Rendezvous with Keira Knightley

LONDON: Maybe it’s because we normally see her in pretty dresses and bonnets, speaking so exquisitely crisply, that it feels strange, paradoxical even, to be sworn at by Keira Knightley. Like a spurt of cheap lager from a fine Wedgwood teapot. Can she really have just told me to get lost? When all I asked was who she went on holiday with?Knightley has a new film out, about which more later. We are sitting in a posh London hotel where she drinks green tea, and sits, like a cat, in the middle of an impossibly plumped-up sofa cushion. There is something quite feline about Knightley. When we talk about her work, she purrs. No, not literally – that would be weird — but she speaks easily, and appears content and relaxed. When I attempt to steer the conversation towards her life outside work, the claws come out. In a very good-natured, playful way, it has to be said. At times the interview feels like a sparring match, and she gives as good as she gets, if not better. She’s very entertaining company, and it’s fun – trying to get under the guard of Keira Knightley.This will sound like the tragic fantasy of a male journalist who has fallen under the spell of a very pretty young lady and somehow imagines he could be her friend, but although she does speak awful proper, there is something nicely un-starry about her. Perhaps it’s being sworn at, but I’m finding it hard to remember that I am talking to the second highest-paid actress in Hollywood last year, although there seems be some debate about exactly how much she made.“According to Forbes magazine, I earned 32 million last year,” she says, though she can’t remember if it’s dollars or pounds (it’s dollars).Is that not true? “Unfortunately, no.”How much did you earn? “Get lost.”She says that money is not important beyond being comfortable, that she owns her own flat “somewhere in London”, and she mentions a new sofa. When I ask how much the sofa was, I get the inevitable (and probably well-deserved) “get lost”.She doesn’t want to talk about politics much, because she doesn’t feel confident talking about it, though when I ask what she votes, she says, “My dad was a founder member of a leftwing theatre company, I went to a comprehensive – what do you think?”Her father is an actor, her mother is a playwright, and young Keira was brought up in Teddington, west London. How posh does that make her, I wonder. “Why are you so obsessed with poshness? Somebody from the Observer asked me why I don’t have a cockney accent, seeing as I went to a comprehensive school.”It seems a reasonable question, so what’s the answer? “Not everyone who goes to comprehensive school has a cockney accent. I think I probably did have more of an estuary accent. Coming from Teddington, it’s more estuary. Cockney is more east London.”Do an estuary accent then. “No.”American then. “No.”Can she do an Indian accent? “Not today, no. Get lost.”But she’s an actor. “You’re an actor, so act [Oi, she’s stealing my lines]. Give me a script then.”The new film is called The Duchess, and Knightley is excellent in the lead. It’s about a late 18th century “It girl” called Georgiana Spencer, Princess Di’s great-great-great-great aunt. There are obvious parallels between their two lives, though Knightley wasn’t immediately stuck by them, mainly because, as she says, she was only 11 when Diana died (she’s 23 now).Georgiana marries a cold fish played, also excellently, by Ralph Fiennes, who is really, really horrid to her. It gets more complicated when Georgiana’s best friend, Bess, moves in, and they live as a joyless menage a trois. Georgiana finds some solace in an affair with young politician Charles Grey, but has to stop seeing him in order not to lose contact with her children. It’s a story of female repression, but also of female strength and survival. It’s also a story about public adoration versus private misery (see what I mean about those parallels?).Even though Knightley is too young for Diana to have made much of an impact on her life, the difference between a person’s public facade and what’s going on inside is something that seems to preoccupy her. “The way you can have extremely strong people who actually in private are completely breaking down. Everyone does it – presents a front that is actually... No one can ever know what’s going on emotionally inside.”Is there anything of this, of Georgiana, in her? “Am I very lonely, and terribly trapped, and all the rest of it? No, I don’t particularly look for characters that are like some kind of biography of myself, no.”It’s a role she didn’t find easy. “I wasn’t particularly confident about it, which I think actually helped – because I don’t think that confidence is always a very helpful thing. I really found it very difficult to get a grasp of her.”Is she often unconfident about her parts? “There’s always an element of fear that you’re not going to be able to make people believe in the fiction, that suddenly you’re going to be standing there in your dress and wig, and feel like a complete loser. Which is not particularly helpful.”It is not surprising that she mentions wigs and dresses, because a role for Knightley generally involves her putting on one, or both, of those. This has happened by accident rather than by design, she says. “I think I’ve simply read better characters in period pieces than I have in contemporary, which is a pity. I don’t know why that is. But I haven’t been kind of going, ‘I really want to do another period film.’ I’ve just been led by what scripts I’ve thought were good, and what film-makers I thought were good.”Knightley knew she wanted to act pretty much from the moment she knew anything at all. Famously, she wanted an agent at three, got one at six, and was making TV appearances by the age of 10. Her big breakthrough was the low-budget British film Bend It Like Beckham in 2002, after which she found herself alongside Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp in camp, big-budget action blockbuster Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl. Suddenly, the skinny little girl from Teddington was a major, if unlikely, Hollywood star.While it may be the Pirates franchise that has brought in those millions (however many there are), Knightley is more serious about acting than to be happy simply being a damsel in distress. She’s done the odd thriller and action film, which have slipped by comparatively unnoticed, but it’s with country houses and the past that she is most associated – Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, now The Duchess. It’s what Britain exports well, she says, and it isn’t hard to find modern relevance under a bonnet. “I don’t think we’ve really changed that much in our essence.”I’m wondering if that’s it, and whether we’ve seen the full range yet. “Of?”You. “As an actress? I hope not. It would be quite sad if I said yes. I’ve only been making films for the past five years. You change as a person all the time. And so therefore the way you perceive the world and situations, and the way you portray characters, is going to change. I think that’s the aim.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service

Will Democrats rescue Pakistan?

