E-Paper PDF 22th December (ISB)

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22 December, 2019 I 24 Rabi-ul-Sani, 1441 I Rs 27.00 I Vol X No 172 I 68 Pages I Islamabad Edition

IndIan mIsadventures won’t go unanswered, warns Pm g

iMran says indian arMy Chief’s stateMent adds to Pakistan’s ConCerns of a false flaG oPeration

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mid heightened tension with india and increased Line of Control (LoC) violations, Prime minister imran Khan on Saturday said Pakistan would give a befitting response to any indian “false flag operation” aimed at diverting attention from its domestic problems.

Pm imran Khan said that the indian government wanted to whip up war hysteria and mobilise nationalist sentiment in india by vilifying Pakistan. “i have been warning the international community of this for some time and am reiterating again: if india does such an operation to divert attention from its domestic chaos plus whip up war hysteria to mobilize Hindu nationalism, Pakistan will have no option but to give a befitting response,” he said in a series of tweets.

He said over the last five years the modi

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says Protests aGainst reCent Citizens aMendMent aCt will turn into Mass MoveMent

government had been using the virulent Hindutva ideology to establish a Hindu Rashtra.

Now with the Citizens Amendment Act, all those indians who want a pluralist india are beginning to protest and it is becoming a mass movement, the Pm observed.

At the same time, he said the siege by indian occupation forces in indian Occupied Kashmir (iOK) continued and a bloodbath could be expected when it was lifted.

“As these protests are increasing, a threat to Pakistan from india is also increasing. indian Army Chief’s statement adds to our concerns of a false flag operation,” the prime minister remarked.

The prime minister’s remarks come days after the indian army had claimed to have thwarted a cross border attack on the Line of Control (LOC) by Pakistan. indian Army Chief Bhipin Rawat, in a statement to indian media, had said that the situation on the LOC could escalate at any time and that

the people should be prepared to go to war.

“The situation along the LoC can escalate any time. We have to be prepared for the spiraling of the escalatory matrix,” the indian army chief said.

Earlier, in response to the indian army chief’s statement, inter-Services Public Relations director General maj Gen Asif Ghafoor had tweeted: “Provocative statements and preparations for escalation along LoC by indian COAS appear to be an effort, as usual, to divert world attention from widespread protests in india against CAB.” “Pakistan Armed Forces shall befittingly respond to any indian misadventure or aggression.”

Pakistan has repeatedly alerted the international community that india will possibly stage a “false-flag operation” to “divert attention from massive human rights violations” in occupied Kashmir.

However, india accuses Pakistan of training and arming insurgent groups that have been fighting since 1989 for Kashmir’s independence from india or its merger with Pakistan, a charge islamabad denies. Pakistan says it only provides moral and diplomatic support to these groups.

On Aug 27, india’s ministry of External Affairs said Pakistan was trying to infiltrate militants into the country to carry out attacks amid rising tensions over New delhi’s decision to abrogate the autonomy of indian-occupied Kashmir. its spokesman Raveesh Kumar had told reporters that indian security forces were prepared to deal with any eventuality.

But, Pakistan binned the reports, saying it was a responsible state and “we would be insane to allow infiltration” across the Line of Control.

saudis deny ‘blackmailing’ Pakistan over Malaysia summit g

saudi eMBassy says ties Between Pakistan, saudi araBia ‘suPerior to the lanGuaGe of threat’ STORY ON BACK PAGE

Court sends scholar Junaid Hafeez to gallows over blasphemy charges

STORY ON PAGE 02

Maryam files another plea for removal of name from eCl

India protests rage on as death toll rises to 21 editorial: deadly riots

Justice Gulzar Ahmed takes oath as 27th Chief Justice of Pakistan

STORIES ON BACK PAGE & 08

STORY ON PAGE 03

Muslim nations consider gold, barter trade to beat sanctions g

PM, Gen Bajwa discuss current situation, greet new CJP STORIES ON PAGE 02

Malaysian PM Censures india for Citizens aMendMent aCt

STORY ON BACK PAGE

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CMYK Sunday, 22 December, 2019

02 NEWS

Court sends sCholar Junaid hafeez to gallows over blasphemy Charges FAmily sAys veRdiCt HAs less to do witH ‘leGAl meRits And moRe witH HRCP ‘dismAyed’ by veRdiCt, sAys tHe soCioPolitiCAl enviRonment in wHiCH loweR JudiCiARy oPeRAtes’ blAsPHemy lAws ARe HeAvily misused ISLAMABAD

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N anti-terrorism court on Saturday sentenced a liberal scholar and former university lecturer, Junaid Hafeez, to death on blasphemy charges.

In 2013, Junaid Hafeez was accused by students at the university where he taught of making blasphemous Facebook posts. His lawyers say he was framed by students from an extremist Islamist party for his liberal and secular views and this month a US religious freedom commission placed Hafeez on its list of global victims. “He (Junaid Hafeez) shall be hanged by neck till his death subject to its confirmation by the honourable high court,” a court order stated.

According to the court’s short judge-

ment, “All the sentences shall run consecutively and the accused would not be entitled to the benefit of Section 382-B CrPC because in case of blasphemer, this court has got no circumstance for taking [a] lenient view and it is also not permitted in Islam.”

Under Section 382-B of the Criminal Procedure Code, the period of detention of a prisoner has to be considered in the prison term when a person is convicted by a trial court. His defense lawyer Asad Jamal said he would appeal against the ruling in a higher court. “There can’t be a fair trial in blasphemy cases in Pakistan,” Jamal told Reuters. “We have a spineless system. No one can stand up to a blasphemy charge.”

