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Anyone who met Daniel Pearl, even if once and casually, was struck by his gentle and trusting nature, his sense of humour and his thirst for whatever story he was after at the time. There can be no greater irony than that he was slaughtered by men who believed in their distorted minds that they were doing it for the greater glory of a religion whose name means peace. While Pearl has gone down among the martyrs of journalism, his assassins and what they did will live in infamy.

His wife Mariane is a brave woman because it must take courage of a higher order to relive the nightmare of Danny’s kidnapping and murder. She was then with child but even this did not melt the hearts of his killers. In an interview on CNN, she told them to release him and take her in his place. Her recently published book, A mighty heart, takes you with the narrator on a journey both disturbing and inspirational. Faith in the essential goodness of things illuminates her story like a shaft of sudden light.

Pearl arrived from Bombay to find out at firsthand what violent fanaticism in pursuit of an avowedly religious duty was and how the phenomenon could best be understood and written about. He brought his pregnant wife Mariane with him because he could not leave her alone in her condition in India. The couple shared a house with an Indian-American Muslim journalist who had just finished work on her own book Tantrika (since published). Her name was Asra Nomani and few people know that she was a direct descendant of Maulana Shibli Nomani, a great Islamic scholar and historian, whose biography of the Prophet (pbuh) is considered by many to be the best available.

Gen Pervez Musharraf has said that Pearl went far too deep into areas that were dangerous, peopled as they were with ruthless men under the delusion that they were serving some higher purpose. This has irked Pearl’s parents. While Gen Musharraf is right, what he has not perhaps taken into account is that Pearl was just that kind of reporter, willing to go to any length to get to the heart of a story.

After Pearl’s disappearance, Asra’s rented house in Defence became the headquarters of a massive recovery operation. The Pakistan police, the FBI and the US embassy joined hands to mount perhaps the biggest manhunt in the country’s history. Mariane has high praise for all these men, one of whom, a Pakistani police officer she calls “Captain”, became not only a close friend who provided her the emotional support she needed, but with luck would have succeeded in recovering her husband for her. When Pearl died, he said to her with tears in his eyes, “I could not keep my promise to you that I would bring Danny back.” The organisation of this massive effort was handled by Asra with clockwork efficiency. Wall Street Journal provided the hardware and one of its senior-most men flew into Karachi and stayed with Mariane till the end.

Some of our journalists do not come out of this tragedy smelling very nice. About Kamran Khan, stringer of the Washington Post and reporter on The News, Mariane writes: “He has made a Faustian bargain in order to burrow deep into the world of Pakistani politics and intelligence. When others rely on Khan, they strike a similar bargain.” Khan would write something else for Washington Post and a home version of the same story where he would find little hesitation in calling Pearl a Jew or implying that Asra, an Indian, could be someone other than a journalist. He also implied she and Pearl had some sort of relationship. Certain journalists of the Urdu counterpart of Khan’s newspaper from the same stable were involved in minor capacities in this sordid business, carrying messages and acting as cut-outs. Some of the reports in the Urdu press were full of dark innuendos and straight accusations about a man who was fighting for his life. Even Dawn ran a story about Asra’s arrest for staying beyond her visa. It was not true.

A dark leitmotif to the tragedy that was unfolding, was Asra’s own life. She was married to a Pakistani a decade earlier, lived in Karachi but the marriage broke down after three months. Karachi again brought her bad luck. She fell in love with a young man who is only identified by Mariane as “The Lover”. When he walked out on her, she discovered that she was pregnant. Eventually, she like Mariane gave birth to a boy who is named Shibli after the great family patriarch. I have seen this child and I have met Asra, and off and on we exchange messages. She lives in West Virginia, has published her book and is one of the gentlest, most charming young women I have met. I suppose some people and certain cities are star-crossed. Karachi and Asra are just that.

Once Captain told Mariane, “People have asked, ‘Why are you doing this thing?’ You know why? It is for my national pride.” “Yes,” Mariane answered, “Danny represents America, and you strive to represent the best in Pakistan.” She wondered, though, where the ISI’s “national pride” was because it had shown the “minimal interest in the kidnapping”. Once, Jameel Yusuf, the citizen-soldier of Karachi, phoned an ISI bigwig and asked the same question. A major appeared on the scene some time after, never to be seen again. Curious.

On her last night in Pakistan, Mariane invited all the men who had helped her look for Danny. There was Captain and another Pakistani officer whom we only know as Dost. There was Jameel Yusuf and the Americans and a Pakistani named Zahoor who worked at the US consulate and had been an important part of the team. They gathered in a circle and for a while no one spoke. Finally, Mariane found her voice, “You are the bravest men I have ever met. You went straight to hell, where darkness is the deepest, because you hate injustice, and racism, and tyranny. You did it for Danny and for me and for our child. But you also did it on behalf of the rest of the world. You are on the front lines of the fight against terrorism, and still, nobody knows you and how brave you are. Nobody sees how your willingness to fight the darkest threat for humanity actually makes each one of you shine as an individual.”

She looked at their faces, lined with fatigue and anguish and added, “I have gathered you here to let you know that without amazing people like you around me, I couldn’t have any hope left by this point. And how can anyone live without hope?”

Mariane, French Algerian-Cuban Daniel Pearl’s courageous wife who lived through the horror of his kidnapping and eventual murder with great dignity and faith, left Pakistan to return to France where her son, whom his father had named Adam but whom he did not live to see, was born.

In her just published book, a mesmerising account of those terrible days in Karachi, as she hovered between hope and despair, she publishes in an appendix a selection out of the thousands of letters she received, many of them from Pakistan. She writes, “After this excruciating ordeal, there was nothing I needed more than to be reassured about human nature. I had just experienced how barbaric human beings can be, and I was about to bring a child into the world. Living through the nightmare was like falling down a well. These letters have been the rope that, word by word, allowed me to raise my hopes again and see the light at last.”

She says when Adam grows up, she will have, on the one hand, to tell him the terrible tale of his father’s murder and, on the other, the voices of men, women and children from the world over, expressing the full power of human solidarity. She read every single letter, every single e-mail that had been addressed to her and it is clear that these messages helped her gain strength and come back to life.

Carole Schmidt writes to Mariane and Adam from Chicago, “I just wanted you to know that so many of us — the strangers across the lands — are heartbroken at your loss. And despite the awful outcome, I share Daniel’s optimism about bringing the world together in peace someday.”

Zarina Mehta writes from Bombay, “While you don’t know us, we are deeply grieved by your loss and feel as if we have lost someone from our own family,” while Sultan, Sara, Ryanan and Raniya write, “As a Pakistani, I am ashamed of being one today. His unborn son will come into this world hating us, but is he not justified to hate us? I have no words to say how sorry I am for what happened to Danny. Danny died for a great cause and he is a martyr.”

An 85-year old man from New York state tells Mariane that he wept when he heard that Danny was dead. “I wipe my tears and wonder: what can I say to your heartache?” He sends her a cheque that he calls “the token of my tears,” and adds, “it’s like a return engagement because your voice perked up mine.” Customers and owners of a small New York liquor store send her a cheque for “some baby expenses.” A Jordanian man writes, “I feel great shame that Daniel’s murderers did their heinous act in the name of Islam.” A Texan woman sends her a quilt for the baby which she hopes will bring Mariane “pleasure, security and a bit of comfort.”

Jean-Marc Peyron from France feels “personally hit by the tragedy”, while workers at a general store in Pennsylvania send her the money that they have collected. A retired journalist also sends a cheque and adds that if Mariane is ever in financial difficulty he would “dig down deeper.” Twenty-six 5th grade students from East Hampton, New York, raise $2,000 that they send to her and Adam. A Belfast woman writes, “It is through people like Daniel that the world hears the truth.” Tehmoor Nawaz from Karachi says his father was in jail from 1977-88 (the Zia era) for the movement for democracy and adds, “I cannot fathom your loss, but am touched by it. Your husband’s blood is in the likeness of all those who have tried to expose, fight and stand up to oppression, epitomised by the martyrs of Kerbala, and it shall not be in vain.” Dr Younas Sheikh writes to Mariane from his death cell in Rawalpindi, sentenced on a spurious blasphemy charge.

Every tragedy is interspersed with some comic relief and in this case it comes from Muhammad Ahmed, advocate, Karachi who writes, “I know you may be indecisive about your future. I want to reciprocate your feelings. But I cannot offer any better substitute to our deceased husband still if you think appropriate to live in Pakistan, I am ready and willing to support you and share your sorrow including the esteemed matrimonial relationship if you desire so.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

The story is apocryphal but deserves to be told one more time. Sometime in the 1960s at a ladies’ soirée all wedded to gentlemen of the long-departed Civil Service of Pakistan - someone mentioned Dr Abdus Salam and how brilliant he was, at which Attiya Inayatullah is said to have asked, “If he is that brilliant, why is he not a CSP?” Needless to say, even Dr Salam with all his mathematics and higher physics could not have answered that one.

Dr Salam was a man of astonishing humility. In Vienna, which he used to visit off and on, I once ran into him as he was walking across the rotunda of the Vienna International Centre where all the UN agencies are housed. We shook hands and chatted for a few minutes in Punjabi which he spoke with that delicious Seraiki lilt that makes the language sound exceedingly sweet. After he had gone his way, a friend of mine who was with me asked who that man was. “Dr Abdus Salam,” I replied, “the Nobel Prize laureate”. “But he was so utterly simple, I would never have guessed,” my friend said. Maybe that was another reason he did not end up as a CSP.

