View from
New York
Story of a UN Briefing
Which Could Have Been Better
By
Ibrahim S. Malick
Special to South Asia Tribune
NEW
YORK: I love it when I'm so energized and purified from walking
to my office in Downtown New York that I experience a lightning
bolt of realization about some crucial truth.
I
love it when I'm walking through the New York City's trash-spattered
concrete jungle and am suddenly blessed with the fresh smell of
dirt from a renegade garden.
I
love it when the pathological decisions of bad leaders inspire
people to redouble their commitment to fight for outrageous peace,
ingenious love, and wild understanding.
What
about you? Where do you look for your breakthroughs and redemptions?
It's time to be on high alert.
After
many failures and successes I have come to the realization that
our idealism is one of our greatest assets, but it can also be
a liability. Driven to seek beauty and harmony, we sometimes become
blind to the messy truth.
That's
why I was so pleased to get the following oracle when I consulted
the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching: "It
is only when you have the courage to face things exactly as they
are, without any self-deception or illusion, that a light will
develop out of events by which the path to success may be recognized."
I
interpret this to mean that I am about to temporarily suspend
my idealism in order to see the messy truth, which will in turn
lead me to an opportunity to practice idealism on a higher level.
America's
occupation of Iraq has unleashed far-reaching consequences that
profoundly affect every one of our personal lives. In the coming
months, we'll encounter events that require us to revise our understandings
about the very nature of reality. Our imaginations will have to
be ingenious and our hearts alert in order to keep up with the
changes.
To
locate truth amid relentless waves of propaganda, we'll have to
be fiercely disciplined and tenderly hate-free. To avoid being
infected by popular delusions, we'll have to cultivate compassionate
lucidity, humble courage, and a determination to rouse beauty
of veracity everywhere we go.
We
have to get out the truth to people: that this is a war for empire,
not for liberation. Iraqis are being sacrificed on the oil-soaked
altar of imperialist interests. That the war on Iraq is but one
part of an entire "deadly trajectory." That victory
in Iraq will only feed the appetite of this power structure headed
by a frat boy with a bad messiah complex--and the world will be
a far more dangerous place.
I
was unimpressed with a press conference delivered last week by
three Pakistanis at United Nations Headquarter in New York. Faiz
Rehman, President of The National Council of Pakistani-Americans,
Imran Ali, a Pakistani government employee, and a Pakistani journalist,
Zahid Ghani, had organized the press briefing. "Are Muslim
immigrants being unfairly or selectively targeted by the authorities?
Could such a perception encourage more recruits for terrorism."
The
topic of the discussion was very relevant to today's objective
realities but the speakers were either unprepared to confront
truth or intended to pre-empt any journalists from asking President
Musharraf, what he has done for non-resident Pakistanis.
Imran
Ali, 2nd Secretary, Embassy of Pakistan prefaced his talk by saying:
"I am sure these steps (the Justice Department fishing expedition)
was not intentionally targeting Pakistanis." He said that
more than once. But the statistics he shared contradicted his
faith on the neutrality of the US administration. It was Mr. Ali
who pointed out that nearly 1400 Pakistanis had been removed from
the United States since September 11, 2001. Egyptians stand a
distant second at 427. The difference is in order of magnitude.
Will the Government of Pakistan care to explain why their citizens
are being harassed in this friendly country?
Faiz
Rehman, who does not work for the Government of Pakistan thought
Musharraf's staff in the US have done all they can. "I was
quoted by New York Times and many other papers. Pakistani Embassy
always responds to the press unlike embassies of other Muslim
countries." One cannot belittle the importance of media visibility,
but, there is more that needs to be done. To begin with, demanding
from the US government that Pakistanis should not be profiled
if America wants Pakistan government's continued support. But,
when the Pakistani rulers visit again this month, plight of Pakistanis
in America will be way down in their list of priorities.
The
panelists also had difficulties contextualizing the discussion
within the framework of international law and human rights. Sitting
in the United Nations less than 20 feet away from a barrage of
press statements issued by Kofi Annan recently on the imperative
of human security and dignity, instead of describing immigrants
being stripped of their personhood, arbitrarily incarcerated amongst
a general prison population, where they are routinely harassed
and brutalized by both guards and inmates (to which authorities
respond with solitary confinement); instead of drawing attention
to a policy of moving these detainees from prison to prison and
state to state in order to thwart any legal intervention without
giving their families even a clue as to what state they might
be in, effectively creating a new population of "the disappeared"
in the US, instead of describing the hardships on mothers and
children who lose not only husbands and fathers but also sole
providers, the panelists jumped this category of what was referred
to as "illegals", and presented the plight of H-1 and
F-1 visa holders who due to misinformation (quite probably deliberate)
are not allowed to return to their high-tech jobs and their Ivy
league dorms.
With
a look of despair Mr. Ali lamented, imagine: "There are students
from Harvard and Princeton, who have lost a semester of school
as well as thousands of dollars of tuition."Their whole career
has been ruined."
Someone
needed to remind this panel that they were addressing an institution
(the UN) that deals with summary executions, torture, forced displacements,
and other egregious acts of violence on an almost daily basis.
An
advice for the panel: Next time around spend more time preparing
statements. Provide written statements. State the problem, propose
solutions and discuss your strategy. (Food was good but not aromatic
enough to attract the entire UN press corps.)
Telling
the truth has to go along with strengthening and spreading the
spirit of resistance. One thing that people have learned over
these past months is that resistance reverberates.
When
people dare to confront the powers and tell the truth, people
in other cities and even other countries answer them back. Let's
be real clear: if it weren't for protests on the American streets
-- in unity with people around the world--then Bush would probably
be marching into Iraq with the UN fully behind him, draped in
an aura of righteousness and legitimacy. Public opinion would
be eating out of his hand and believing everything he said. Bush
would have gone into Iraq riding high, with very few if any political
concerns.
While
this criticism may sound harsh, I truly support the effort of
these three Pakistanis. But the stakes these days are high and
those who represent the issues need to do so with effective tools
and strategies.