Hafeez, who quit his studies at Pakistan’s top medical college to pursue a passion for art and literature, secured a

Fulbright scholarship and attended Jackson State University where he majored in American literature, photography and theatre. The trial was held in a prison in the central Pakistan city of Multan under tight security due to threats to Hafeez’s family and his lawyer.

Reacting to the verdict, Hafeez’s family expressed disappointment and said it was”an unfortunate verdict which has less to do with the legal merits of the case and more with the sociopolitical environment in which the lower judiciary operates and for which no one seems to care”.

“The prospect of Hafeez getting even a semblance of fair trial came into question when his counsel Rashid Rehman was brutally murdered inside his chambers. Those involved in the murder were never apprehended. Rehman’s murder resulted in a wave of fear, putting off other

lawyers from taking up his defence. The failure to apprehend those who shot Rehman dead signalled impunity for other would-be vigilantes,” the statement said. “Could any judge in such circumstances take the risk of doing justice?

Those who could were transferred from the district or brought under pressure by groups of lawyers operating as mafias.”

The statement said Hafeez has already spent over six years in solitary confinement prior to conviction “which amounts in itself to cruel and inhuman punishment”.

“We feel the case was wholly unnecessarily prolonged defying all legal norms. Seven judges were transferred in six years of the trial,” it added.

The statement said an appeal against the verdict will soon be filed in the high court, and that it was hoped that “justice

will be served without delay”.

In a statement, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said it was dismayed by the verdict.

“HRCP believes that blasphemy laws are heavily misused,” it said, adding that this “is compounded by a trial process ridden by delays and pressures at the level of the lower judiciary”.

“The offence itself is already associated with vigilantism and entrenched impunity – underscored by the 2014 murder of Mr Hafeez’s lawyer, Rashid Rehman.

The resulting pressure on lower courts becomes apparent when most such verdicts are overturned by the High Court or Supreme Court,” the statement.

“In five years, at least eight judges have heard Mr Hafeez’s case, making a fair trial virtually impossible. Meanwhile, he has undergone six years’ imprisonment in solitary confinement. Aasia Bibi, who was charged similarly, was acquitted after eight years’ incarceration. There are grave implications here for access to justice in such cases.”

Justice Gulzar Ahmed takes oath as new CJP ISLAMABAD INP

pm, gen baJwa disCuss Current situation, welCome new CJp ISLAMABAD

Justice Gulzar Ahmed on Saturday took oath as the 27th Chief Justice of Pakistan on Saturday.

President Arif Alvi administered the oath to Justice Gulzar Ahmed at a ceremony at Aiwan-e-Sadr in Islamabad. The ceremony was attended by Prime Minister Imran Khan, Senate Chairman Sadiq Sanjrani, National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser, members of the federal cabinet, parliamentarians, services chiefs and serving and retired judges of the Supreme Court and lawyers. Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed replaces chief justice (r) Asif Saeed Khosa, whose tenure came to an end with his retirement on Friday after serving as the country’s top judge.

Newly appointed Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed will serve till February 21, 2022. On December 4, the law ministry notified the appointment of Justice Gulzar Ahmed as the new chief justice of Pakistan. The notification stated, “In exercise of the powers conferred

by Clause (3) of Article 175 A, read with Article 177 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the President is pleased to appoint Justice Gulzar Ahmed, the most senior judge of the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice of Pakistan with effect from December 21, 2019.” Born on February 2, 1957, in Karachi,

Justice Ahmed received his early education from Gulistan School, Karachi and obtained BA Degree from Government National College, Karachi and LLB Degree from SM Law College, Karachi.

He enrolled as an Advocate on January 18, 1986, and as an advocate of the High Court on April 4, 1988, and then as an advocate of the Supreme Court of Pak-

istan on September 15, 2001. He was elected as honorary secretary of the Sindh High Court Bar Association, Karachi, for the year 1999-2000. Throughout his legal practice, Justice Ahmed mainly practiced on the civil corporate side and worked as a legal advisor to various multinational and local companies, banks and financial institutions.

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Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa on Saturday called on Prime Minister Imran Khan after an oath-taking ceremony of newly sworn-in Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Justice Gulzar Ahmed held at Aiwan-e-Sadr in Islamabad.

President Arif Alvi and CJP Justice Gulzar Ahmed were also present during the meeting. Prime Minister Imran Khan, Chief of Army Staff Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Mujahid Anwar Khan, Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Zafar Mahmood Abbasi, National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser, Senate Chairman Sadiq Sanjrani, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Law Minister Farogh Naseem and various ministers attended the oath-taking ceremony. Former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry also attended the ceremony.

Justice Ahmed, who replaced Justice Asif Saeed Khosa as the chief justice, will serve till February 21, 2022, as the 27th chief justice.

PmC notifies doubling of quota for FAtA medical students ISLAMABAD HamId KHaN WazIr

The dividends of Federal Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) started bearing fruits, as the Pakistan Medical Commission (PMC) has issued notification pertaining to doubling the quota for students of the erstwhile Federal Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in medical and dental colleges in line with the federal cabinet decision back in 2017.

The Senate Standing Committee on States and Frontier Regions in its meeting on November 18, 2019, discussed doubling the quota for students from the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas in various universities and colleges according to a March 2017 cabinet decision.

