. Neither will arouse the conscience of either democratically elected kings or of their courtiers. They donotcare.

As Nietzsche said: `He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

Money no longer matters to those slaughtered in Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park and in Army Public School, Peshawar. They paid admission fees with their lives. Pakistanis pay every day to admit their filthy rich into Panama.

The writer is an author.
www.fsaijazuddin.pk

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan