From South to South Pt.2

Mon, 12 May 2008 11:14:48 -0400

Bouncing in and out of muddy pot-holes, I noticed something fairly unusual in Pakistan. In a nation with perhaps the most feverish cricket obsession in the commonwealth, it is almost a strange sight to see boys play anything else. Instead of multiple cricket games being played on dusty pitches, in the decrepit streets of Korangi, one of Karachi's city's violent, sprawling slums, I saw hundreds of children, instead, playing soccer.
Aziz, my diminutive driver hired from the Karachi Sheraton, was an enthusiastic member of a mostly apolitical Muslim missionary sect and, as was required by the sect's goals, was often keen to share with me about his life and sense of renewed faith. When asked about the religious and ethnic milieu that made up his community, he mentioned off handedly that a congregation of Muslim refugees from Burma attended the mosque near his home in Korangi. This piqued my curiosity considerably. I've had an idea for sometime that by meeting people living on the world's geopolitical periphery, I can learn the most about both globalization and its attendant wars.
Aziz was a mohajir, an Urdu speaking Muslim whose family migrated from northern India to Karachi, then the capital of a newly created but ill conceived Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The root of the Arabic term mohajir is hijira, symbolizing the Prophet Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina in the 7th century. This term is used to describe what was likely the 20th century's largest migration that took place in the ashes of the British Raj when the empire abandoned the "jewel of the crown". Aziz was an enthusiastic member of an evangelical, Islamic revivalist movement called Tablighi Jamaat ("Conveying Group"). One of the Tablighi's primary aims is to renew religiosity amongst wayward Muslims and other communities at risk in the Muslim world where the movement believes the influence of the faith has lessened due to political and cultural factors. Tablighi Jamaat was busy influencing a new group of mohajirs, the Rohingya of western Burma.
It was here in the warrens of Karachi's underbelly that the Rohingya founded a settlement after fleeing persecution by the Tatmadaw (the Burmese military). The Rohingya, after suffering acute religious persecution, were a perfect fit for the Tablighi's proselytizing.
Aziz's neighborhood also houses thousands of stranded Bangladeshis who presence in Karachi pre-dates Bangladesh's 1971 linguistic-based liberation war from Pakistan. These quasi-indigenous Bangladeshis have then been joined by more recent Bengali migrants seeking wider job opportunities and a chance to earn a stronger currency. Aziz informed me that the missionaries from Tablighi Jamaat were quite active in Korangi. They were also hugely influential in Bangladesh where the group hosted the world's second largest yearly Islamic pilgrimage after the Hajj.
Arriving in Korangi, I immediately was greeted by a roadside lined with busy fresh fish stalls on one side and a herd of hulking, tar colored water buffalo blocking the rickshaw traffic on the other. I felt like I had been transported into a sliver of Southeast Asia on the Indian subcontinent. The most noticeable cultural contrast to the rest of Karachi was the appearance of the lungi, the ubiquitous floor length national dress of Bangladesh and much of Burma. We went to visit a small Rohingya settlement near Aziz's one room concrete block home. In comparison to the immense suffering I would encounter in Bangladesh, the people I met were relatively prosperous and urbanized with some of them having been in Pakistan for decades. I wanted most to know how they came to arrive in outer Karachi from western Burma, which I gathered to be an immense logistical feat.
Aziz introduced me to a few Rohingya families crouched under a shade tree down the road from the local mosque. A gaunt old man named Saraj ul-Islam spoke up and told me how his journey commenced. The Tatmadaw had come to his farm some twenty years ago and claimed they were doing a census on behalf of the junta. Since Saraj was one of Arakan's land owning Muslims, the soldiers burned his crops, confiscated his land and told him in no uncertain terms that he must leave Burma with his family because the Burmese are a Buddhist people and he "must have come from somewhere else" implying he was of South Asian origin. At first he fled to southern Bangladesh and lived in a majority Bengali village where other refugees had temporarily made their homes. It was not long before the Bangladeshi authorities told him and his family that they were not welcome there either. Like many Burmese fleeing Arakan state, Saraj did not arrive in a large, visible exodus. He and thousands of his countrymen arrived in a quiet yet constant trickle across the Naf river. It was at this point that he and many of the Rohingya in Pakistan morphed from being destitute refugees displaced by the Tatmadaw's brutal coercion into actual economic and religious migrants seeking work in Pakistan.
Saraj told me that missionary Pakistani members of Tablighi Jammat had convinced him that Pakistan would much more suit his tastes. Saraj, who stated that he was around 85 years old, said he would return to Burma immediately if he could have his land back and was allowed to openly practice his religion.
A fellow Rohingya friend of Saraj's named Hamidullah, donning a brilliant blue plaid lungi, told me of he and his people's flight to Pakistan. Realizing they had no future as refugees in a country that refused to recognize them as such, they had gravitated towards Chittagong (Bangladesh's 2nd largest city) after being shoved out of Burma. In Chittagong, they linked up with a vast human smuggling network that regularly trafficked both refugees and migrants through Bangladesh, across all of northern India and then south down through the deserts and plains of eastern Pakistan. Along a well worn circuit of bribes, corrupt border officials and rigorous night crossings, and after weeks or months of body numbing travel, the Rohingya continue to arrive in Pakistan. Some of them die en route or simply get stuck in transit and end up stranded in India or a part of Pakistan or Bangladesh that they never intended to be in. Though many of them are voluntarily trafficked, some are sold in prostitution or bonded labor upon arrival in their desired destination city. In other words, the people I met were the more fortunate ones.