The committee also directed medical colleges to give the PMC proposals

to increase the number of seats for these students. Additional seats were allocated for students from Fata in 2017, but the then Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) argued that medical and dental colleges only have a certain number of seats according to provincial quotas and it would not be possible to increase seats just for students from the tribal districts.

However, the PMDC was dissolved through a presidential ordinance last month and replaced by the nine-member PMC, which notified the increase of quota as per the federal cabinet decision made in its meeting held on March 2, 2017, under the chairmanship of the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

A notification a copy of which is available with Pakistan Today addressed to Khaber Medical University Vice-Chancellor reads, “This is with

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reference to your application dated 13th December 2019 on the subject providing a proposed beak-down of the additional seats in the public colleagues affiliated with KMU for purposes of accommodating the additional 136 seats under the FATA Quota.”

“Having reviewed the same, one time approval is hereby granted for the following additional seats over and above the allocated strength of the named colleges for 2020 season,” it added. According to the notification a total of 120 for MBBS seats have been increased of which 50 seats would be in Khyber Girls Medical College; Kohat Institute of Medical Sciences 10; Bannu Medical College 10; Gomal Medical College 15; Bacha Khan Medical College, Mardan 05; Nowshera Medical Complex 10; Gajju Khan Medical College, Swabi 10 and Saidu Medical Col-

lege, Swat would have to accommodate 10 students.

Similarly, a total of 16 seats have been increased for BDS of which five would be in Khyber College of Dentistry; three in Ayub Dental Section, three in Bacha Khan Dental Section and five seats would be allocated for FATA medical students in Kohat Institute of Dental Sciences. The notification reads, in respect of the increase in 50 seats in Khyber Medical College, Peshawar, the increase sought is approved in view of the fact that the said college secured an A+ rating in the 2019 national inspection and therefore, the permission shall be subject to the Khyber Girls Medical College applying to the Commission and the HEC for enhancement of its allocated seats by 50 seats within three months hereof and obtaining such enchantment post due inspection.

CMYK Sunday, 22 December, 2019

NEWS

maryam files another plea for removal of name from eCl Pml-n vP seeks one-time PeRmission to Go AbRoAd to look AFteR HeR AilinG FAtHeR LAHORE

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AKISTAN Muslim LeagueNawaz (PML-N) Vice President Maryam Nawaz on Saturday filed a second plea in the Lahore High Court (LHC) for removal of her name from the Exit Control List (ECL).

In the latest petition filed by her lawyers, Muhammad Amjad Pervaiz and Azam Nazeer Tarar, the PML-N vice president is once again seeking a one-time permission to travel abroad for six weeks from the date of departure.

“The respondent government be kindly directed to delete the name of the petitioner from Exit Control List forthwith. Meanwhile, pending the disposal of the instant petition, the petitioner may kindly be granted one-time permission to travel abroad for six weeks from the date of departure,” the petition reads. According to details, the application filed through Advocate Amjad Pervaiz has made the Interior Ministry, Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), National Accountability Bureau (NAB) as respondents in the case.

The petition requests the memorandum dated August 20, 2018, be declared

as “illegal, without lawful authority, void ab-initio and of no legal effect in the interest of justice”. Additionally, it is also seeking the award of “any other relief deemed appropriate in the peculiar circumstances of the case”. The petition has been set for hearing by a two-member bench headed by Justice Ali Baqar Najafi on December 23 (Monday).

On December 7, Maryam had filed a petition in the LHC seeking the removal of her name from the ECL. The PML-N VP is currently on bail in the Chaudhry Sugar Mills (CSM) case, in which she is a suspect, but her name remains on the no-fly list. Her father, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, travelled to London last month after the government and courts granted him permission to fly abroad on medical grounds. Subsequently, the court

had directed the federal government’s review committee to decide Maryam Nawaz’s application for removal of her name from the ECL within seven days.

Former prime minister and PML-N supreme leader Nawaz Sharif, who was serving a prison sentence, left the country to receive medical treatment in London last month. Nawaz Sharif reportedly had an immune system disorder and other health problems.

His brother Shehbaz – who also traveled with Nawaz – signed a court document that said: “If at any stage, the federal government has credible information that Nawaz Sharif is living abroad despite his fitness to travel, a representative from Pakistan’s High Commission would have a right to meet with his physician(s) to verify or confirm about his health.”

Reference against Justice waqar not sent to sJC yet: law ministry bbC urdu to take sairbeen off air British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Urdu on Saturday announced that its popular radio broadcast of news and current affairs programme Sairbeen would be wrapped up by the year’s end. The decision to end the media outlet’s shortwave broadcasts was taken “to better serve the BBC’s listeners, readers and viewers in Pakistan and to achieve the objective of proper utilisation of our resources”, a BBC Urdu report said. The media outlet added that it would now prioritise digital media platforms and television, however, although broadcasts of Sairbeen on shortwave and mediumwave radio will end, those of Global Newsbeat and FM bulletins, which the BBC broadcasts in partnership with its FM partners, will continue. An effort will also continue to “cast BBC Urdu’s radio content according to the interests of the youth”, the report added. Sairbeen will continue to be aired via BBC Urdu television during weekdays and the programme will also be available on the outlet’s digital platforms.

The report further adds that a BBC public survey in 2018 revealed that the number of listeners of radio on shortwave had vastly fallen in Pakistan due to rapidly increasing TV audiences and widespread access to digital media. BBC Urdu head Mehwish Hussain has expressed that she would like to tap into the young generation as well as women with news as much as possible. “We will continue to provide news on the subjects for which our listeners trust us and on which the local media is unable to report.

