Opinion

Change: Pakistan’s Only Option – 2
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg , CA

“Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” - Robert Kennedy, speaking in South Africa-1966

The miracles that were wrought by insignificant and small acts of defiance and resistance:

In our next door India, a fast unto death against corruption by an old Gandhian, Anna Hazare, and Kiran Bedi, mobilized Indians like never before. A stiff-necked government buckled under pressure to write an anti-corruption bill with the help of civil society groups. Anna Hazare, a shy and withdrawn person, overnight transformed himself into a national hero. Brigadier N L Verma, with whom Anna had served the army during 1975, came to salute him. Anna Hazare was not a rich man, nor even a high-ranking officer in the army. He was just a driver in the Maratha Regiment. “But look at him now, he looks as big as father of nation Mahatama Gandhi today. Hats off to this man for the way he had fought this battle against corruption”, says the retired Brigadier. A Grand Alliance against Corruption has been tabulated in India. In Pakistan, a Grand Alliance of Interests, between the incompetent leadership of four political parties - ( PPP, PML (N), PML (Q) and MQM) -with one playing against the other, is what people get to hear each day.

To join Anna Hazare were not just the ordinary people. People with vision and character also were there to lend strength to him. An IIT graduate, Kejriwal of the Indian Revenue Service, was also there, and so was India’s first woman IPS ( Pakistan’s PSP) officer, Kiran Bedi, who always has had an image of an upright and no-nonsense officer. Swami Agnivesh, a law and economics graduate from the University of Calcutta was also there. On the contrary, here in Pakistan, the retired generals, bureaucrats and diplomats and the old and visionless journalists, are heard chanting their tilted mantra day and night on TV, lecturing the people on “How things were when they were…..”

Fifty people in Sargodha in Pakistan, the other day shaved their heads in protest against the power outrages and load-shedding. It was a commendable step, but the step remained unsupported. Sustained effort is what brings about a change.

In 1980, the striking workers in the shipyards of Gdanask and across Poland, staged walkabouts of protest against the ban on Solidarity. Every evening, the people of Swindnik would come out as the half-hour fiction-filled evening news would begin. They would chat, walk and loaf about initially; then would begin bringing out their switched-off TV sets on strollers or on wheelbarrows. Thus the people of Poland succeeded in frustrating the aim of dictatorship to isolate people and to brainwash them. Swindnik broke that isolation and built confidence in people and the movement went forward.

The 12- year military junta rule in Uruguay from 1973 suffered a terrible jolt when thousands of Uruguayans in the soccer game stadium refused to participate enthusiastically in the national anthem ceremony. The military rulers suffered the embarrassment until 1985 and finally the voices of democracy won.

All of us know what the word ‘boycott” means, and we often take its meanings for granted. In fact, it was the name of one, Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott. He was a much disliked land agent for Lord Erne, an absentee landlord in the County Mayo of Ireland. In September 1880, as per the Connaught Telegraph paper, Boycott’s servants walked out on him, in protest against unjust rents and evictions. This forced Boycott and his family to tend to the cows, to milk them, to shoe the horses, and to till the fields themselves. The local post office even stopped delivering mail to Boycott and the shopkeepers refused to serve him and his family. Boycott felt so isolated and powerless that he could not retaliate. The Times of London wrote in its editorial, “A more frightful picture of triumphant anarchy has never been presented in any community pretending to be civilized and subjected to law”. Now who is stopping the people of Pakistan from initiating such acts? A recent boycott of tomatoes resulted in bringing the price of tomatoes down; a similar act can be initiated against the high prices of meat and fruit and rice, etc. Depending for everything on a leadership from whose each pore is oozing out corruption and infinite greed and who is blind and deaf and dumb is like desiring for the Moon.

Alberto Fujimori was a very unpopular president of Peru. He was not known for inflexibility, corruption and brutality. In May, 2000, thousands of Peruvians started gathering every Friday, from noon until three, on Plaza Mayor in Lima. They began washing the red-white-red-striped flag, with a view to showing that Peru, and its flag, had become soiled and dirty. The head of the security suggested that the flag washers be labeled as terrorists. Famous actor Miguel Iza also joined them, declaring, “I just want a clean country”. The success came soon: Fujimori stepped down. He resigned by fax when he was on a visit to Japan. In 2009 he was extradited from Chile and was jailed for twenty-five years for the killings. The Peruvian flag flies clean now. In Pakistan the Jamait I Islami knows only one thing. Make a call for a “Dharna”, after the Friday prayers, bring the business to a standstill, and create disruption and loss to the already dwindling economy of the country. The disconnected MQM self-exiled leader fires the shots from London, and the country suffers a loss of millions of dollars and of lives. These aims lack sincerity as they are cheap and witless ploys used solely for establishing one’s own ethnic group’s hegemony. Good acts that bring a healthy change are engineered by people who are pro-active and not reactive; who aim at bringing about a change that is national in scope, and who plan carefully not to cause any loss to the national assets.