THE US Democratic Party now has its ticket for the elections of Nov 2008. If the ticket succeeds and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are elected to become the next pair of leaders of the United States, what will it mean for Pakistan?Pakistan still remains dependent on American largesse. In spite of the significant structural change that has occurred in global finance, Pakistan will remain tied to Washington in order to receive the resources it needs desperately to prevent its economy from collapsing. Will the Obama-Biden administration rescue Pakistan? Will the Democratic administration be better for Pakistan than one headed by Senator John McCain?Let me get the McCain-Pakistan question out of the way before discussing the likely Pakistan policy of the Obama-Biden administration. The McCain administration will remain obsessed with the issue of terrorism and its impact on the security of the United States. In this respect, John McCain will basically follow the approach of the Bush-Cheney era, putting aside all other concerns. For McCain the ‘war on terror’ remains the central concern in relations between America and its allies in both the developed and developing parts of the world. He will also follow a muscular foreign policy as indicated by his response to the Russian involvement in Georgia.If pronouncements by the leaders are to be treated as providing some guidance to their conduct in office, it can be said with some certainty that the Obama-Biden administration will follow a different approach. This will have enormous consequences for Pakistan. What will be the approach, what will be its consequences, and how should Pakistani policymakers position themselves are some of the questions that deserve serious reflection in Islamabad.Senators Obama and Biden have approached Pakistan from two different angles. The former has looked at it from the perspective of the American war in Afghanistan. Obama believes, and for good reason, that Washington should not have gotten involved in Iraq. When it did it diverted its attention away from Afghanistan and allowed the situation there to deteriorate. He wants to pull the Americans out of Iraq as soon as such a withdrawal is practical and get more fully engaged in Afghanistan.He does not seem to be happy with the way Islamabad has conducted military operations against Al Qaeda and the resurgent Taliban on its side of the border. At one point he declared that he would not hesitate to send American troops into Pakistani territory if such a move was warranted by developments on the ground. His approach, in other words, focused on the military aspects of the solution to the Al Qaeda-Taliban problem.It was after this declaration, which was understandably not well received in Pakistan, that he travelled to Afghanistan and met President Hamid Karzai in Kabul. He has not spoken in any kind of detail on that subject since his visit but it can be assumed that the Afghan president must have encouraged him to pursue that line of thinking. For Karzai blaming Pakistan for his troubles has been a convenient way of camouflaging his failure to stabilise his country.Senator Joe Biden has approached the Pakistan problem from an entirely different angle. He has focused on the need to economically stabilise the second largest Muslim country in the world. Working with Senator Richard Lugar, the senior-most Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee that Biden heads, he has tabled a resolution that aims to provide Pakistan with $1.5bn a year of economic assistance for at least five years, perhaps even 10 years.This amount will be spent on Pakistan’s social and economic development in a way that the rewards of economic growth reach the poorer segments of the population and poorer regions of the country. The Biden-Lugar approach is premised on three assumptions: that economic deprivation is a major reason for growing extremism in the Muslim world, that Pakistan is central to the problem of Islamic extremism, and that Pakistan does not have resources of its own to get the country’s economy moving in the right direction.I have no doubt that once the Obama-Biden administration is in place there will be much greater emphasis on economic and social development as a way of fighting Islamic extremism than on the use of force. The Biden approach will prevail. This should be welcome to Islamabad. However, in the discussions I have had with various people involved in developing positions for the Democratic administration, there is some scepticism about Pakistan’s ability to proceed on that course.The neglect of the economy by the new set of leaders in Islamabad has not increased the confidence of the policy and opinion-makers in Washington. They are not convinced that Pakistan fully understands the real nature of the problem it faces on the economic and social fronts. With some Pakistani leaders scurrying around the globe trying to raise funds for bailing out the country from its current predicament, it can be suggested that the emphasis is on applying the band-aid once again rather than on finding a lasting solution to the country’s economic problems.What is it that Islamabad must do to restore confidence among the people in the world of finance and in the political arena in Washington that it has the ability and the expertise to strategise for developing its economy and its society in a way that would bring its young people into the economic mainstream rather than let them drift into extremism?This is not a hard question to answer. The answer has three components. First, there must be a demonstrated ability to plan for the future. Second, there is the need to focus the state’s attention on building institutions in the areas of both economics and politics that would help to secure a better future for all citizens. Third, there also the need to give a clear signal to the world that Pakistan wishes to join the community of nations as a partner rather than continue to operate from the margin as a force for disruption.With the change in its own leadership and with change about to occur in Washington in the next few months, Pakistan may have the opportunity to correct the course on which it has been moving for many months. This opportunity must not be lost. This has been a constant refrain in many contributions I have made to this space. Sometimes the message needs to be repeated.
Courtesy: Daily Dawn Lahore/ By Shahid Javed Burki