However, this news will no longer be broadcast on shortwave and mediumwave,” she said. NeWS deSK

Federal Ministry of Law on Saturday said that the reference against Justice Waqar Seth has not been sent to the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) as yet whereas research and investigation related to the reference is underway. A spokesperson for the ministry said that the reference filed earlier in the day was by an independent individual or firm who is/are unrelated to the government of Pakistan.

“The Attorney General of Pakistan (AGP), Anwar Mansoor Khan, who had left on a short trip to Turkey has returned to the country today and would spearhead the process of skimming through data and resources before the government files a reference against Justice Waqar Seth,” the spokesperson added. The special court convicted Musharraf of high treason and sentenced him to death on Tuesday in an unprecedented trial delayed by the absence of the septuagenarian former military ruler, who has been out of the country since 2016.

“The government will not allow any situation, which creates instability in the country or a clash between institutions, to arise,” said the prime minister while addressing a meeting of the Media Strategy Committee on Thursday. It was decided in the meeting that the government would file a reference in the SJC against Special Court President Justice Waqar Ahmed Seth. The legal team informed the meeting that the sentence – hanging him (Musharraf) on D-Chowk – penned by Justice Seth crossed all legal boundaries.

The legal team termed “unconstitutional”, “illegal” and “inhumane” the detailed verdict of the special court. Justice Seth has directed for the “corpse” of the former president to be “dragged to D-Chowk” and “hanged for 3 days” in paragraph 66 of the verdict. Law Minister Farogh Naseem while addressing a press conference here alongside PM’s Special Assistant on Information Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan and PM’s aide on accountabil-

unidentified men hold advocate akram sheikh, family hostage in islamabad Unidentified assailants broke into the house of Advocate Akram Sheikh on Friday night and held him and his family hostage at gunpoint for at least before escaping with money and valuables, Islamabad police said. According to police, the incident took place in the city’s Shehzad Twon area from where the robbers

ity, Shahzad Akbar earlier in the week had said, “There is no room in Article 6 of the Constitution; in the High Treason Act, 1973; in the Criminal Amendment Act of the special court, 1976; for a judge to have the authority to present such an observation”.

“With due respect, this is an unprecedented, despicable and completely wrong observation by the judge.” The law minister then spoke of Article 209 under which the attorney general had announced his intention for a trial against the judge. He said that Article 209 comes into effect when there is misconduct due to “incompetence” or when there is “questionable mental capacity”.

“Our request is, because he has proven himself to be mentally unfit and incompetent, he must immediately be prevented from working. We request the Supreme Court judges to restrain him from any administrative or judicial work,” said the law minister. NeWS deSK

managed to escape with Rs0.5-0.6 million in cash, mobile phones and other valuables.

Police spokesperson said that an investigation had been launched and efforts were underway to identify suspects with the help of Close Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras installed near the house.

“Senior Superintendent Police (Rural) Malik Naeem Iqbal will lead the investigations into the robbery,” the police spokesperson told the media, adding that, “the robbers will be arrested as soon as possible”.

Earlier this week, advocate Shiekh had said that unidentified men had been harassing the judges of the superior courts in the wake of a special court’s ruling in the high treason against former president General (r) Pervez Musharraf. Sheikh was the chief prosecutor in the high treason case against the former president until July 2018. NeWS deSK

Taking a swipe at Saudi Arabia, Malaysian FM bats for Pakistan ISLAMABAD mIaN abrar

The Malaysian government on Saturday clarified that despite its absence from the Kuala Lumpur Summit 2019, Pakistan still would be a partner in joint efforts to establishing a television channel to help smash the Islamophobic narrative along with Malaysia and Turkey.

“We are also looking into establishing a TV channel which would be a collaborative effort between Turkey, Qatar and Malaysia,” an official handle of KL Summit 2019 uploaded a tweet, quoting Malaysian Foreign Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah as telling at the Summit.

However, the officials immediately corrected the statement, clarifying that instead of Qatar, Pakistan would be partnering with Malaysia and Turkey for the collaborative effort.

Meanwhile, without naming Saudi Arabia, Malaysian Foreign Minister Dato’ Saifuddin Abdullah took a swipe at Muslim countries ‘who go to war with other Muslim nations’ on behalf of superpower countries. “When Malaysia wants to organise a summit, some people accuse us of trying to divide the Ummah. Meanwhile, the same people think it’s okay to bomb other countries,” the Malaysian foreign minister added.

He said the Muslim countries must seek to coexist peacefully

with each other, rather than engage in conflict with their Muslim brothers.

Saifuddin Abdullah went on to say that among the ummah, “We have countries who are involved in shadow wars on behalf of superpowers, or creating proxy wars on behalf of others”.

“We have countries among the Muslim ummah who bully smaller countries, who unilaterally impose sanctions on other countries, or attack or bomb Muslim countries.

When Malaysia wanted to organise the KL Summit, some people accused us of dividing the Muslim ummah, but it is ‘okay’ to bomb or impose sanctions on other countries,” he said in a special session at the Kuala Lumpur Summit.

He added that there has been a growing trend of supremacist and racial ideologies the world over. “We are faced with issues like racism, politics of race, and the rise of supremacist ideologies – be it from the West or the East.