I had briefly met Dr Salam at Multan at that famous meeting of scientists which Zulfikar Ali Bhutto called. I next met him in Canada in 1974 when I was serving at the Pakistan embassy. This was after the National Assembly decision declaring the Ahmedis non-Muslim. I went to receive him at the Ottawa airport. At first I did not recognise him because he had a beard. “You have grown a beard,” I said. “Yes, the day I was declared a non-Muslim, I decided to follow ‘ sunnat-e-Rasool (pbuh)’ and grow a beard,” he replied. He had come to confer with the Canadian government on matters relating to the International Centre for Theoretical Physics he had almost single-handedly established at Trieste, Italy. He had wanted it to be set up in Lahore and would have done so had the Pakistan government showed serious interest. I asked him what his engagements were and when I found that one of his afternoons was free, I suggested that the embassy chauffeur Mirza Abdul Rehman show him around because some of the city’s suburbs were very beautiful. He said that would be very nice. On his return to Trieste, he wrote me a letter in which he asked me to thank Mirza Abdul Rehman who had been so kind as to have driven him around Ottawa. That was the sort of man he was. How many Pakistanis would do that? Most of us treat those who serve, be they cooks or drivers, as simply having no existence as human beings. But to Dr Salam such things mattered.

He also told me a Bhutto story. He had resigned as Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of Pakistan after the National Assembly decision. When ZAB pressed him in a meeting to take it back, assuring him that it was “all politics” and he would change it at an appropriate time, Salam said to him, “Write that down for me on a plain piece of paper, from Zulfi to Salam, and it will always remain a secret between the two of us. I will then take back my resignation.” Bhutto thought for a moment, Salam told me, and replied, “That I cannot do; you see I am a politician.”

Dr Salam died of a debilitating disease in 1996. Since then there have been many books written about him, to which has now been added an Urdu compendium of tributes and reminiscences of this remarkable man by Canada-based Muhammad Zakariya Virk in a book called Dr Abdus Salam: Musalmanoon ka Newton. It is truly a labour of love (though it could have been better printed and edited) and will bring back to those who read it both the man and the scientist. Dr Salam loved Pakistan and though he could have become the citizen of any country he chose, he never gave up his citizenship and all his life he travelled on that green passport which has needed a visa for every country for years now. In a letter Salam sent to an admirer from Karachi some months before he died, he wrote: “Never doubt your abilities to produce the best in the world but remember the best will not come without hard work. As Muslims we have a great heritage to inspire us and we should never forget that great and learned Muslim scholars a few centuries ago led the world in so many fields.” He donated the entire Nobel Prize money in scholarships for students, many of them in his beloved Jhang. He wanted to be buried in Pakistan and willed that if he could for some reason be taken to Pakistan for burial, his tombstone should read, “It was his wish to be buried at the feet of his mother.”

He found no conflict between Islam and science, and once said that of the three Abrahamic religions, Islam was alone in devoting one-eighth of its holy book to urge a study of nature and to call on people to reflect. When he came to Pakistan after his Nobel Prize, he met Zia-ul-Haq and after he had explained to him what he understood about the finality of Prophethood, the General recited the kalima, asked Salam to recite it also and said, “You are a better Muslim than I am.” When Salam was leaving Cambridge after his double tripos, he asked his professor for a testimonial but was told, “You should give me a testimonial that I taught you.” In 1986 many countries wanted Salam as UNESCO director-general but the Zia regime nominated Sahibzada Yaqub Khan instead. Khan was roundly defeated despite the Pakistani plea on his behalf that France was saved by a general and another general would save UNESCO.

When he died the Times of London wrote, “The death of Abdus Salam leaves the world of theoretical physics without one of its most distinguished and respected members. In addition to his brilliant intellectual gifts, Salam was a man of remarkable vision and outstanding energy who played a major role in developing science throughout the world. He was deeply concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and served on many high-level committees involved in the promotion of international peace and collaboration and in the development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy.”

And how has Pakistan remembered this great son of hers? Exactly as it has remembered another of her sons, Saadat Hasan Manto. Nothing is named after them, no road, no town, no city nothing. But that should not matter because what Salam and Manto accomplished, each in his separate domain, has placed them in the company of immortals. What more can a man ask?

Not everybody is obsessed with politics in this town or exercise of power or lobbying on the Hill or making money through less than upright means. Some of the citizens are interested in other things. Birds for example.

David DeGroff and William Milan are two such. They fancy birds (bird birds that is, not girls), in fact, one particular bird, a parrot, which if you must know, goes by the name of Tallulah aka Loulou. There is nothing wrong with Loulou except that she has been missing since April 12 this year. The parrot is 11 years old — they can live up to 50 — and its distraught owners think it has been found, but the person in whose custody Loulou perhaps now perches, refuses not only to return it to her rightful owners, but she won’t even let them so much as set their eyes on their treasured pet. The case has gone to court once but was thrown out because the judge, who obviously did not care one way or the other for parrots, said his was the wrong court for this kind of case.