The crisis in Kashmir

THE age-old struggle of the people of Jammu and Kashmir for independence and self-determination has made a great leap forward. The catalyst for massive political reactions proved to be the Srinagar government’s move to donate a piece of land for the convenience of the pilgrims en route to the holy Hindu shrine of Sri Amarnath.The struggle has achieved a new pitch of intensity and fervour as the leaders of the people are showing unprecedented unity of objective and action. The government of India has acknowledged it by throwing all principal leaders like Ali Gilani, Umar Farooq, Yasin Malik and Shabbir Shah in jail simultaneously. Unprecedented demonstrations all over the state have erupted.To suppress the demonstrations and rioting, there is curfew everyday.So dramatic was the political impact of the land donation and the subsequent protests that Ghulam Nabi Azad’s government in Indian Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) fell.The new governor of J&K had to rescind the order of the transfer of the donated land. That in turn sparked massive protests in the Hindu majority region of Jammu, leading the authorities to decide once more to let the pilgrims use the land.The Hindu rioters blocked the Jammu-Banihal-Srinagar road cutting the lifeline of the Valley with India. The stoppage of food and other vital supplies revealed to the people of the Valley a hitherto obscure strategic dimension of their geography and their political struggle against New Delhi.One morning they had the horrible feeling that the people of the Jammu region were capable of controlling their jugular road link with the rest of the world. The Jammu region had demonstrated its power to starve the population of the Valley at will. It could no more be trusted.Overnight the need for the Valley to have an ever open road link with the world via Muzaffarabad became clear to them. Estimates vary but between 100,000 to 200,000 people marched on the main road from Baramulla to Uri in J&K. They were stopped; many were wounded and killed including Sheikh Abdul Aziz, a prominent Hurriyat leader. That was on Aug 11, 2008.Since then massive protests have continued. To prevent dharnas and processions curfews are intermittently imposed over large areas of the Valley. The struggle for liberation has acquired unprecedented momentum.A crisis of gigantic proportion stares the governments of India and Pakistan in the face. The results of the long, painstaking and admirable negotiations between the two governments about a general understanding on the framework of the solution of the Kashmir issue have been washed down the River Jhelum — a great tragedy, indeed.Like the British in 1946, the governments of India and Pakistan failed to fathom the depth of frustration and anger caused by delaying the solution during the preceding two years. Apparently they paid a heavy price. A little spark proved enough to light a prairie fire.Our two countries now face a qualitatively new situation. The demand for independence has moved to the top of the Kashmiri agenda.The governments of India and Pakistan must realise that it will no longer be feasible even with their combined power to impose a solution of the dispute on Kashmir by force.They must now fully permit the regions of J&K to go the way they want. In the circumstances it is advisable for India and Pakistan to think of negotiating their compacts with the future governments of Kashmir in a new mode.In yet another way, the situation is not very dissimilar to that of India in 1946. In that fateful year it was the British who were fast losing their grip. The Congress and the League were having a field day working up the emotional aspect of their demands among their followers.Today in J&K, on one side are the governments of India and Pakistan who have lost moral and political ground. On the other side are the worked-up political forces of Jammu and Srinagar as antagonists. All four parties are highly dissatisfied with the status quo.India and Pakistan must not repeat the blunder the British committed by relying on elections and referendums to determine the wishes of the people. That is a sure way of widening the distances between communities and nationalities which ultimately result in mass killings and migrations. The 1946 elections in India, 1970 elections in Pakistan, referendum in the former Yugoslavia and elections in Palestine are proofs if any are needed.The solution lies in arriving at agreements with leaderships and then putting them up to the people through referendum as was done in the case of Ireland.Courtesy: Daily Dawn Lahore/By Dr Mubashir Hasan

The goose and the gander

THREE weeks ago, when the Georgian army foolishly invaded South Ossetia and the Russian army drove it back out, I wrote that we shouldn’t worry about a new Cold War. An old journalist friend in Moscow immediately e-mailed me saying that I was wrong, and I’m beginning to think he was right. The preparations for a new Cold War, or at least a Very Cool War, are coming along quite nicely.On August 27, Britain’s foreign minister, David Miliband, flew into Kiev to say that “the Georgia crisis has provided a rude awakening. The sight of Russian tanks in a neighbouring country on the 40th anniversary of the crushing of the Prague Spring has shown that the temptations of power politics remain.”By recognising the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Miliband said, Russia has ended “the post-Cold War period of growing geopolitical calm in and around Europe.” So Ukraine and Georgia, formerly parts of the Soviet Union, would be welcome to join Nato, formerly Russia’s great enemy. Oh, and one other thing. Russia bore “a great responsibility “ not to start a new Cold War.On the same day Mitt Romney, a leading candidate for the Republican vice-presidential nomination, was in Denver to make the point that Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, lacked the judgement and the experience to deal with a crisis like the “invasion of Georgia.” He then proceeded to speculate that the next move of “the Soviets” might be to invade Poland. Well, why not? If we’re going to have the Cold War back, we might as well have the Soviet Union back too.And so to Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who raised the stakes on the following day by speculating that the United States government had encouraged Georgia to attack South Ossetia in order to provoke a crisis. “The American side in effect armed and trained the Georgian army....The suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of US president.”But I don’t believe that the White House told Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to go ahead and grab South Ossetia, counting on the Russians to counter-attack, smash the Georgian army, and scare Americans into voting for John McCain. The Bush administration would not have betrayed its favourite Georgian so callously. The truth is probably that Saakashvili, having been promised Nato membership, attacked South Ossetia on the false assumption that the United States would threaten war with Russia to back his play.Now Russia has enraged the West further by recognising the independence of South Ossetia and Georgia’s other breakaway territory, Abkhazia. This is no real loss for Georgia, which has never controlled them since it got its own independence when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. The local ethnic groups fought off the first Georgian attempts to conquer them in 1991-92, and the “ethnic cleansing” by both sides in those wars ensured that the Ossetian and Abkhaz minorities would never again accept Georgian rule.Yet for the past sixteen years Moscow did not recognise their independence. Russia has always insisted on preserving the territorial integrity of states, because so many of its own minorities might be tempted by separatism if it were legal for unhappy ethnic groups to just leave a country. If South Ossetia can secede from Georgia, why can’t North Ossetia secede from Russia?When the major western countries, having occupied Serbia’s Albanian-majority province of Kosovo in 1999 to stop the atrocities being committed there by the Serbian army, finally recognised Kosovo’s independence last February, Moscow was furious. This was a precedent that could unleash international chaos. Well, now it has accepted that same precedent for South Ossetia and Abkhazia — although Hell will freeze over before it agrees that the same principle might apply to, say Chechnya.As the former British ambassador to Yugoslavia, Sir Ivor Roberts, said last week, Moscow has acted brutally in Georgia. But when the United States and Britain backed the independence of Kosovo without UN approval, they paved the way for Russia’s defence of South Ossetia, and for the current western humiliation. “What is sauce for the Kosovo goose is sauce for the South Ossetian gander.”There is still no good reason to have a new Cold War, and I still think it won’t happen. But as the politicians posture and the stupidities accumulate, I’m less sure than I was that it won’t happen.Courtesy: Daily Dawn Lahore/ By Gwynne Dyer