“Muslims are divided and polarised due to different mazhab (sects), and we also have a polarisation between Muslims and non-Muslims,” he said. He added that racism and politics of race must end and that countries should move to the centre, rather than moving further right, of the political spectrum. Governments, he added, must not only work with other governments on this end but also with civil society organisations, international bodies and corporate sectors.

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four, including pakistani national, die of asphyxiation in greece ISLAMABAD: The Foreign Office on Saturday confirmed a Pakistani national is among the four people who died of asphyxiation in Greece on Dec 19.

“According to available information four persons had died on 19 December 2019 due to gas suffocation in a factory in Kalivia, a place 50 kilometres from Athens,” read a statement issued by Spokesperson Ayesha Farooqui in response to media reports about the death of Pakistanis in Greece. According to local authorities, thus far one deceased has been identified as a Pakistani national as identification of the remaining three is in process. The spokesperson said the Pakistan Embassy in Athens is in close contact with local authorities and will provide necessary assistance and facilitation to bereaved families. INP

bilawal flays govt in peshawar rally PESHAWAR: Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari Saturday lashed out at the Pakistan TehreekInsaf (PTI) government, saying the nation didn’t achieve independence to serve a “puppet”. Addressing a workers’ convention in Peshawar, the PPP chief asked what kind of democracy is this in which people cannot even choose their representatives through transparent elections. He announced to observe the death anniversary of Benazir Bhutto at Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh on December 27. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was hanged in Rawalpindi and Benazir was martyred at the Liaquat Bagh, he said. The PPP chairman stressed that both leaders embraced martyrdom for the rule of the public, and the third generation of Pakistan Peoples Party is spreading the same message. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari told that PPP workers’ conventions have been scheduled in Karachi, Quetta, Lahore, and other cities as well. Staff rePort

opp failed to dislodge pti govt: sh rasheed ISLAMABAD: Minister for Railways Sheikh Rasheed on Saturday said that the opposition to the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-eInsaf (PTI) has failed to make the government dysfunctional. Talking to media persons he said that Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Shehbaz Sharif has been “playing on both sides of the wicket” and the Sharif brothers would celebrate the New Year’s Eve in London.

“ML-1 plays a role of backbone for CPEC [China-Pakistan Economic Corridor] […]

[Pakistan Peoples Party’s] Bilawal is also included in Asif Zardari’s corruption,” he said. Rasheed expressed serious concerns over the bail granted to PPP’s Khursheed Shah by an accountability court in Sukkur.

“126 [bank] accounts owned by Khursheed Shah have been unearthed and he has been given bail,” he said, adding Pakistan People’s Party wanted to transfer all of its cases to Sindh. “Unfortunately, whoever had come [to power] in this country, he accumulated assets,” he added. INP

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IMRAN Khan and his government are having a hard to get the act together, but Shah Mahmood Qureshi won’t have any of it. The foreign minister was seen sleeping at the oath-taking ceremony of the new chief justice, free of all worries that plague his boss.

May be his sleep has something to do with the dreams of becoming the new chief executive. May be all it takes to become the PM is forty winks. * * * * * * * * * ExCISE department’s quest to rid the country of bootlegging at the time of festivities has made many a people unhappy. And now that cold has started to bite Pakistanis, their desire for booze has rather taken a desperate turn.

May be Excise needs to stop acting like a scrooge and let people celebrate Christmas and New Year with their spirits high.

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Sunday, 22 December, 2019

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Lahoris suffering from Low gas pressure LAHORE

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AHORE is suffering from an acute gas shortage as the demand for the commodity has increased due to the drop in mercury levels.

People from various localities across the provincial capital have complained about very low pressure or suspension of gas supply. In neighbourhoods like Ichhra, Township, Rehmanpura, Wahdat Colony, Township, Chungi Amer Sidhu, residents poured out on the streets over the suspension of gas supply and shouted slogans against the government and gas supply companies.

Many also pointed out that people in their own neighbourhoods had installed compressors or pumps on gas lines to increase pressure.

The Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited

EPA seals two smokeemitting factories LAHORE APP

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sealed two smokeemitting factories in Quaid-eAzam Industrial area. Action was taken when Punjab Safe Cities Authority (PSCA) identified two hazardous smoke-emitting factories through its cameras and reported it to the EPA. The Judicial Environment Commission had ordered the PSCA to help the EPA control smog situation in the metropolitan. Asmi dyeing and Silko dyeing factories were sealed by the agency officials.

The EPA and CTP are also taking action against the smoke-emitting vehicles in the city.

PML-N SPOKESPERSON SLAMS GOVT OVER SHORTAGE DESPITE RISING GAS TARIFF BY 214 PERCENT (SNGPL) has been advertising against illegal use of compressors and pumps but has failed to effectively control their use.

An SNGPL official has claimed that consumers were only facing low gas pressure and that there were no total blackouts in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

He also added that to address rising number of complaints the company has decided to curtail supply for bulk containers, like industry and

CNG sector. Speaking on the disruption of gas supply, Pakistan Muslim League N (PML-N) Information Secretary Marriyam Aurengzeb strongly criticised the government’s handling of the issue. In a statement Marriyum said the excruciating outages even after a 214 percent increase in gas tariffs is a proof of the government’s sheer incompetence and inability.

“The 12 hour disruption for domestic and industrial uses shows that this regime is incapacitated to manage such matters. The domestic user, industry and small businesses are all a victim of Imran Khan’s incompetence,” she said “How can a government be trusted to run an entire country when it cannot even ensure running of tandoors,” she questioned.