As long as General Than Shwe remains firmly in power, Saraj's right of return is a highly unlikely fantasy. While readers in the West may be under the impression that Burma's ultra repressive regime is essentially an isolated outlier on the global stage, it is far from it. General Shwe and his bizarrely named State Peace and Development Council do not exist in a vacuum in an era where hungry economies are vying for scarce resources. In a fully globalized world, every state will be a participant in the ebb and flow of trade regardless of their record on human rights. If Burma's ruling generals can outlast the decline of the world's remaining altruistic foreign policies, they may be able to leverage Burma's now much needed resources to gain a kind of crude legitimacy.
In the twisted realm of South Asian proxy politics, India has accused Bangladesh and Pakistan's intelligence services of supporting insurgent groups such as the United Liberation Front of Asom and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland who are fighting against Indian rule. In turn, these groups have taken periodic shelter in western Burma after allegedly being trained in militant camps in Bangladesh. It is quite common practice in South Asia for rival governments to aid in agitating ethnic grievances in the other's territory in order to keep their opponents off balance. The Rohingya, while once being left to fester during the Sino-Indian rivalry that followed China's invasion of India in 1962, are now an absolute lost cause in the noise of this new competition. The economic tentacles of these emerging powers are furiously grasping for influence inside both Burma and Bangladesh. Over the decades since the Sino-Indian confrontation, China supplied arms to anti-Indian war fighting groups in Burma, Bhutan and Bangladesh when irritating Delhi suited Beijing's aims of the day. China also supplied arms to both the Burmese junta and ethnic guerrillas fighting the junta depending on the politburo's mood swings. War by proxy is politics as usual in the region, and Burma exists in its most dim corner.
After hearing first hand accounts of hijira from the Rohingya elders, Aziz and I then visited a bare-walled, local Burmese religious school called Madrassa Usmani. There, I met a group of Pakistani-born Burmese children who were rocking back and forth studying the Qu'ran on a fraying sun bleached carpet. A young maulvi (religious instructor) named Abdullah told me that the people of his generation witnessed mass destruction of their religious institutions by the junta as they were being forced out of their once home country. In Pakistan, it was the Islamic charities who provided aid and "proper" religious instruction for the children of the community as per the standards of Pakistani society. It is from just this milieu where students can be cultivated into fighters. I left with only the hope that these vulnerable, young Rohingya would not fall for the siren song of violent radicalism gripping much of modern Pakistan. As we have learned the hard lessons from the militancy spawned in Pakistan's notorious Afghan refugee camps, it is not terribly difficult for yesterday's victims to become tomorrow's aggressors.
I explained to my driver that I didn't have quite enough material for a story and that we needed to delve deeper into the area. He said it wouldn't be safe to proceed any further without the guidance of his brother. Aziz's brother, it turned out, was an MQM operative. The MQM, which stands for the Muttahida Quami Movement, is Karachi's dominant political force and sometime terrorist outfit. The MQM controls large swathes of this 15 million strong port city with a mix of intimidation and sheer brut force. From the comfort of our air-conditioned sedan, we followed Aziz's brother on his motorbike through alleys strewn with burning rubbish flooding with humanity until we reached an area called Bangla Para (literally "Bangladeshi Area"). When we arrived, our car was immediately surrounded by curious Bangladeshis who looked particularly at me with a great deal of suspicion. I followed the MQM man deeper on foot into the bazaar capturing its life on camera while also inquiring about its inhabitants ethnic identity, a naturally sensitive subject in an area full of illegal migrants living outside the mainstream of Pakistani society. I essentially had the MQM man ask groups of men and boys which languages they spoke and went from there. Many of the Rohingya had come to Karachi hoping they could find work in the fishing industry as they had done in Arakan. The irony of them fleeing Bangladesh is that they seemed to be naturally drawn to settle amongst Karachi's Bengali community. Here they could attempt to blend in with the Bengalis with their colorful lungis and white skull-caps. The people of southern Bangladesh spoke a dialect known as Chittagonian that is somewhat mutually intelligible with the Rohingya's language. Since both groups had essentially fled conditions in Bangladesh (albeit for very different reasons), they also shared the same arduous migration as recent common history.
Speeding away from the squalid neighborhood these former refugees now call home, I naively said to my driver, "I actually felt pretty safe there." Aziz looked at me skeptically and said in his heavy Pakistani accent, "that is the most dangerous area of Karachi." Considering Karachi is one of the world's most violent cities, I would shudder the next day when I read in the nation's leading English-language daily that five men had been shot dead in Korangi during my brief visit.
Upon entering into the overwhelming traffic of Karachi proper, I thought it a strange fate that the Rohingya fled an area where they faced state orchestrated violence only to arrive in another area plagued with rampant crime and anti-state and sectarian terrorism. Karachi may have its dreadful shortcomings but at least here in their relative anonymity, the Rohingya are free. While in India the call centers buzz, and in China the factories hum, in Burma, the generals keep marching.