Arundhati Roy and the K-word

NATIONS are usually proud of their celebrities. But sometimes these celebrities can be a pain in the neck, if they are a little too outspoken, especially at an awkward time.Arundhati Roy, the petite Booker Prize winner (author of The God of Small Things) has been exactly that, at least to some Indians. She has uttered the dreaded K-word, just when Kashmir has been aflame.“After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian government’s worst nightmare has come true,” she writes in a cover story for Outlook, one of India’s most read and respected news magazines. “For all these years, the Indian State has done everything it can to subvert, suppress, represent, misrepresent, discredit, interpret, intimidate, purchase — and simply snuff out the voice of the Kashmiri people. It has used money (lots of it), violence (lots of it), disinformation, propaganda, torture, elaborate networks of collaborators and informers, terror, imprisonment, blackmail and rigged elections to subdue what democrats would call ‘the will of the people’.” Strong stuff. Also a tribute to the extent of press freedom in India. Not many developing countries, even those with a free media, would allow such sentiments to be expressed on a sensitive subject. Roy continues, “It was always clear that in their darkest moments, it was not peace that (the people of Kashmir) yearned for, but freedom too,” and then concludes in words of great eloquence that will resonate for a long time to come: “At the heart of it all is a moral question. Does any government have the right to take away people’s liberty with military force? India needs azaadi from Kashmir just as much — if not more — than Kashmir needs azaadi from India.”Basically, Roy was elaborating on the idea of India as formulated by the nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru: a democratic federal republic where all have the right to dissent. Her implication was that this idea of India should be big enough to also take in the right of people to peacefully disassociate themselves from the republic.The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) immediately condemned her, virtually calling her words treasonable. The Congress said nothing, though a former Congress prime minister had once said that everything on the status of Kashmir was negotiable, except ‘azaadi’.Roy’s writing must be viewed in the context of an unprecedented three-month-long mass agitation in Kashmir — which continues at the time of writing — that has taken several lives. At core of the demonstrations is a relatively minor issue, the handing over of some land at the Hindu pilgrimage centre of Amarnath. Yet, the unrest has spread from the Muslim-dominant Valley of Kashmir to the Hindu-majority Jammu region.Underlying it, however, is something much bigger, the alienation of the Muslims of Kashmir, where a secessionist movement has been going on for almost two decades and which has taken the lives of some 30,000 militants, military personnel and civilians.Human rights abuses have certainly taken place — on both sides. And Pakistan, despite its official denials, undoubtedly helped to arm and train the militants, at least until a few years ago. Whether this was done by the shadowy intelligence agencies acting on their own, is neither here nor there. Sept 11 and American pressure on Gen Musharraf changed all that.Be that as it may, the reality is that pro-Pakistani slogans have now been raised in the Valley and the Pakistan flag flown, in defiance of the Indian army, not by the militants, but the general populace. Make no mistake, this is a mass upsurge. That disturbs most Indians. You can use the gun against terrorists but what do you do when virtually all sections of society are demonstrating peacefully?Though Kashmiris were never really ‘pro-Indian’, even in the days of the charismatic Sheikh Abdullah, they were not ‘pro-Pakistan’ either. Islamabad learnt this to its cost in the 1965 and 1971 wars, when it expected Kashmiris to rise up in revolt. They didn’t.In any case, it was a paradox for Pakistan to say that there should be a plebiscite in Kashmir, as had been promised by Nehru, and that Kashmiris should have the right to self-determination when that very right was denied to Pakistanis under military rule. But Pakistan now has a democratically elected government. So, the picture has changed.When Pakistan broke up and Bangladesh was formed, one thing had stuck in this writer’s mind. In the 1960s there had also been a secessionist movement in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. In fact, the Tamil secessionist demands were more extreme than those made by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. But in India, the secessionists were voted to power and became moderates. In Pakistan, there was a crackdown on Sheikh Mujib and his party. And we know what followed.Some people also liken what is happening in Kashmir to what happened with the Sikhs in Punjab. However, that is a false analogy. In Punjab in the 1980s, when Sikh militancy was at its height — and this writer was based there then — the vast majority of Sikhs, though alienated and unhappy over the army assault on the Golden Temple and the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi, were by no means votaries of an independent ‘Khalistan’. At most, perhaps 10 to 15 per cent were ‘Khalistanis’. In the Kashmir Valley, on the other hand, the people overwhelmingly want azaadi, so fed up are they with army repression.Nevertheless, how far can one expect any Indian government to go in meeting Kashmiri demands — and listening to Arundhati Roy’s plea? Sadly, not very far. Although Kashmir is a case apart, given the controversy that shrouded its political status when the British withdrew from the subcontinent, the government in New Delhi has over the years whittled down its special status and treats it like any other part of the country.So, Ms Roy, though many of us admire your boldness and the sentiments underlying your eloquence, the reality is that no Indian government would risk its political future by making Kashmir azaad. That government would fall. What it can do — and what it must do — is to restore to Kashmiris their lost dignity and their sense of well-being. The call for azaadi will then melt away. Ask the Tamilians.Courtesy Daily Dawn Lahore/ By Rahul Singh