But this is what happened, according to a delightful account published in some detail by Washington Post on its front page on a Sunday, space normally reserved for major disasters, domestic and political, and important football games featuring the local team, the Redskins, a name the Indian (not our Indians) community finds irreverent and racist, though the court where they went for redress refused to share their view.

A woman guest visiting the two men who owned Loulou and who share an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, ran into a glass door because she was not wearing her glasses — a lesson there for those who don’t do so out of vanity. This startled Loulou because she screamed. Next thing anyone knew, Loulou had flown over the balcony and settled herself in a tree fourteen stories down. Milan raced out like a banshee but by the time, he got under those trees, Loulou was gone. Loulou is an African gray, a much-prized bird, whom the two friends had raised from a chick. The African gray is among nature’s smartest birds with the intelligence of a five-year old.

Act two brings in Nina Weaver, who adopted an African gray on May 11 from an animal shelter. The two men are convinced it is their missing Loulou. Not so, according to Weaver. After Loulou’s escape, the owners called every animal agency in the area and stuck notices all over the neighbourhood and distributed fliers. They said Loulou was a member of the family. One day, a shelter they had called told them that an African gray had been taken for adoption recently by one Nina Weaver of Newburg, Pennsylvania. They called her but she did not answer the phone. So on a rainy day in June, the two men drove the three hours to her rural area home. She did not answer the door but they saw the silhouette of a bird through a window. DeGroff swears it was Loulou and she recognised him.

African grays are talkative birds and Loulou could speak many sentences and even whistle a certain tune. She also had a pink feather under her left wing, but a pet breeder whom the woman Weaver allowed to examine the bird found no such feather. A ‘bird detective’ from Alexandria, J D Taylor, has also been hired by the two men, but he has not been able to get through to the hard-hearted Weaver. All talking parrots can say their name, but the one Weaver has only says Toby and ‘Ho, ho, ho, merry Christmas’.

DeGroff has now filed another suit and wants to cross-examine in court the bird Weaver has, because he is confident that he will prove it to be his Loulou. Not everyone thinks so. The animal shelter people who gave the parrot away say the only memorable phrase to leave his beak was, “What’s that smell in here?”

Well, as they say in Indian and Pakistani movies, “Iss ka faisala ab adalat mein ho-ga.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Outside of publishing circles few people would know – or for that matter care – that the one book which sells consistently, edition after edition, and has done so since its publication nearly twenty years ago is Qudratullah Shahab’s Shahabnama.

The question to ask is why? Does it sell because of the many stories it contains? There are some revolving around haunted houses (“The restless spirit of Bimla Kumari”); there is an account of the plague in Jammu; the tale of the young Shahab’s encounter with India’s greatest Vedantic philosopher, Dr Radhakrishnan, which the future president of India loses hands down; and stories of the paralysed Ghulam Muhammad ruling Pakistan through sign language and gibberish that only Shahab and the governor general’s memsahib secretary could decipher. Or is the books success because of Shahab’s strange mystical encounters with a spirit codenamed Ninety? I would vote for the latter explanation. In Shahab’s book, the line between fact and fanciful fiction is thin and, more often than not, nonexistent. He could be said to have invented a new genre in Urdu literature that one can best describe as fictionalised fact.

Since his death and that of his acolyte Mumtaz Mufti, many have wondered if the stories they both told about each other were a big put on or if they had any basis in fact. In Pakistan, superstition has been rising over the years, a phenomenon always associated with insecurity and lack of confidence in the living environment. Uncertainty, no one will disagree, has been the only certainty since the break-up of 1971. What other than superstition can one expect in a country where fifty-six years after its establishment, a debate is still going on as to why it came into being. The history of the Indian Muslim urge to be free of economic exploitation and the tyranny of the majority has been entirely rewritten. Were the Quaid-e-Azam to return to life, I doubt he would recognise today’s Pakistan as the country he created. Shahab and Mufti’s “shortcut to nirvana” is popular because, if the stories that the two men have spun are true, then anyone can get to the promised land without much work. Just a few trick mantras or a being called Ninety or Ninety-nine would do the necessary. A lifetime of prayer and contemplation is too long and too arduous. Everyone can now become a saint in his spare time.

Over ten years ago Ajmal Kamal, who runs an admirable magazine and literary publishing house in Karachi, wrote a review article based on the second volume of Mumtaz Mufti’s autobiography Alakh Nagri. He pointed out that the picture on the cover was not the author’s but Shahab’s, which according to Mufti was “in the fitness of things”. His preface said that in the first half of his life, he discovered Woman and in the second half Qudratullah Shahab.