In 1984 the Oxford university and other British university cities spray-painted Barclays Bank cash dispensers. Above one ATM they sprayed the word BLACKS, and above another, WHITES ONLY. Barclays was known for its involvement in the South African system of apartheid. The lucrative share of UK student accounts fell from 27 percent to 15 percent of the market. In 1986, the banking giant admitted defeat at the hands of the graffiti sprayers and Barclay pulled out and became one of the most high-profile and punishing acts of divestment suffered by the South African regime.

In Iran the mullahs may have ruled the country after the fall of Shah in 1979, but still they are not venerable enough to catch a cab. Taxi drivers in Tehran regularly refuse to stop if they see turbaned men standing by the side of the road, while any other passenger is a welcome. Why so, the answer lies with the mullahs themselves. The people in Pakistan in this business can also start doing the same against the known corrupt leaders, against the corrupt police officers, against the sectarian mullahs, against the fat-belly profiteering businessmen. Just start refusing normal courtesy to them. Only the youth of the country can do so.

The Burmese people had been under the rule of military dictators for a long time. In September 2007, thousands of them took to the streets to protest against the lawlessness of the military regime in Burma. The protests spread far and wide, this time against the increase in the cost of fuel and prices to calls for basic human rights, etc. The military began beating, arresting and killing the protesters. As per a UN report, 31 people died in the protests. The imaginative Burmese found a way around that problem. In Rangoon and other big cities, they promoted the legions of stray urban dogs to the ranks of protesters. Now, dogs are regarded as lowly creatures and to be reborn as a dog means one were not good in the previous life in their culture and religion. This was deemed as a great insult in Burma. The stray dogs began carrying pictures of the military leader, Than Shwe, and the images of other senior leaders tied around their necks. In what low esteem the leaders were being held became obvious. The dogs when chased created a funny scene. A Thailand paper wrote, “They seem quite good at avoiding arrest”.

Drogba of West Africa’s Ivory Coast, (like Imran Khan of Pakistan) played for the Chelsea team in London. He was also captain of the Ivorian national team, the Elephants. Like Pakistan, Ivory Coast was also divided into different ethnicities, and was heavily polarized. The civilians suffered most, enduring mutilation, rape, and murder in the violent clashes of the civil war. Suspicions between the two sides seemed impossible to overcome. One man, Drogba changed that. First he insisted that the national team must be ethnically mixed, and second in 2007 he went a step further with a simple, revolutionary move. He declared that the qualifying game for the African Nations Cup would be held in Bouake, the rebel capital in the North, (like saying that a Test match headed by Imran Khan or Wasim Bari would be played in the Tribal area), which had remained off-limits for government forces, even after a March 2007 peace treaty.

People who had been unable to reconcile their differences for five years came together in Bouake, for a soccer game. Austin Merill, present in the stadium that day wrote, “You didn’t have to look hard to see that there was much more at stake than just a soccer match. On this day, the Beautiful Game had reunited a country”. Drogba’s five goals ended five years of war. This is how a change works with courage.

Ferdinand Marcos of Philippines who had ruled that country for 20 years was known for three things like the politicians of Pakistan: brutality, rigging elections and corruption. After the assassination of Benigno Aquino when his wife, Corazon known as Cory, declared that she would contest the elections, Marcos knew what to do. It was the action of just thirty female computer technicians who foiled his designs. When the authorities instructed them to omit numbers that were favorable to the opposition, these women walked out of the county hall in protest at the fraud. They also took the computer discs and printouts with them as irrefutable proof of the fraud. Marcos loyalists insisted that it was much ado about nothing. The women went to a church and held a press conference and went into hiding. Marcos assured everybody that he had won but no one believed him. Meanwhile, at the women’s walkout, hundreds of thousands of peaceful protests in the streets of Manila began, leaving only one option for Marcos: to board an American helicopter with his wife and her shoes and fly to Hawaii. In Pakistan, the recently held elections in the Northern Areas and in Azad Kashmir have exposed the volatility of the situation and the vulnerability of the whole system. Fair elections in Pakistan: an impossible thing.