Media and its discontents

PRAISES have been heaped on the media and at the same time abuses have been hurled at it for its coverage of events that have unfolded in the recent past. The media coverage of the lawyers’ movement has especially been a bone of contention between the lawyers and the Musharraf camp.The latter condemned the media vehemently as though the entire judicial crisis was its creation. The lawyers eulogised the media projection so profusely that it led one to believe that the movement would fail without the blessings of the media.But on taking a closer look at the matter one finds that the criterion underlying this qualified denunciation and appreciation of the media has been the degree to which it has served the interests of one side or the other. This approach to news coverage has swept under the carpet the real problems that are plaguing the print and electronic media.Some of the basic issues that are being questioned are the graphic depiction of the gory details in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, lopsided time and space allocation to a particular story, monopolisation of the national debate on key issues by a few intellectuals and the lack of investigative reporting. In this context, the performance of the media as the fourth pillar of the state has come under intense scrutiny.There is a strong case for media self-censorship insofar as the depiction of suicide bombing scenes on television is concerned. The objective of the masterminds of suicide bombings is not limited to killing people. They also want to instil terror in the heart of the government and the people. The media has unwittingly been playing into the hands of these terrorists by showing terrifying images on television and spreading panic and despair.Furthermore, death is a private affair and news channels violate the right to privacy when they display horrible images of the dead or dying. Let alone children, some of the images are too horrific to be handled by adults. Interestingly, one news channel has started employing ‘bombing’ vocabulary in its reporting of price hikes in different items that we have witnessed recently.“Another bomb falls on the poor: prices of petrol raised by Rs5”. Or “After price hike in petrol, people become victims of yet another bomb: prices of gas also raised”. A couple of points need to be made here with regard to this kind of reporting. One, with the media employing such extreme language, how would the horrifying scenes of suicide bombings impact on the common people in their daily lives? Second, it is easier to sensationalise an issue than to look deep into the structural issues through investigative reporting.Take for example the issue of a petrol price hike. It is easier to equate it with the falling of a bomb than to investigate how the hike in international crude oil prices by one dollar per barrel translates into the price of one litre of petrol at petrol stations. What is the share of the marketing companies? What is the share of the government in the shape of the taxes that it collects on petrol?The investigation of these and other problems requires time and resources which most media houses are not willing to provide journalists with. In such a scenario, it is not surprising that the majority of journalists are unfamiliar with the existence of the Freedom of Information Ordinance 2002. Not surprisingly, they are unaware of how to submit information requests to the federal ministries and provincial departments under this law in order to gain access to public documents for investigative reporting.Related to this is the issue of time and space allocation to particular stories by both the electronic and print media. Reporters and anchor persons give most time and space to stories pertaining to political developments than to reporting and discussing systemic issues of governance. Instead of analysing governance-related structural issues, our anchor persons find it easier to wax eloquent about political developments by inviting politicians from different political parties for discussion.Take the example of the various news channels that love to invite the information minister to share her thoughts on the emerging political scenario. However, they have never invited Ms Sherry Rehman to discuss the draft of the Freedom of Information Bill 2008 that her ministry recently prepared. For this to happen and for a qualitative discussion on the subject, it would require an extensive study of the existing legislation on the issue and of internationally accepted principles of freedom of information. It would also require a comparative study of different laws enacted by other countries.Ironically, the media has largely ignored an information law that aims to promote transparent and accountable government by giving citizens access to public documents — a goal that elevates the media to the level of the fourth pillar of the state.Lastly, news channels have restricted themselves to a handful of intellectuals who keep going from one channel to the other. We are not an intellectually bankrupt nation. There are so many academicians, civil society activists and other individuals who might not be otherwise educated in the conventional sense but are wise enough to give fresh perspectives on national as well as international issues.The media stands indicted on all the issues raised above. The readers of newspapers and viewers of television are also consumers. As things stand, they have been left to the mercy of market forces as the media gives primacy to selling time and space at the expense of quality of coverage. Protecting corporate interests and establishing and maintaining high standards of quality reporting, both in the print and electronic media, are not mutually exclusive. The issue is that of striking a balance.The question as to how this balance can be achieved needs to be looked into by the media managers themselves. Civil society organisations working in the area of consumer rights need to intervene and determine how they can mobilise people in order to exert pressure on the media managers to strike this balance.
Courtesy: Daily Dawn Lahore/ By Zahid Abdullah