“Imran Khan must be ecstatic over fulfilling his claim from the container of shutting down the country and its industry”, she added.

Ibadat Trust hosts annual Christmas pageant LAHORE

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FIA to probe doctor who ‘provoked’ PIC clash Lahore: A district and sessions court in Lahore on Saturday ordered the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to conduct an inquiry against Grand Health Alliance (GHA) Punjab Chairman Dr Irfan for allegedly provoking a clash between doctors and lawyers. Additional session judge Amjad Ali Shah presided over a petition filed by advocate Haider Zaman for registration of a case against Dr Irfan. The petitioner contended that the lawyers were humiliated by Dr Irfan of the PIC, and it was a well thought out and organised conspiracy to instigate lawyers. It pleaded with the court to prosecute Dr Irfan under the Cyber Crime Act. The order, which came on an application filed against Dr Irfan, also directed the FIA to expedite the proceedings of the inquiry, and subsequently lodge a case against the doctor. Meanwhile, the FIA prosecutor stated that the inquiry has been initiated upon approval of the application in which FIA’s director, FIA Cyber Crime Circle’s Additional Director and Dr Irfan were made respondents. He said that the FIA Cyber Crime Circle had been proceeding with other inquiries as well. It is pertinent to mention here that the core reason of the clash between doctors and lawyers at the PIC was Dr Irfan’s speech, which was viral on social media. In the video, Dr Irfan is seen narrating an encounter with some lawyers in front of a group of medical and paramedical staff of PIC. According to Dr Irfan, a group of lawyers had gone to the inspector general of police and told him to charge “two doctors” under Section 7 of ATA. He narrated that the IG had refused while the lawyers had urged him to press charges, saying “they could save face” that way. INP

No appointment without selection board approval: ASSMS BoG

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Idara Ibadat, a Christian non-profit organisation working to promote literacy in young adults, organised its annual Christmas pageant at the Saint Thomas Center here on Saturday.

Addressing the ceremony, National Council of Churches in Pakistan (NCCP) President Bishop Dr Azad Marshall, who is also the chairman of the Ibadat Trust, said that the organisation had imparted education to over 0.3 million poor students across Pakistan since its inception 30 years ago.

He said that the Christmas program was organised annually to acknowledge the hard work put in by the Ibadat students and teachers.

"Our vision is to impart education to the poorest of the poor sections of society to make them literate and useful citizens of society," he said.

The chief guest, Punjab Minister for Human Rights Ijaz Alam Augustine, and guests of honour Senator Kamran Michael, Presbyterian Church of Pakistan Moderator Reverend Dr Majeed Abel and

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Supreme Court Advocate Saiful Mulook lauded the services of the Ibadat Trust, especially its Chairman Bishop Dr Azad, for their services to promote education in the poor.

The guests also awarded medals and commemorative shields to distinguished students.

Later, the Ibadat students presented a beautiful pageant honouring the birth of Jesus Christ. Over 50 students shared the miracle of Christmas with a packed house amid several rounds of applause.

Lahore: A meeting of Board of Governors of Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences (ASSMS) was held here at the Government College University Lahore under the chairmanship of Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Asghar Zaidi. The board issued stern directions that appointments and extensions in contracts should only be made through selection boards as per law to ensure merit and transparency. The members of Board also showed concerns over short nature of contracts and exuberant salaries to faculty members in the past.

Vice Chancellor Prof Zaidi said that ASSMS continues to be the pride of GCU and immediate measures would be taken to further strengthen its administration and faculty. He said that he has visited the school and met its students and would continue to do so. He said that an advertisement for the three posts of professors for ASSMS are currently under preparation and the professors appointed through this advertisement via the selection board would be initially offered a contract period of three years instead of just one year. StAff RePoRt

Buzdar lays foundation stone of 13 projects worth Rs2.94b LAHORE INP

Punjab Chief Minister Sardar Usman Buzdar on Saturday inaugurated and laid foundation stone of 13 projects worth Rs.2.94 billion in different areas of Punjab.

The Chief Minister laid the foundation stone of Govt. Technical Training Institute in Taunsa which will be constructed on 100 kanals at a cost of Rs30 crore. He also laid a foundation stone of project of beautification of Taunsa which will complete at a sum of Rs62.74 crore. Chief Minister inaugurated 23-kilometer long road from Kharar Buzdar to Hangloon constructed at a cost Rs26 crore.

He also inaugurated 5 internal roads of Taunsa which have been constructed at a sum of Rs11.62 crore. He laid foundation stones of up-gradation projects of Govt. Girls Higher Secondary School Taunsa and Govt. Boys High School Taunsa. More than Rs9 crore and Rs4.37 crore will be spent on the up-gradation respectively.

Usman Buzdar also inaugurated projects of three roads of tribal area which have been completed at a sum of Rs8.26 crore. He laid foundation stone of the project of constructing

65-kilometer long three roads for the trial area. These three projects of constructing roads in tribal area will cost more than Rs1 billion.

He said that Rs33.75 crore will be spent in the construction of 25-kilometer long road from Baharti to Fazla Kach via Phagla. Similarly, Rs42.40 crore will be spent for constructing 32kilometer long road from Baharti to Hangloon Kach via Soradaat and Rs.26.80 crore will be spent in constructing 18-kilometer long road from Agha Masjid to Bailbatar.