Obama, America, and the Afghans

Thu, 8 May 2008 11:15:16 -0400

I reconnected with an Afghan friend of mine named Ahmad Idrees Rahmani who I hadn't seen since the 2001 war. He had recently completed a degree at Stanford and is setting up a new think tank called Afghanistan's Center for Research and Policy Studies in Kabul. We had a conversation in his office about the future of democracy in Afghanistan and Afghan perspectives on America. Afghan politicians are readying themselves for the country's second national parliamentary elections in fall of 2009. The Afghan vote will take place well into the first term of the next American president and will very likely pose a difficult test of any future administration's global credibility.
Idrees and I talked about the very healthy rivalry between the Hillary and Barack camps within the Democratic Party and how this pre-November tug of war is slowly improving America's international image. Idrees summarized his hopes by saying that if Barack Obama were to be elected the next American president, it would be much easier to convince the average Afghan voter that, yes, democracy is still a genuine and vibrant process. Obama may help to revitalize the still nascent democratic processes in Afghanistan by showing that elections in our "beacon of democracy" are themselves free and fair. A Clinton victory would not have quite the same stunning effect because, that while although having a female president would be remarkable in its own right, it could still be perceived by some as nuptial nepotism akin to the astonishingly corrupt Asif Ali Zardari who succeeded his slain wife Benzair Bhutto next door in Pakistan. Idrees has worked within U.S. government's Afghan efforts in various capacities over the last few year and is very aware of the immense political and military challenges the U.S. will be forced to contend with under the next administration.
Though virtually all of Afghanistan's neighbors are democracies in theory, few of them are full-fledged democracies in reality. The nation-states in Afghanistan's neighborhood are run by either corrupt familial dynasties (Pakistan, India), unelected theocrats (Iran, the previous Afghan government) or brutal autocrats (Turkemenistan, Uzbekistan). It is not difficult to see why many Afghans became disaffected after their initial 2004 elections in which it seemed that no other candidate stood a fair chance against Hamid Karzai. An indispensable component in the Bush administration's clumsy attempt at creating a viable client state, Karzai was viewed by many Afghans as having his victory predetermined by American political operatives inside their country.
The Bush presidency has not only been disastrous by its irrational actions but has been source of succor to the world's anti-democratic political actors who gloatingly point to its disingenuous, hereditary nature as inherently corrupt. An Obama victory in 2008 could potentially mean a more hopeful path toward a transparent Afghan election in 2009. In the eyes of the Afghans, if they see that Americans are capable of electing a man named Barack Hussein Obama as their leader, they may believe more vigorously in their own democratic aspirations. The United States may once again be leading by example rather than force in the world. And with over 30,000 American troops in harm's way in Afghanistan, the resurgence of democracy at home will indeed help the export of it abroad.