NEWS VIEWS

US transfers control of Anbar to Iraqis
Iraqi forces on Monday took control of the Sunni Anbar province, once the most explosive battlefield in Iraq, from the US military, symbolising the growing security gains in the war-torn country.The transfer ceremony at a building in the provincial capital of Ramadi marked the handover of the 11th of Iraq’s 18 provinces.Anbar, once a flashpoint of anti-American insurgency and later an Al Qaeda stronghold, is the first Sunni province to be returned to Iraqi government.“I would like to announce that the (Anbar) transfer from the US to Iraqi forces is done,” said Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser, at the handover ceremony.US President George W. Bush said the transfer of Anbar was a defeat for Al Qaeda.“Today, Anbar is no longer lost to Al Qaeda -- it is Al Qaeda that lost Anbar,” he said in a statement.“Anbar has been transformed and reclaimed by the Iraqi people. This achievement is a credit to the courage of our troops, the Iraqi security forces, and the brave tribes and other civilians from Anbar who worked alongside them,” Bush added.Police said tens of thousands of Iraqi and US troops were on alert for the handover across the vast desert province in western Iraq, home to some two million people.US ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker and the top commander of American forces, General David Petraeus, said Iraqi forces had already been operating independently for the past two months in Anbar.“The provincial and military leadership in Anbar will have to work cooperatively in order to attain the sustainable security necessary for long-term economic prosperity,” they said in a joint statement.The US military said the transfer of security “does not necessarily mean that the security situation is stable or better.” “It means the government and the provincial authorities are ready to take the responsibility for handling it.” After the transfer, US forces are to withdraw to their bases and take part in military operations only if requested by the provincial governor.Sunni Arabs in Anbar were the first to turn against US forces after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime by US-led invasion forces in 2003, mounting a raging insurgency that tore through the world’s most sophisticated military.In the first years after the invasion, Iraq’s biggest province became the theatre of a brutal war focused on the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.Mamoon Sami Rashid, the governor of Anbar, said the security transfer was achieved after a “lot of sacrifices and shedding of blood.” “Al-Qaeda has committed some of the biggest massacres in this province. We have lost some big personalities,” he said, singling out Abdul Sattar Abu Reesha, the Sunni sheikh who launched the first anti-Qaeda Sahwa (awakening) group in Anbar and was killed a year ago in a car bomb attack.—AFP

Japan PM resigns in surprise move
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announced his sudden resignation on Monday, saying the country needed a fresh start after a troubled year in office marred by bitter fighting with the opposition.The surprise announcement came after the 72-year-old political moderate failed to turn around dwindling public support for his government despite reshuffling his cabinet and unveiling a major economic stimulus package.Fukuda, under fire over a deeply unpopular medical care plan for the elderly, admitted he felt “swamped” dealing with the problems of the world’s second largest economy.“Today, I have decided to resign. We need a new line-up to cope with a new session of parliament,” Fukuda told a hastily arranged news conference.“I have determined that now is the most opportune time, in which we will not create a political void,” he said.“I thought it would be quite different if somebody new would take care of this.” Fukuda said his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) would hold an internal election to determine his successor. He did not call a general election, which does not need to be held for another year.The likely front-runner to take over the post is Taro Aso, a former foreign minister who is known for being both more charismatic and more conservative than Fukuda.Fukuda, who in July presided over the annual summit of the Group of Eight major industrial powers, is known for his moderate policies including his efforts to repair historically uneasy relations with China.—AFP

Qadhafi hails full US ties after 39 years in power
Libyan leader Moamer Qadhafi said his regime’s long estrangement from the United States was finally over as he marked the 39th anniversary on Monday of his overthrow of the Western-backed monarchy.“The whole business of the conflict between Libya and the United States has been closed once and for all,” Qadhafi said in an anniversary speech to the General People’s Congress, Libya’s equivalent of a parliament.“There will be no more wars, raids or acts of terrorism,” said Qadhafi. Last month, Libya finally reached a compensation deal with the families of the 270 victims of the 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, the deadliest attack blamed on Libya.The move paved the way for the full normalisation of ties with Washington and an expected visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice later this week.But Qadhafi stressed that Libya was not looking for US friendship. “All we want is to be left alone,” he said.The Libyan leader hailed a new era in relations with former colonial power Italy after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi apologised on Saturday for the damage inflicted on Libya during the colonial era and signed a five-billion-dollar investment deal by way of compensation.“It’s a major political, moral and material victory from which we are going to benefit all our lives,” Qadhafi said in the anniversary speech delivered in Libya’s second city of Benghazi in the early hours of the morning.Under the deal, Libya is to receive 200 million dollars a year from Italy over the next 25 years through investments in infrastructure projects.Exceptionally Qadhafi himself signed Saturday’s agreement with Berlusconi.The Libyan leader normally eschews state functions insisting he is the guide of the revolution not head of state.Qadhafi has struck a regal posture throughout this year’s lavish celebrations for the anniversary of his regime, unlike last year when he left the limelight to his son and heir apparent Seif al-Islam.On Saturday, he wore a crown and sceptre for a speech to thousands of supporters in this Mediterranean port city.The symbols of royalty were gifts from more than 200 African traditional leaders who gathered here for a conference on Thursday at which they bestowed on Qadhafi the title “king of kings.” The Libyan leader has not given up however on the people’s power rhetoric which has marked his four decades in power.In his speech, he again pledged to scrap most government ministries and hand their budgets directly to the people to spend themselves.He said that the plan, which he first announced in a speech in March, was a response to complaints from the public of widespread corruption in the administration.—AFP