Despite the charm and likeability of Shahab, it is not easy to forget or condone that he authored the infamous editorial “A new leaf” when the Progressive Papers, the flagship of progressivism in Pakistan, were taken over by Field Marshal Ayub Khan, or that he founded the Pakistan Writers’ Guild and even the National Press Trust. Mufti was not concerned with that sort of thing because he believed that it was Shahab who was responsible for some of Pakistan’s seminal events. He caused the capital chosen by the Quaid to be abandoned in favour of the garrison town of Rawalpindi-Islamabad. He had Pakistan renamed an Islamic Republic. He also explained the true concept of Iqbal’s “ khudi” to the field marshal and later helped formulate the 1962 constitution that fell into disuse when its author was pushed out of power by his army chief. Ayub was under the constant spiritual care of spirits and guides, wrote Mufti (whereas they should have attended to the spiritual needs of Yahya Khan).

Guided by the mysterious Ninety, Shahab had gone to Israel, Mufti wrote, as a UNESCO representative to look at Israeli school textbooks, but his actual purpose was to spend a night at the Al Aqsa mosque which he did by giving Israeli security the slip. He had to go to Al Aqsa, according to Mufti, to activate a metaphysical process which would reach fruition with the total destruction of the Zionist entity. One wonders why Yasir Arafat has not retired to the French Riviera since his mission has already been accomplished through the works of Shahab.

Mufti wasn’t alone in promoting what came to be known among the wags of Lahore as Silsala-e-Shahabia. Mufti wrote that Pakistan’s establishment was decided at a meeting of higher beings presided over by Sarkar Qibla, a divine buried near Islamabad. The killing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims was ordered by these otherworldly powers so that they could enter heaven as martyrs and become a spiritual army to guard the border at Wahga (while not forgetting Pakistan’s soft underbelly in the Rajasthan area, one hopes). Pakistan, Mufti disclosed, was being run in accordance with a Master Plan prepared by Sarkar Qibla. Mufti reproduced a letter from one Abdul Ghafoor, advocate, which said that the 1965 war was fought under the command of dervishes wielding “spiritual atomic power”.

Mufti wrote that certain spiritual presences ordered him to move to Rawalpindi and work under Shahab. Once there, he found himself the owner of a plot in Islamabad on which he built a house with money pouring in from mysterious sources. Another member of the Mufti family, the journalist and erstwhile filmmaker Ahmed Bashir had a vision that he had been sent to earth to make movies (all his movies crashed which only shows that angels know next to nothing about the film business). He made Neela parbat which ran for either three or four days (I saw it; it was a scream). Other believers in the Silsala also flourished and had their dreams come true. Mufti’s basic thesis was: nothing is what it appears to be.

In every good thriller, there is a chase scene. In this one, it occurred in Paris when a black limo stopped to offer a lift to Shahab. He should have declined the offer because once he got in, he placed himself at the mercy of a Zionist magician who turned him into a “stinking chunk of flesh” and sent him packing to Pakistan where he arrived as “half a man”.

Well, both Shahab and Mufti are gone and may they rest in peace. My explanation for all this is simple: Qudratullah Shahab had a puckish sense of humour. Mumtaz Mufti just got taken in.

What Arnold Schwarzenegger will do to or for the sunshine state, those who voted for him will find out before long, but what he has done to newspaper sub-editors around the world is no less lethal than what he does to his adversaries in the movies he makes. The first newspaper to speak up for unsung members of the tribe that toils in backrooms, putting the next day’s issue together, is Washington Post.

In a leading article, aptly called ‘Fit to Print’, the newspaper wrote a day after the big man’s big victory that there was “one problem facing the Schwarzenegger administration that might be beyond solving: the man’s name won’t fit in newspaper headlines. At 14 letters, it far exceeds the limits of the standard one-column headline, unless reduced to the type size used for stories about bus accidents in Malaysia.”

The Post article pointed out that this had been “a problem for leaders ever since the coming of daily newspapers, before which time they could have names such a Nebuchadnezzar or Suleiman the Magnificent or whatever they pleased — there was plenty of room on the scroll.” The question is what are headline writers and newsroom subs going to do with the star of ‘Pumping Iron.’ The man has no short name like JFK, FDR, LBJ or Ike. Had Alexander the Great been alive, wrote the Post, he would have been known as ATG in the more serious papers and Big Al in the New York Post, the city’s number one tabloid. A name that is more friendly to column inches should be on top of Schwarzenegger’s list of priorities. Obviously.

In my view Arnie is a good candidate but not Terminator because it is not the answer to a sub-editor’s prayer. He is not the first actor to win public office but he is no Ronald Reagan. It is amazing that a man who has either lifted weights or destroyed mean robots and villainous troublemakers in movies should have been chosen to run the largest state in the nation. What is more, he has been picked up by the electorate — which needs to gets its head examined — of a state that has a massive debt nobody knows what to do about, least of all Arnie who may find it hard to spell economics at the first attempt.

