The Independent, Monday Sep 22, 2008
The admired Scots-Pakistani novelist Suhayl Saadi and his wife, Alina Mirza, who runs a Pakistani film festival in Glasgow, are dear friends. They got married at the Marriot in Islamabad, just bombed by Islamicist murderers who sent in a delivery of lethal explosives in a lorry, during Ramadan. Nice work, guys. Allah will surely reward you aplenty for the slaughter of the blameless, sent off with less ceremony than goats and chickens who, at least, are prayed for as their throats are cut. Ah but they only razed a temple of Western decadence, and many Muslims who worked or went there weren’t “real” Muslims, only Shias and disobedient women, reprobates and sinners for sure.
The couple are devastated, rendered hopeless – for the first time that I can remember. For years, in spite of Pakistan’s many failures, they have kept up a fierce optimism, as if heartfelt belief would, one day, drive away the evil forces that circulate and in parts overrun their ancestral homeland.
There are many more like them, Pakistani-Britons who are proud of the culture of Pakistan, its creative movers and shakers, and millions of extraordinary, generous people. But their pride and idealism are fast draining away.
My father came from Karachi. He fled the place in the 1920s and went back only once, a fortnight before he died in 1970. He never recovered from the experience. It was as if his heart gave up. The country was in the grip of the military again and savagery ruled. It still does. I have never felt the desire to go look for cousins, aunts and uncles.
The newly elected President, Asif Zardari, husband of Benazir Bhutto, new best friend of the United States, is one of that nation’s dodgiest characters. He replaced a military dictator, who replaced another allegedly corrupt politician, Nawaz Sharif, now a big player in the latest political configuration.
Armageddon is on its way as Pakistan dissolves at its north-western borders into that lawless territory that is Afghanistan. American interventions, demands and military incontinence in the region bolster Islamic reactionaries and guerrillas.
India meanwhile, with many similar endemic problems and ruthless governance in Kashmir, nevertheless flowers economically and still holds on to democracy and fundamental freedoms. Sadly Pakistan “proves” what the rest of the world believes, and not without reason, that Muslims are incapable of decent leadership or progressive politics and move instinctively to political and personal tyranny.
Look around and the evidence punches you in both eyes. Saudi Arabia, Iran and various nations in the Middle East and most “Islamic” states elsewhere are failing entities where the people are either afraid or oppressing others. I, a Muslim who fights daily against the unjust treatment of Muslims in the West, have to face the blinding truth that although we have serious external enemies, more Muslims are hurt, wounded, killed and denied by other Muslims who feel themselves to be virtuous.
Lest our detractors rub their hands with satisfaction, I tell them loud and clear, this is not exoneration of Guantanamo Bay, the destruction of Iraq, Belmarsh, Israel’s criminal treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, the fascists in Cologne who tried this week to run an anti-Islam rally, the viciously anti-Muslim BNP and the many ways Europe humiliates us Muslims.
But I am saying that Muslims enthusiastically participate in “rendition”, torture co-religionists in prisons, bomb fellow-worshippers from Iraq to Pakistan and beyond, subjugate their women, cut off hands and necks, keep their young cowering or brainwash them to the point when they are unfit to inhabit this century. If we respect and care for our own so little why should the rest of the world give a damn?
Peace is not the absence of conflict; it’s a way through it
September 22, 2008Statesman.com, Sunday, September 21, 2008
By Susan Van Haitsma
September 21 is International Day of Peace, a day established by the General Assembly of the United Nations for “commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace within and among all nations and people.” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also has urged all combatants to honor the day by standing down from battle. “I call for a day of global ceasefire: A 24-hour respite from the fear and insecurity that plague so many places,” he stated on this date last year. “I urge all countries and all combatants to honor a cessation of hostilities. I urge them to ponder the high price that we all pay because of conflict. I urge them to vigorously pursue ways to make this temporary ceasefire permanent.”
What is peace? Is it a temporary condition between periods of conflict? A worthy but unattainable ideal? Just a hope, or a dream?
Peace is not as elusive as that. It’s got a past, present and future. Peace is not so much a goal as a process. As the great nonviolent organizer, AJ Muste famously said, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”
Peace is not the absence of conflict; it’s a way through it. Because we humans are always going to be in conflict in some form or another, making peace means actively addressing conflict and injustice – not running away from it — using nonviolent methods. The choice is always available.
Some forms of peacemaking are so common that most people do it just like breathing. It’s the smile of affirmation, the word of encouragement, the humor that eases tension, the candid statement that clears the air. It’s the community garden, the guitar lesson, the basketball game. We make peace a hundred times a day because it’s the natural thing to do.
Peacemaking is also a discipline. We may make conscious decisions to refrain from gossip or name-calling, learn how to apologize, let go of a grudge, and firmly and respectfully stand up to bullying. Nonviolence, at its best, involves confronting an adversary while simultaneously preserving the adversary’s dignity.
People using principled nonviolence catch courage from one another. Like the father who forgives the man who murdered his daughter and then visits him in prison, the unarmed peace team that intercedes between armed militias, the former gang member who talks kids out of retaliatory violence, the soldier who refuses to return to war.
Peacemaking is done spontaneously or may be strategically planned – and is often both. Actions may be immediate responses to overt violence or symbolic acts that address root causes of injustice. Methods may include civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance and creative intervention. Like the elderly woman who is first to crawl under the barricade, the young people who sit in the road to halt business as usual, the cellist who plays Bach in the middle of a besieged town square, the student who faces down the rolling tanks.
The more we know about nonviolence, the more likely we are to use it. If media reports about people who commit violence dominate the news at the same time that nonviolent actions are ignored or minimized, what message does this convey, especially to young people who want to be heard?
I’m not convinced that violence sells the news, but I do think that the news sells violence, and it doesn’t have to.
I’d like to see what would happen if, even just for one day, like a Global Day of Ceasefire, all major media outlets around the world directed their journalists, photographers and videographers to document the ways people are choosing active nonviolence in the face of conflict, terror and injustice. Inspiration is contagious. A temporary ceasefire could become permanent.
Susan Van Haitsma writes as makingpeace on the Austin American-Statesman reader blogs.
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Tags: International Day of Peace, nonviolence, peace, peacemaking, UN Secretary-Genral Ben Ki-moon
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