Ethnic cleansing in South Ossetia
By Luke Harding
AFTER three weeks in Georgia reporting on the war and its aftermath, I find one conversation sticks with me. I had arrived in Karaleti, a Georgian village north of Gori. I had gone there with a group of foreign journalists in a Russian army truck; our ultimate destination was Tskhinvali, in South Ossetia. Several houses along the main road had been burned down; an abandoned Lada lay in a ditch; someone had looted the local school.Refugees from Karaleti and nearby villages gave the same account: South Ossetian militias had swept in on August 12, killing, burning, stealing and kidnapping. Sasha, our Kremlin minder, however, had a different explanation. “Georgian special commandos burned the houses,” he told us. I demurred, pointing out that it was unlikely Georgian special commandos would have burned down Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali, deep inside rebel-held South Ossetia. Sasha’s face grew dark; he wasn’t used to contradiction. “Those houses suffered from a gas or electricity leak,” he answered majestically.Despite Sasha’s inventive attempts to lie, it’s evident what is currently happening in Georgia: South Ossetian militias, facilitated by the Russian army, are carrying out the worst ethnic cleansing since the war in former Yugoslavia. Despite the random nature of these attacks, the overall aim is clear: to create a mono-ethnic greater South Ossetia in which Georgians no longer exist.Before Georgia’s attack on Tskhinvali on August 7/8, South Ossetia was a small but heterogeneous region, a patchwork of picturesque Georgian and Ossetian villages. Georgia’s government controlled a third; the separatists and their handlers from Russia’s spy agencies controlled another third, principally around the town of Tskhinvali; the other third was under nobody’s control. Surprisingly, both groups coexisted in South Ossetia.A week after the conflict started I drove up to Akhalgori, a mountain town, 41km north-west of Tbilisi. South Ossetian militias, together with Russian soldiers from Dagestan, had captured the town the previous evening. Most residents had already fled; by the bus stop I found a group of women waiting for a lift. The town had no history of ethnic conflict, they said. Its population was mixed. Now almost all the Georgians had fled. I asked a militia leader, Captain Elrus, whether his men had ethnically cleansed Georgian villages between Tskhinvali and Gori. “We did carry out cleaning operations, yes,” he admitted.The Kremlin’s South Ossetian allies have re-established the old Soviet borders of South Ossetia. This new, greater territory will, as South Ossetia’s parliamentary speaker made clear on Friday, become part of the Russian Federation: a large Georgian-free enclave stretching almost to the suburbs of Tbilisi.Back in Karaleti, meanwhile, villagers are continuing to flee. After August 12, dozens escaped on foot, walking for three days across the fields, hiding from the militias and eating wild plums. South Ossetian gunmen are preventing refugees from returning, and forcing the few elderly residents who remain to leave as well. The Russian military has done nothing to stop this. Its peacekeeping mandate is little more than a pretext for occupation. There are Russian checkpoints between Gori and Tskhinvali.EU leaders meet on Monday in Brussels to discuss how to respond to Russia’s invasion and occupation of Georgia, and President Dmitry Medvedev’s unilateral recognition of South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence. Already the European appetite for sanctions appears to be fading, with the French and the Germans signalling an unwillingness to punish Moscow. But the EU needs to be clear about what is happening. Russia is not merely redrawing the map of Europe but changing its human geography too.—Dawn/Guardian News Service

EU and Georgia: awkward partners
By Jim Heintz
Of all the countries that emerged from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia has followed the most chaotic path – a long, lurching march of high expectations and abysmal disappointments, of crude rogues and polylingual sophisticates, of peace pledges and bloodshed.Each of the three leaders of independent Georgia came into office as a seeming acolyte of Western values, but soon came to be seen by many as a demagogue; two were driven from office in uprisings and the incumbent says his opponents were preparing the same fate for him.Monday’s emergency European Union summit in the wake of August’s Georgia-Russia war may focus largely on what – if anything – the EU will do to punish Russia. But it can also be seen as a straw poll of what the bloc thinks of Georgia, which so avidly wants to join.If the EU leaders are looking to history as a guide, Georgia may not find much warmth.Conflict is a central piece of Georgians’ identity, from the gleaming swords and daggers displayed by sidewalk curio merchants to tourist guides’ ritual mention that Tbilisi has been sacked about 40 times in its 1,500-year history.“Historically this was the fate of Georgia; we had numerous invaders and unfortunately this continues in the 21st century as well,” Deputy Defence Minister Batu Kutelia said on Saturday at the funeral of a general killed in the August war. “We do hope that no more of these types of heroes will be needed for Georgia in the future.”Georgia, however, has difficulty with the art of compromise.President Mikhail Saakashvili came to power after leading the massive “Rose Revolution” street demonstrations of 2003, which culminated in a crowd storming parliament and chasing President Eduard Shevardnadze from the building.Shevardnadze, once respected in the West for his work as Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost-era foreign minister, had become a protector of corrupt profiteers and a runner of rigged elections. Still, he was an improvement over Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who abandoned his Nobel Peace Prize-nominated human rights work to become a nationalist hard-liner and was violently deposed two weeks after the USSR went out of business.Saakashvili, in turn, scored his first major domestic victory by goading and pressuring Aslan Abashidze, the leader of the Adzharia region, until he snapped, blew up all his province’s land links with the rest of the country and fled with his beloved dogs to Russia.In 2006, Saakashvili went on the offensive again, sending in troops to take a remote piece of the separatist region of Abkhazia.The West may have looked askance at those moves, but Saakashvili, with his fluency in languages, his degrees from Western institutes and reforms that pushed the country’s economy into vigorous growth, still seemed a comforting figure. That changed late last year when he imposed a state of emergency and temporarily shut down independent news media in response to mass protests.Although Georgia has been successful in portraying itself as the victim of Russian aggression in the recent war, at the outset a Georgian general made it very clear that it had sent its forces into South Ossetia to restore its territorial integrity.If Georgia is hoping the war with Russia will lead it into the EU’s full embrace, it may have to settle instead for a peck on the cheek. Anne-Marie Lizin, part of a Belgian parliamentary delegation investigating the war’s aftermath, told reporters in Tbilisi that at Monday’s summit the EU is likely to consider war-recovery aid for Georgia and possibly visa-free travel, but indicated nothing more was in the cards.Georgian officials have called for the EU to form a monitoring mission for the trouble zone and Russia has shown signs of willingness to at least discuss the concept. But there’s no indication whether such monitors would induce Russia to pull out of its controversial “security zones” on Georgian territory.—AP