From South to South Pt.1

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:13:20 -0400

A column of frail women and children in brilliant cotton tunics deftly balance aluminum jars atop their heads as they trundle down a steep, eroded jungle hillside. They are spending most of their day in search of the area's most valuable commodity, clean drinking water. After hours of searching, what they most often find are muddy, stagnant pools. These are the Rohingya, a people you have never heard of, striving to subsist in a place you'll never visit, inhabiting a violent landscape of crisis completely devoid of human rights.
The most common image of the plight of human migration portrayed in cooperate media these days is what's known as "South to North": Guatemalans passing themselves off as Mexicans trying to enter California's vast produce engine or Cameroonians traversing thousands of miles up the African continent to look for work in a Parisian suburb are but a few odd examples that come to mind. However there is another scenario that is far off the radar of Lou Dobbs and his ilk who appear to advocate blatant xenophobia as part of a Pavlovian response to their own fears and misconceptions about the pace of an increasingly integrated global economy.
Referred to as "South to South" migration in think tank parlance, these massive underground movements are an example of the complex patterns of today's transnational human exodus across political and cultural boundaries. South to South migration is an economic indicator writ large conveying the severity of poverty (and often state repression) of people struggling to earn $2 a day in the "Global South." This ambiguous term, which may be new to some, is what we used to refer to as the "Third World" during the Cold War. These human movements and refugee outflows are only likely to increase in the 21st century across this vast region. With particular reference to the Republic of India and the People's Republic of China, Asia's furiously accelerating economies are further less inclined to institute a faintly moral foreign policy in light of the wishes of their leadership and the needs of their respective billion-plus populations. This Darwinian competition strains the world's economic and human resources in parity with the ascendancy of these pragmatic Asian market states. Rather than promoting liberty and idealism as the triumph of human desire, the search for natural gas fields and connectivity of deep-sea ports are a core strategic component in the rise of these mega states.
In ten years of travel and reportage at civilization's fraying and violent crossroads, I've witnessed an array of struggles of people burning in the smoldering embers of post-World War II decolonization and the last great upheavals of the post-Berlin Wall paradigm shift. From meeting depressed Iraqi refugees living in a dark hotel in coastal Syria, to nowhere Palestinians in brick and mortar "camps" in South Lebanon, I have never personally encountered a situation as dire and a people as desperate as I have on a recent expedition to the far south of Bangladesh. There, near the country's last settled town of Teknaf, I went to meet a stateless minority from western Burma called the Rohingya. With the advice of people from the United Nations's High Commissioner for Refugees and Doctors Without Borders, I ventured into a squalid, ad hoc settlement along the Naf river. The Naf is not only a political boundary between Bangladesh and Burma (though the name Myanmar is the preferred nom of the country's military dictatorship), but it is also a civilizational boundary between Muslim and Hindu South Asia and Buddhist Southeast Asia. This miserable aggregation is known locally as the "makeshift camp" indicating that it survives outside the recognized protection of the U.N. The refugees who "live" there remain in permanent legal limbo. The U.N. is severely limited by an understanding with the government of Bangladesh on specifically who and just how many Burmese it is allowed to help. The U.N.'s writ here is tenuous at best since Bangladesh has refused to acquiesce to the 1951 Convention on the Refugee (when it was then Pakistan's deprived, untenable eastern wing) and its subsequent 1967 protocol. In other words, from Dhaka's perspective, the world should be satisfied by the fact that a portion of refugees are being helped at all since Bangladesh is under no international or legal mandate to do so.
The Rohnigya are a Muslim people originating in Arakan state on Burma's west coast. Arakan has since been renamed Rakhine State by the junta in favor of the ethnic Rakhine Buddhist majority. Since Burma's independence from the British Crown in 1948, the Rohingya have been persecuted by the central government in several violent fits over the last six decades. The essence of the dispute, for lack of a better term, being that the junta does not consider the Rohingya to actually be Burmese citizens in large part because the are Muslim. The Burmese leadership accuses the refugees of being historically Bangladeshi and, by its own perverse logic, is therefore well justified in using ethnic cleansing to force them off of their farms and out of their villages in Rakhine State. This push factor throws the vulnerable Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh and as far west as southern Pakistan (which we will visit in Part Two of this piece). Although Bangladesh is a majority Muslim republic to which the refugees feel a large degree of cultural, linguistic and religious affinity, they are hardly welcome there. The Rohingya refugees surviving in this dreadful camp are considered by the Bangladeshi authorities to be "illegal economic migrants" according to Shannon Lee, a Doctors Without Borders officer operating a therapeutic nursing center for under and malnourished children near the camp's roadside entrance.