In California, nobody walks which is why there are more cars in that single state than in several states put together. One of Arnie’s campaign promises is abolition of car tax which means the state will be short of another $4 billion, but I suppose the Terminator is not interested in numbers or maybe he can only count in German.

In America, which is otherwise both liberal and permissive when it comes to the oldest cause of trouble in the world, sex, any politician who is caught flagrante delicto or found at dalliance by newspaper hounds can kiss public office goodbye. American history is chockfull of such examples, Gary Hart being one of the better known ones. However, despite 15 women screaming on the front page of Los Angeles Times, no less, how on different occasions, they had been ‘groped’ by Arnie, it would appear that the Sisterhood voted for him. Perhaps they all felt like this 21-year old girl at one of Arnie’s rallies who carried a sign that said, “You can grope me anytime you like.”

Not only did Arnie survive that, he also survived his own admission many years ago that he was involved in a ‘gang bang’ at a body builders’ gym. He said he had no recollection of having said that. He was also credited with having made racist remarks. But the Californians appear not to have been bothered by any of that. He also becomes the first American politician (which he now is) to survive after it came to light that he had once expressed admiration for his old countryman Adolf Hitler. So there you have it.

Arnie is looking for people who can fix California. May I suggest that we gift Mr Shaukat Aziz to the new Gov. It will do two things: fix that deficit and leave Pakistan Shaukatazizless. Not a bad bargain, wouldn’t you say?

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

I have decided – for a while at least – to stop fretting about Pakistan. I will not join countrywide catcalls for the culling of Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, our distinguished information minister. I have even decided to believe our other distinguished minister, Shaukat Aziz, and not start rolling my eyes when he goes on television and begins extolling the miracles his fiscal polices have wrought. It is also time to get not so worked up about the desk thumpers and screamers of Islamabad, otherwise known as National Assembly members. Ms Naheed Khan can go for the jugular of any occupant of the treasury benches she pleases and I won’t say a word. Prime Minister Jamali can throw away his secret exercise bike and never take another walk in his life and I won’t complain. General Musharraf can keep wearing his uniform as long as he thinks he looks good in it, and I will look the other way. Members of the MMA don’t have to trim their beards – who wants angels to fall to the ground anyway – nor do all the hijab -clad bibis of the Al Huda overground and underground network have to ever show their face to a living human being again, as far as I am concerned.

Have I had a change of heart? Well, not exactly that, but since I read a long, investigative report by Philip Gourevitch about North Korea in the New Yorker this week, I have come to the conclusion that despite the LFO, Mad Mullahs Inc, the generals and colonels of the land, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed and the National Accountability Bureau, we are not that badly off if you consider for a moment that it could have been much worse. I mean we could have been North Korea and instead of General Musharraf, we could have had Kim Jong Il, or Baby Doc Duvalier or the late Haji Idi Amin Dada. One should be thankful for mercies small and big, so let us go to North Korea and by the time we are done, you might perhaps become more serene about life in general.

In North Korea, truth has never been a matter of fact so much as “an expression of Kim’s whim, father and son. Truth is a confection of outright lies, a form of unreality imposed with relentlessness and violence on a people hermetically sealed form any alternative sources of information.” A satellite image of North Korea at night shows an area of total darkness, while the South shimmers. Kim Jong II was installed by his father “The Great Leader” to take his place. He says he worships the people “but his adoration, like a jealous lover’s is only rhetorically distinguishable from contempt”. In 1997, North Korea abandoned the Christian calendar and adopted a new one which marked the beginning of history as 1912, the year of Kim Il Sung’s birth.

Pyongyang is a city of “megalomaniac architecture”, towering monuments to “The Great Leader” to awe the rare foreigner from outside who is granted visas. The Leader “shuttles between his lavish palaces, unseen, in a darkened car that speeds down streets cleared for his passage”. Until the early nineties, there were 51 sub-classes of citizens, based on party loyalty. The State maintains three separate security services which spy on all citizens and report to the leadership. “Underpinning this whole apparatus, the most invasive and pervasive scheme for creating a monolithic culture in history, is a principle of collective family responsibility that makes every member of a household accountable for the conduct of his immediate kin, so that the deviations of one are the calamity of all.” The difference between being imprisoned and being free in North Korea is “more one of degree than of kind”. It is one large concentration camp “designed not only to keep its inmates captive but, equally, to keep the rest of the world out”.

Every radio and TV set in the country is made to receive only one signal, the official propaganda channel which carries such messages as, “Today, the world’s people are consistently envious of our people, calling our people the people blessed with a Leader.” Fifty percent of the food the North Korean people need has to come by way of foreign handouts. In the past decade, two to three million Koreans have died of starvation. A generation of children has grown up stunted. “North Korea is a desperado in the international arena, holed up in its enclave and taunting its enemies to come and get it. Kim Jong II runs the place as a criminal syndicate, maintaining his kingdom with money earned primarily from arms trading, drug running, money counterfeiting, and foreign aid. He spends the money on his own pleasure – lavish feasts, flocks of dancing girls, barrels of fine wines and spirits, fleets of black Mercedes-Benz sedans to dole out as gifts – and on the People’s Army.”