McCain rules out review of Palin’s candidature
Republican presidential candidate John McCain says he is satisfied that Sarah Palin’s background was properly checked before the Alaska governor became his vice-presidential running-mate.“The vetting process was completely thorough and I’m grateful for the results,” McCain told reporters as he toured a Philadelphia fire house.Questions about the review came up after news surfaced that Palin’s unmarried teenage daughter, Bristol, is pregnant, and that the Alaska governor has retained a private attorney to represent her in an investigation into the firing of the state public safety commissioner.The lawyer who conducted the background review said Palin voluntarily told McCain’s campaign about Bristol’s’ pregnancy, and about her husband’s two-decade-old DUI arrest during questioning as part of the vice presidential search process.The Alaska governor also greatly detailed the dismissal of the state’s public safety commissioner that has touched off a legislative investigation, Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr. told The Associated Press in an interview on Monday.Palin underwent a “full and complete” background examination before McCain chose her as his running mate, Culvahouse said. Asked whether everything that came up as a possible red flag during the review already has been made public, he said: “I think so. Yeah, I think so. Correct.”McCain’s campaign has been trying to tamp down questions about whether the Arizona senator’s team adequately researched his surprise vice presidential selection.Since McCain publicly disclosed his running mate on Friday, the notion of a shoddy, rushed review has been stoked repeatedly.First, a campaign-issued timeline said McCain initially met Palin in February, then held one phone conversation with her last week before inviting her to Arizona, where he met her a second time and offered her the job on Thursday.Then came the campaign’s disclosure that 17-year-old Bristol Palin is pregnant. The father is Levi Johnston, who has been a hockey player at Bristol’s high school, The New York Post and The New York Daily News reported in their Tuesday’s editions.In addition, the campaign also disclosed that Palin’s husband, Todd, then age 22, was arrested in 1986 in Alaska for driving under the influence of alcohol.Shortly after Palin was named to the ticket, McCain’s campaign dispatched a team of a dozen communications operatives and lawyers to Alaska. That fuelled speculation that a comprehensive examination of Palin’s record and past was incomplete and being done only after she was placed on the ticket.Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser, said no matter who the nominee was, the campaign was ready to send a “jump team” to the No. 2’s home state to work with the nominee’s staff, work with the local media and help handle requests from the national media for information, and answer questions about documents that were part of the review.—AP

Hamas denies Meshaal has moved to Sudan
The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Tuesday denied that its political supremo Khaled Meshaal had moved from his self-imposed exile in Syria to Sudan.“The movement totally denies media reports saying that Khaled Meshaal has left Syria for Sudan,” a Hamas official said in a statement. “These reports are false.”Meshaal early August paid a visit to Sudan to express solidarity with President Omar al-Beshir after the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested an arrest warrant for the Sudanese leader over alleged war crimes.However, Hamas said Meshaal had since returned to Damascus.In Khartoum, a spokesman for Beshir too denied that Meshaal had moved to Sudan. “We have no information about that,” said Mahgoub Fadl.Israeli media on Monday, quoting a Kuwaiti newspaper, reported that Meshaal had left Syria to live in Sudan allegedly because of the relaunch of talks between Syria and Israel.The two countries announced in May that they had resumed indirect peace talks brokered by Turkey after an eight-year freeze. Four rounds of talks have taken place so far and a fifth is due soon, according Israeli public radio.Meshaal in June had said the Turkish-brokered peace talks would not affect relations between Hamas and Syria, which is home to a number of Palestinian groups.—AFP

China to launch third manned space flight
China has brought forward the launch date of its third manned space flight to late September, a report said on Tuesday.The launch of Shenzhou VII is now expected to take place between Sept 17 the end of the Beijing Paralympics and China’s National Day on Oct 1, Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po said, citing unnamed sources.The period offered the best launch window for Shenzhou VII, the source told the Chinese-language newspaper, without giving any more details.The mission will blast off from China’s Jiuquan launch centre in northwest Gansu province and land in northern Inner Mongolia province, Wen Wei Po said.The launch schedule has been changed several times, with previous Chinese state media reports suggesting a October or November launch.Three “taikonauts” or astronauts will be on board the flight, with one of them conducting China’s first space walk, China’s official Xinhua news agency said in an earlier report, quoting a spokesman for the mission.China successfully launched its first man, Yang Liwei, into orbit in 2003, making it the third country after the former Soviet Union and the US to put a man in space. It sent two more astronauts into orbit in 2005 on a five-day mission.—AFP

Mandela partners with OUP
Nelson Mandela has signed an agreement with Oxford University Press to help raise money for scholarships.Under the deal the former South African president signed on Tuesday in Johannesburg, his Mandela Rhodes Foundation becomes a 25.1 per cent owner of the South African arm of the press. Dividends the foundation earns will fund scholarships.Officials from the press and the foundation refused to say how much the foundation paid for the shares, but called it a “mutually beneficial business deal.”The foundation offers full scholarships for university study in South Africa.—AP