Upon visiting the Teknaf area camp, I was forced to ask myself if this utter wretchedness was even remotely acceptable under international legal and moral norms? The scene was more evocative of a Nicholas Kristof column on alleged genocide in sub-Saharan Africa than of 21st century South Asia. I thought to myself, somewhat cynically, that at least the Darfuris have George Clooney and Samantha Power. The Rohingya have no one, own nothing and have been stripped of everything, even their history. Naked children waddling around with distended bellies and emaciated elders stooping in their fetid huts without even the stamina to beg confound the odd visitor. This scene looked more out of a late night cable Christian infomercial than one laying on the periphery of this century's most highly touted, emerging global powers; China and India. It is therein I believe lay the crux of why there is a devastating dearth of political leverage in this emergency. While technocrats in "Incredible India" can attempt to dress up their strategy in Burma as constructive engagement, the Politburo in Beijing cannot be bothered to waste time on such euphemisms. In fact, it is precisely a reaction from within the Asian economic theater that India has abandoned its 60's era ideologically driven foreign policy in favor of Kissengerian realpolitik to compete with the Chinese in the regional buffer states of Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and most disturbingly, Burma.
Last year, India's activist Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee indicated that India would be willing to supply fresh arms and military-related spare parts to the Burmese regime in order to help its military flush out ethnic Naga and Assamese rebels from its territory back into India's insurgency-wracked states of Nagaland and Assam along the Indo-Burmese frontier. India has a multitude of festering rebellions in its isolated Northeast that date back to the country's painful birth in 1947. The calculatingly severe junta in Burma, forever playing the victim, says it is perfectly willing to coordinate on defense with the Indians so long as India agrees to assist them in updating their aging Cold War arsenal. The fact that China has been Burma's principal military supplier over the years does not sit well with Delhi as India looks to assert itself militarily and increase economic cooperation in the region.
Part of India's realpolitik outlook, known domestically as its "Look East" policy, is to have totally dropped the public support it once maintained for Aung San Suu Kyi, the junta's Nobel Prize winning hostage. Sitting in the heat and pain of the makeshift camp, a Rohingya elder employed by a British NGO named Abdul Jabbar explained to me that his people had made an alliance with prime minister-elect Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy in the ill fated elections of 1990. Following the junta's decision to nullify the democratic process in the country, the generals began to systematically crackdown on those who had supported the League. Aung San Suu Kyi's party was meant to be a multi-religious and multi-ethnic umbrella organization (at least in theory) where the Rohingya would have been participants. For the cruel, late General Saw Maung and his successor Than Shwe, a massive, vengeful collective punishment was the order of the day for Burma's Muslims. In the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of them fled to riverine environments in Bangladesh's deep south.
The junta, in the then capital of Rangoon, insisted that the Rohingya minority were not historically Burmese nationals and had no right to dare assert their political or sub-national identity. Bangladesh, a perpetually poor and deeply corrupt state, claimed it had neither the means nor the goodwill to house and assist the Rohingya refugees seeking shelter. The generals in Burma insist that the Rohingya are in fact historically South Asians who migrated to what is now Burma beginning in the early 1800's at the onset of British colonial rule in Rangoon. The general's solution to the Rohingya "problem" is blunt state repression interspersed with occasional ethnic cleansing. As for the refugee's status in Bangladesh, authorities in Dhaka insist that the refugees are Burmese nationals who must eventually be repatriated to Burma lest their bothersome presence encourage further migration. The great irony of all this, as anyone familiar with the region might surmise, is that no one seems to be pushing out more migrants than Bangladesh itself. Bangladesh is the world's most densely populous nation of any size and pushes untold numbers of genuine economic migrants north and west into neighboring India (as well as across the entire rest of the world). For the central government in Dhaka to label the Rohingya, who are legitimate refugees, as illegal economic migrants is the quintessence of hypocrisy in this age of hyper politicized globalization.
Trudging through the overwhelming stench of human waste and the eyes of hunger, I came upon a significant light of hope. While the camp is in the process of being taken over by a British NGO, a new, and in relative terms, state of the art refugee camp is being constructed up the road with humanitarian aid funding from the European Union. After a few days of wading through this squalor, it was incredibly heartening to see the new camp being constructed at breakneck pace with many of the laborers being refugees themselves. According to Engineer Bashar, who is in charge of the camp's day-to-day construction operation for Islamic Relief UK, he is able to employ between 60-75% refugees of the approximately 1,000 workers under his charge. This not only brings in desperately needed income for refugee families, but also adds a sense of self worth for people who have lost everything to a regime that heeds not even the most fundamental cries of human dignity. It is not a circumstance devoid of hope, however much, much more progress is needed to shore up the Rohingya's most basic human rights and long term food security.
Ultimately, we must ask ourselves the following: television host Charlie Rose has referred to this period in which we are now living as the dawn of an "Asian Century" while interviewing leading global economists and politicos from these aspiring superpowers. Here on the frontier of Bangladesh and Burma, two of Asia's poorest nations, the Rohingya, an obscure and stateless people, suffer in silence at the hands of the military government in Burma's Orwellian new capital of Naypyidaw, while the leaders of Bangladesh's feeble caretaker regime have themselves been less than sympathetic. As India and China are interested in resuscitating decrepit colonial era ports and WWII era transport routes in these weak states in the name of securing resources for their respective domestic economic progress, the Rohingya are literally being crushed to death. In the darkest shadows of dawn in this Asian century, there are children starving.