The chief minister also laid foundation stone of the project of providing missing facilities in Govt. Degree College for Boys Taunsa at a cost of Rs11.5 crore. He also inaugurated passport office for Taunsa. Chief Minister also laid foundation stone of the project Tameer Payal Foundation Bridge nullah Sanghar Baharti which will cost Rs27.88 crore. He said that present government is including backward areas in its journey of development.

Funds of Southern Punjab were spent on different projects and cities during previous tenures. He said that we have imposed ban of transferring Southern Punjab’s funds to another project or city. Those backward areas which are not developed yet will be

brought in the mainstream, he added.

He said that effects of development will be reached at grass root level.

Usman Buzdar while addressing in Saraiki language said that from Kashmoor to DG Khan Indus Highway will be made dual carriage. The chief minister said that he will go every district and tehsil for solving the problems.

Public service is his duty and it gives immense pleasure to him. Agenda of public service will remain continue.

Scope of motorbike ambulance service will be expanded gradually.

The Chief Minister while announcing for setting up Institute of Taunsa at cost of Rs2 billion said that classes of engineering, IT and social sciences will be held in this institute.

Technical training institutes and technical universities will be set up for eradication of unemployment. Work in Mir Chakar Khan Rind University will soon be started. Three special economic zones were set up in Punjab so far since inception of Pakistan but PTI government has started working on establishing ten special economic zones within one year. Country’s largest industrial estate FIEDMC is being set up on 7.5 thousand acre of land. One hundred billion rupees have so far been invested in FIEDMC.

Dr Yasmin launches largest-ever health programme for school children LAHORE APP

Punjab Health Minister Dr Yasmin Rashid has launched the largest-ever programme for health of school children under the Chief Minister's School Health and Nutrition Programme.

A ceremony in this regard was held at the Government Higher Secondary School Jeevan Gondal, Sargodha on Saturday.

Under the Programme, in the first

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phase, health and nutrition status of more than 50,000 public school children across the province would be examined. Children requiring further screening would be provided diagnosis and treatment through the Mobile Health Units and government facilities.

Dr Yasmin Rashid said that the programme had been launched under special directives by Prime Minister Imran Khan and Chief Minister Punjab Sardar Usman Buzdar.

The ceremony was attended by

Provincial Minister for School Education Murad Raas, Provincial Minister for Labour, Ansar Majeed Khan, Secretary Primary Secondary Healthcare Captain (retd) Usman Younas, MPA Iftikhar Hussain and Deputy Commissioner Sargodha.

Dr Yasmin said that this year, the project was piloted at the Central Model School in Lahore. It was later expanded to 11 schools of Lahore and it had now been scaled up to the entire province.

CMYK Sunday, 22 December, 2019

NEWS

UN mooT adopTs pakisTaN’s resoLUTioN To sTreNgTheN aNTi-corrUpTioN cooperaTioN ISLAMABAD

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app

HE Eighth Session of the Conference of the States Parties (CoSP) of the UN Convention against Corruption has unanimously adopted a Pakistan-sponsored resolution on strengthening the role of parliaments in preventing and combating corruption.

The conference was held in Abu Dhabi, UAE from December 16-20, 2019, said a press release received here Saturday.

Pakistan’s initiative is in line with the vision of Prime Minister Imran Khan to eliminate corruption and his

focus on the issue in his address to the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2019.

The unanimous adoption of the resolution is manifestation of the trust reposed by the international community in Pakistan’s leading role in the fight against corruption, the Foreign Office spokesperson said in a statement.

The resolution, inter alia, calls upon States parties to enhance exchanges among parliamentary institutions for promoting good practices to strengthen the role of parliaments in their respective countries in enacting legislation and ensuring effective oversight.

In this regard, the United Nations

Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has been mandated to organize a thematic dialogue in collaboration with the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) on strengthening the role of parliaments in combating corruption in all its forms.

The UNODC will also develop a compendium of good practices on the role of parliaments in combating corruption.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Pakistan Mission in Vienna steered the process of consultations to achieve consensus on the Resolution. A wide range of developing and developed countries from all geographical regions co-sponsored the resolution, including Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, China, In-

donesia, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore and Switzerland.

Pakistan’s initiative has brought focus of the international community on the important role parliaments can play in the campaign against corruption,and would be useful in pushing for concerted action worldwide.

The United Nations Convention Against Corruption is the only universal legal framework at the international level to prevent and combat corruption in all its forms. There are 186 States Parties to the Convention, including Pakistan, which joined the Convention in 2007.

Indian general wants ISPR-like media wing India’s cybersecurity chief on Saturday called for a need for a unified public relations command for all wings of the Indian armed forces purportedly to gain parity in the narrative warfare with Pakistan, which he said, has “got its act together” through it ISPR, reported India Today.

Indian National Cyber Security Coordinator Lieutenant General (r) Rajesh Pant said the three wings of the armed forces have their own public relations officers and “are going in different ways”. “When are we going to have our own equivalent of the ISPR because the (Indian armed forces) services have their own PRs and they are going in different ways. Somebody at the national level now has to look at the narrative warfare and how to implement it in various domains,” he said. In regard to Pakistan’s ISPR, General Pant said the neighbouring country got its act together in narrative warfare

through the agency.