The only object of export value North Korea produces is arms which it sells to anyone it can for cash. During the famine years of the later nineties, North Koreans were told to “draw on their inner resources”. But when the situation worsened, the people were told to tighten the belt for an “arduous march”, and later “a forced march to final victory”. Finally, they were exhorted to undertake “a march to paradise”. Party operatives were called upon to “lead a more cultured and aesthetic life” by cleaning up homes and workplaces so as to “make the whole society firmly dominated by a merry and lively atmosphere to suit the demands of the realities of the new age of the revolution we are in”. When that failed, the starving masses were encouraged to forget the present and look to eternity: “living today for tomorrow”. They were told, “The more our generations undergo suffering and shed sweat, the happier our future generations will be.” When the famine peaked, the message from the Leader was, “The spirit of suicidal explosion can be cherished only by those who thoroughly resolve to voluntarily choose death for the sake of the Party and the Leader.”

The most unforgettable comment on North Korea was perhaps on a cover of The economist that carried a picture of a waving Kim Jong II under the headline ‘Greetings, Earthlings’. So perhaps we are not that badly off with His Heaviness and Boss.

Mir Zafraullah Khan Jamali may not have brought anything else to Washington — or taken much back — but he has brought to the capital the best time of the year: autumn, which Americans call fall. John Keats, whom the Prime Minister may some day like to read when he is bored with ordering postings and transfers, called it ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ that had its own music matching the ‘songs of summer’. And that indeed is true.

Washington autumn is not as spectacular as autumn in the states of New England where every colour that exists in nature comes to life as the trees start turning. Autumn puts a spring in one’s step, rid as the air is of the oppressive humidity that blights life during this area’s hot and rainy summer. Mr Jamali would have time this weekend to take a walk in the woods and sample some of the season’s delights, but I doubt if his minders will let him. The obsession with security, especially of visiting heads of government, is something that has to be seen to be believed.

This has been a bad year, now that it is nearing its end. It saw George W take the country to a war which, it now turns out, had no justification except that he wanted to go riding into Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein. The weapons of mass destruction that we were told Saddam was priming up to rain at mainland America have not been found. Had the White House consulted the Punjab police on the matter, this gap could have been easily filled. The Punjab police plants unlicensed weapons, smuggled goods and narcotics on perfectly law-abiding citizens every hour of the day. It would have suggested to the President to plant some on Iraq. After all, America has more weapons of mass destruction than the entire world will have in the next hundred years. A few could certainly have been spared for the higher purpose of proving President Bush and his gunslingers’ cabinet right.

The year, I said, has been bad. Just think of how many great personalities of the film world have gone in the last few months. Gregory Peck died and I am sure was much mourning in Pakistan by people of a certain age, recalling him as the dashing reporter who wins the heart of a holidaying princess in the eternal city of Rome. Bob Hope died. He was one hundred years old, that is true, but everyone thought he was there forever and more. Last week, one of the greatest of Hollywood’s movie directors, Elia Kazan, went too.

To him we owe the introduction of stars such as Marlon Brando, James Dean, Lee Remick, Natalie Wood and Eva Marie Saint. He will always be remembered for such film classics as A Streetcar named Desire, East of Eden, On the Waterfront and Splendour in the Grass. There is only one cross that he carried to his grave. During the McCarthy witch-hunt, Kazan supplied the names of a number of his former leftwing or communist friends and colleagues to the Committee investigating ‘un-American’ activities. He was never forgiven for this act of treachery and when he was given a Life Achievement Award a few years ago at the Oscars ceremony, there were many who said he did not deserve to be honoured. Had Kazan been a Pakistani and had those events taken place in Pakistan, he would have been honoured for betraying his friends and condemned for making his movies.

But coming back to Washington, some heads may roll because of the ongoing inquiry into whether the White House leaked the name of a CIA operative because it was angry at her husband, a former US ambassador, who had questioned the administration’s case on Iraq’ clandestine effort to obtain ‘yellow cake’ from Africa for enriched uranium. President Bush has said that he wants those responsible for the leak identified and punished. This town leaks like a sieve and seldom, if ever, has a leaker been caught. Maybe the Squire of Ranch Crawford will have better luck.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

HK Burki went down fighting, as he had all his life, whether he was playing hockey for Pakistan or writing his columns. With him Pakistan loses one of the best and most brilliant reporters of his generation. Nobody could write quite like him. His prose had such polish and he wrote with such bite, especially when he was upholding a cause or denouncing someone or something. There has simply been no journalist in the entire history of our country to whom I can justly compare him. I always called him ‘The Maestro’ and reverentially touched his right knee every time I met him.