Pakistan urgently needs a T. N. Seshan, the famous election commissioner of India- 1990, who liked himself to be called an “Alseshan”, who hung a sign in his office saying, “Silence is demanded”, and who made the corrupt and arrogant politicians of India to clean up the city walls of campaign slogans first and next submit the details of the election expenses before they could think of taking the oath.

The west African nation of Liberia is unfortunate in the sense that it is riddled with drug fueled militias who maim and kill the civilians every day of the week. The government as well as the rebel forces both rape women with complete immunity. Hundreds have fled, and the remaining feel trapped by the unending violence as they are unable to go anywhere. In 2003, a group of women boldly attempted to end the conflict once and for all. Dressed all in white, hundreds of them would sit by the roadside, on the route taken daily by President Charles Taylor, rebel leader-turned-president. The president would only slow down a little and cast a casual look and move on. The women in pouring rain and in blazing sunshine kept returning and praying and dancing. Taylor mocked them by saying that they were “embarrassing themselves”. Then the protests gained momentum. Religious leaders, imams, bishop alike, all joined them. The president agreed to talk and the talks began in Ghana. But they did not go very far. Now the women barricaded the delegates into the room where the talks were taking place. Nigerian general Abdulsalami Abubakar, remembered later, “They said that nobody will come out till that peace agreement was signed”. A peace was struck and Charles Taylor went into exile.
Now here is another very best and workable example of bringing about a change. The North and South of Sudan had always been at war. In 2002, women in southern Sudan acted in a unique way to stop the twenty-year civil war in which an estimated two million people had died. The initiative was taken by Samira Ahmed, a former university professor. Working with a handful of women from two ethnic groups, she started a practice they called “sexual abandoning”. Women refused to bed with men who fought. By withholding sex from their men these women felt they could force men to commit to peace. And it worked. In 2005 a peace agreement between north and south was signed. Rukia Subow, a chair of one of the groups, argued, “We have seen that sex is the answer. It does not know tribe, it does not have a party, and it happens in the lowest households”. One man James Kimondo, told journalists he planned to sue the organizers for what he was forced to endure. It had caused him stress, mental anguish, backache and lack of sleep. Women contended, “We don’t want to be widows and for our children to grow up without fathers…”. Their demand was, “Turn in your weapons”.
In many countries, including Pakistan, landlords refuse to give the land or property share to women in the family on one plea or another. In the Uganda town of Mubende, a recently widowed woman settled the problem in a new way. One Sunday in 1996, to Noerina Mubiru‘s house came her late husband’s relatives as she prepared to go to church. The ten relatives of her late husband presented her a list of possessions they thought she possessed and that they intended to seize and remove. The widow Mubiru stripped naked and walked into the living room where these relatives were gathered. The Ugandan Daily Monitor reports what Muribu said, “You see, this was one of the properties my husband loved most.” She patted her behind, and then added, “This was the second item he loved. If anybody wants to remove his property, he will have to start with these and then I can show you the rest”. The father-in-law fainted and the relatives fled. Women can do anything they want.
On December 1, 1955, a forty-two-year old seamstress, named Rosa Parks, boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and took a seat. A few stops later, three white passengers got on the bus. The driver ordered black passengers to vacate their seats. Parks was seated toward the back of the bus, just behind the whites-only section. A white man did not have seat and that was considered unacceptable. The driver asked Parks, “Are you going to stand up?”. She said no. When the driver threatened to have her arrested, Parks famously replied, “You may do that”. The rest of the story of civil rights is well known to Americans. Rosa Parks is a national hero in America.

These few examples I have sifted from a wonderful book, “Small Acts of Resistance” by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson, but the list goes on and on. Small acts of goodness often deliver rich rewards. The time for a radical change is ripe in Pakistan. Pakistan is in the grip of disasters - most of which are self-created and a majority of them are there because the people are passive. Mayhem is prevailing in all the cities and a personal look at the habits of people just makes one sad.

Men urinate against the nearest pole or wall or tree; women encounter raping gazes all the time; the traders feel no moral compunctions by adding stone pellets to rice or dal they sell; the corporations sell pesticide that is banned in the West; the water that people drink is arsenic; the politicians who raise a point of order on an issue in the parliament get paid for doing so. The nation as a whole needs redemption, a reawakening, a sloughing in which the old skin gets replaced. Patch work or any remedial work will not work as it is not sufficient.

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