Election Day

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 07:25:10 -0400

Lahore, Pakistan: When I last left Pakistan in March of 2007, the lawyers movement was in its infancy, Benazir Bhutto was still agitating for her return from exile in Dubai, Nawaz Sharif was barred from entering the country, and General Pervez Musharraf was comfortable as an American ally. Pakistan’s political environment had been degraded greatly by the events that began during my last stay in the country beginning with the detention of the country’s Supreme Court Justice Iftikar Chaudry. In mid-December, I began making tentative plans to cover the parliamentary elections scheduled for January 8th. I reckoned it would be a paramount story because Pakistan had become more unstable than ever in the latter half of 2007 ending with the killing of Bhutto and subsequent postponement of the elections in the previous columns of Dispatches.

I arrived in Lahore five days before the rescheduled polls hoping Musharraf wouldn’t renege on his promises that the event would go ahead as planned. It seemed like one more high profile assassination or narrowly targeted suicide attack may suspend the process indefinitely and entrench the status quo. I was incredibly relieved when election day came and went without any major violent disruption. Pessimistic analysts in the West were throwing out doomsday scenarios about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry and the country being near the edge of disintegration. All of this talk added both hype and hope for what was sure to be flawed but workable process.

My fixer and friend Khalid came scooped me up on his motorbike to head off to the first of many polling stations on an all too quiet Monday. I was a little jittery leaving the guesthouse after spending a few weeks contemplating the worst. Pakistan was in an extremely delicate place that morning.

My first stop was a dim hallway of Lahore’s Mayo Hospital to photograph a group of women voters casting their ballots observing how the process was meant to work. I walked past a cluster of nearly empty electioneering tents from the three major parties in front of the parking area. To enter the gender specific polling area, a few handshakes were exchanged with local policemen and I flashed my agency issued press credential from New York. Almost none of the security seemed to either be aware or to care that Pakistani credentials were issued specifically for the election (which I had not bothered to obtain). The polls opened well behind schedule and the turnout appeared quite thin. There had been a tenfold increase in the number of suicide attacks in the last year with several of the most recent targeting the election workers and the country’s political and military elites. Thirty-seven had been killed at an election rally in the country’s northwest two days before the vote and many were afraid to leave their homes on Monday.