Burki was a man of abiding loyalties. He never let a friend down and he never let those he disliked know what he thought of them. He had no time for humbug or hypocrisy, and he did not suffer fools. To his juniors, like me, he was generous; always ready to forgive our trespasses and overlook our mistakes. All my life I looked up to him, both as a man and as a reporter. There were, of course, those to whom Burki’s very name was anathema and their number was not small, but it never bothered Burki and he never hesitated to take them on.

He was a man of enormous gifts. He played hockey for Pakistan and captained the team that won a world championship at Barcelona. He was a talented sportsman and had he chosen to play cricket or tennis or golf, he would have excelled at any or all of them. He began playing hockey in Jullandhar, coming as he did from among the Pathans of the Bastis. In another time and another age he would have commanded a conquering army on horseback. He was a natural warrior.

I first met set eyes on Burki when I walked into the Rawalpindi bureau of The Pakistan times on Edwards Road (God knows what it is called now) sometime in the 1960s. I came because I knew one of the reporters, Salamat Ali, who after a brief stint at the Risalpur PAF Academy had found his way into journalism, and eventually The Pakistan times, then the hardest newspaper to get into. I wanted to do likewise, and that is what I told Burki. He looked at me curiously and said to think again and keep trying. He also asked me why I wanted to be a journalist, to which I had no answer really, except that that was what I wanted. However, for all things in life, there is perhaps a time ordained and mine still lay some years in the future.

Burki was a flotilla commander in the Royal British Indian Navy and saw active service in the Burma theatre during World War II. He lived in London for some years after the war and recently completed a novel based on his life in those days and after. He was a superb short story writer and in the last years of his life, devoted most of his writing to fiction. It was only when Shaheen Sehbai, another Burki devotee, took over as chief editor of The news that he persuaded Burki to write a series of articles.

Most of Burki’s journalism, however, was at The Pakistan times for which he reported on the United Nations from New York for several years in memorable style. Perhaps it was in America that he took to wearing the bowtie which became his hallmark. I never saw him wearing a necktie. For a time, he also worked for the Civil and military gazette. He was a gifted photographer, though he stopped taking pictures in later years. The Pakistan times used to print them off and on and they were as sharp and startling as his prose.

Burki shone as The Pakistan times’ diplomatic correspondent in the country’s new capital. He set up the Islamabad bureau with a star studded team that included Salamat Ali who later distinguished himself as the South Asia correspondent of the Far Eastern economic review, and Aslam Sheikh, an outstanding economic correspondent. It was in Islamabad that the friendship between Burki and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto deepened. Burki remained true to his friend through some very hard times after Bhutto’s overthrow, trial and execution.

When Bhutto took charge of what Yahya Khan had left of Pakistan in December 1971, Burki wrote a series of articles denouncing the coterie that had reduced the country to that sorry state. The phrase he used to describe Generals Yahya, Hamid and company has since entered the country’s political language: he called them “fat and flabby generals”. By that time, I was working with ZAB as his press secretary, and remember that once some officers at the Staff College in Quetta complained to ZAB about Burki’s hard-hitting articles about the army. ZAB asked me to phone Burki and to ask him to “ease it” till they met. I phoned Burki and conveyed the message. His response was vintage Burki. He said to me in Punjabi, “ Aapi meray naal gal kyoon nahin karda?” (why doesn’t he talk to me himself?) I answered, “Because maybe he is afraid of you.” Burki did stop, but only after he had completed the series. One of the first orders ZAB gave to me was that Burki and SK Pasha (then with Morning news) go with me on every foreign trip.

The Zia-ul-Haq years were hard on Burki because he had no work, but he remained defiant. I visited Pakistan only once between 1977 and 1988, when the late Altaf Gauhar, who had appointed me managing editor of the projected journal South, asked me in 1980 to offer Burki a post as a correspondent in Cairo, or wherever he wished to go at any salary he desired. I was greatly excited when I conveyed AG’s message to Burki. His reply was immediate and it was in his Jullandhri Punjabi, “ Mein nahin jaana kidray bahar, mein aithey hi ainaan (expletive) naal larna vay.” (I am going nowhere aboard; I am staying right here to fight these (expletive).” I can’t think of anyone who would have said no to AG’s generous, no-strings-attached offer.

In the last few years, he had become seriously arthritic but there was hardly a day when he did not go to the Dawn office in Islamabad and spend several hours there chatting with friends and exchanging spirited opinions. To the disbelief of his admirers (including this one), the man whom the army had always considered anathema, had come to like General Pervez Musharraf. He was totally disillusioned with politicians and found Musharraf “better than the rest of them”. He wrote several articles in his shoot-from-the-hip style in broad approval of the general. If I were General Musharraf, I would wear that as a medal more precious than the many that dangle from his breast.

A great sportsman, a great journalist, a great human being has departed Pakistan. Of that there can be no doubt.

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