I zipped around the city with relative ease throughout the tense day. Using smiles to get past checkpoints and with Khalid navigating deftly through city’s diverse neighborhoods, I wanted to document a wide cross section of what was taking place. At one very chaotic but relatively passive polling station, a woman came up to me out of the crowd and asked me what I had seen so far throughout the day. I remarked that everything appeared calm in Lahore but said I couldn’t vouch for the rest of the province or the country for that matter. She became exasperated telling me her son called her frightened after he had just been roughed up at a polling station well north of Lahore in Gujrat when he tried to vote for the opposition Pakistan People’s Party because there was violent rigging taking place in the name Musharraf’s ruling party.

The mood of the people who did come out to vote was cautiously optimistic and most of them, even burqa clad women, didn’t seem to mind being photographed for the occasion on what many consider to have been one of the most important events in Pakistan’s fitful sixty years of independence. Decades of swinging from feudal democracy to blunt dictatorship have left people here beyond cynicism. Several times when I was leaving different polling stations, I would see small convoys of minibuses from the different parties that being used to shuttle in voters who otherwise might not have participated. It was obvious the mainstream parties were spending lots of rupees to bring out the electorate which in the case of Lahore was former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz known in street parlance as the N-League (pronounced “Noon” in Urdu). But then I thought to myself at least the election was taking place at all considering the political environment and the personal risk each person was individually taking.

At the end of this exhausting day, I jumped in a rickshaw to land in the lobby of the Pearl Continental Hotel where the concierge had given my freelance colleagues and I gratis access to the hotel’s WiFi network making it possible to file our stories without too much more stress. Upon leaving the Pearl, I witnessed men wasting no time in tearing down advertisements for Musharraf’s party as the results were being read out on the local news networks.

Not a single bomb had gone off.

A “Credible” Election

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:34:30 -0500

Lahore, Pakistan: Today Pakistan awoke under a spell of relief. The electoral results seem, at least for the time being, to have been accepted as a sounding defeat by the ruling PML-Q. Rather than people taking part in mass civil violence, it was business as usual in Lahore’s Old City while the occasional throng of PML-N supporters cheered for their candidates and held small rallies yelling “Nawaz Zindaband” (go Nawaz Sharif)! It was widely predicted by experts in both Pakistan and the West that wide spread unrest was likely if Musharraf’s party won thereby fulfilling vote rigging conspiracy theories bubbling among the opposition. Here in Pakistan is often speculated that, rather than being spontaneous outbursts of hostility, much of the violence is actually organized by clever political actors in order to exact concessions from their opponents. An additional effect of creating the appearance of urban anarchy is to humiliate the country’s rulers via the media in front of donor nations and trade partners. But the aftermath yesterday’s vote was nothing of the sort.

U.S. Senators Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Chuck Hagel were in Lahore yesterday as the American delegation among a slew of international poll observers. In a press conference here, Senator Biden remarked that while he could not say with confidence that the process had been free and fair, it could be counted as a “credible election” in which Pakistan could lurch forward toward civilian rule which has been absent since 1999’s post-Kargil war coup and the then PM Sharif’s exile in the Saudi kingdom. It appears that a majority of Pakistanis are ready to move forward even if it is with the godfather-like, discredited, former ruling elites Zardari and Sharif. The death knell for Musharraf’s popularity began with the eruption of the lawyer’s movement here last March and was accelerated by the General-cum-President’s handling of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) siege in Islamabad in the July heat.

While undoubtedly there was a certain degree of ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and procedural inconsistencies, many people here in Lahore displayed jubilation at the overall result. As the election hype was drowned out by the hum of commerce, families relaxed with picnics, children played in the Old City’s dusty warrens and revelers vandalized ads for the slumped PML-Q.

If the PML-N and the Pakistan People’s Party can agree to coalesce, they may be able to depose Pervez Musharraf without the use of force. Whether the President is willing to cooperate with the men he helped depose will determine whether or not the country can right itself from sliding into expanding mayhem. For now, the tea is boiling and the tablas are thumping into the night.