“What we are finding from the other side – from the western border – that since the time they have cre-

ated the ISPR, they have got their act together,” he said here at a seminar on the topic of ‘Securing the Future Battlespace: Information and Space Warfare’. Lt Gen (r) Rajesh Pant added, “When they (ISPR) conduct narrative warfare, let’s say in the case of Kashmir, the message they send to Europe is that human rights are being infringed.” While when they engage with Islamic nations they tell them that Islam is under threat, noted Pant, adding, “What they told Southeast Asia is that there is a regional instability,” said Pant. “So, they seem to have got their act together,” he concluded. It is important to clarify what the three services of Indian armed forces imply and mean by ‘information warfare’, he said. “They should come out with the definition because now they are using the terms – as you are aware – like ‘narrative warfare’,” he added. NewS DeSk

Govt committed to creating enabling environment for women: Mazari ISLAMABAD app

The Government was committed to creating an enabling environment for female participation in the workforce, Minister for Human Rights Dr. Shireen Mazar said in her message on National Working Women Day. “It is a matter of great pleasure for me that our nation joins hands to celebrate National Working Women’s Day on December 22, as symbol of recognition of the valuable contributions of female workers and leaders in various sectors in the country,” she added. She further said we believe that the protection of women working

in various professions is necessary for sustainable development. In this regard, a number of legislative and administrative measures have been taken by the federal and provincial governments to provide equal opportunities to women so that they can excel in all spheres of life.

She also highlighted that as a result of concerted efforts of the government, more than 200 women parliamentarians are playing significant role in policy making in Pakistan. A significant proportion of women are also working in top positions in the public as well as private sector. A 10 percent quota has been allocated for women in public sector jobs at federal level. The Federal

Ombudsman Secretariat for the Protection Against Harassment of Women at Workplace at the federal and provincial level is also working to ensure a safe environment for working women in the country, she added. She also said that the Benazir Income Support Programme also provides a unique forum for female empowerment by providing cash transfers to vulnerable women so that they can have more agency in terms of decision making in their lives.

Women empowerment policies, packages, helplines, working women hostels, vocational centers and day care centers are also important initiatives to increase the ratio of working women in the work force.

Pakistan in, India out of US religious freedom blacklist WASHINGTON ageNcieS

The US on Friday issued its 2019 annual blacklist for religious freedom violations, keeping Pakistan in it for a second year but still ignoring India, despite its targeting of Muslims over cow slaughter allegations, occupied Kashmir lockdown and the latest citizenship act on communal lines. Nine countries, including Pakistan, remained on the State Department’s annual list of “countries of particular concern” for having engaged in or tolerated “systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of religious freedom”. Sudan is the only nation removed from the blacklist.

Pakistan was designated in 2018 after years of US hesitation over concerns on the treatment of minorities. According to the announcement made by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Pakistan’s name featured in the list of countries, which are subject to sanctions over religious liberty. “On December 18, 2019, the Department of State re-designated Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North

Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan as Countries of Particular Concern,” Pompeo said in the statement. “The Department renewed the placement of Comoros, Russia, and Uzbekistan on a Special Watch List (SWL) for governments that have engaged in or tolerated “severe violations of religious freedom, and added Cuba, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and Sudan to this list,” he added.

“Finally, we designated al-Nusra Front, al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Qa’ida, al-Shabab, Boko Haram, the Houthis, ISIS, ISIS-Khorasan, and the Taliban as Entities of Particular Concern,” Pompeo said in the statement.

These designations under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 for “having engaged in or tolerated systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of religious freedom” underscored the US commitment to protect those who seek to exercise their freedom of religion or belief, Pompeo said. The statement said that persecution and discrimination on the basis of religion or belief existed in

every region of the world. “The United States continues to work diligently to promote religious freedom and combat abuses,” it said.

Rights groups and US officials accuse China of incarcerating at least one million Uighurs and other Muslims, and US ally Saudi Arabia is in the list for following a rigid school of religious thought. Sudan as well as Uzbekistan, which was removed from the blacklist in 2018, were kept on the watchlist. However, the recent developments in India, which see a phenomenal rise in attacks on Muslims since the Hindu nationalist government of prime minister Narendra Modi came to power, is not included in the blacklist. During the five years of Modi’s first term, hate crime against Muslims soared. According to the Indian media 90% of religious hate crimes in the last decade have occurred since Modi’s Bhartya Janata Party (BJP) came to power. Soon after Modi was re-elected as the prime minister, he abrogated the special status of Kashmir and imposed a harsh lockdown, which still continued.

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ThinkFest in Lahore to feature Nobel laureates LAHORE Staff RepoRt

The Managing Committee of ThinkFest Pakistan has announced the fourth edition of the Lahore ThinkFest from January 11-12, 2020. Unveiling the plans for ThinkFest. the chairman of ThinkFest Pakistan, Najam Sethi, noted that just within a few years ThinkFest had become the premier thought festival in Pakistan. ‘The country is in dire need of openness and dialogue, and by bringing the world’s intellectual leaders to the country, the ThinkFest is creating a lasting bridge for thought and action,’ Sethi stated. Unveiling two of the keynotes at the upcoming event, Dr Yaqoob Khan Bangash, founder of ThinkFest, said: ‘As with earlier years, our keynotes are world leaders in their fields, and everyone in Pakistan should come to listen and engage with them.’ Keeping ThinkFest’s tradition of bringing Nobel laureates to Pakistan, the Lahore edition in January will feature the acclaimed Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Sir Venki Ramakrishnan. Sir Venki won the Nobel in 2009 for helping explain the genome and is also currently the president of the Royal Society, the premier science organisation, in the United Kingdom. Another keynote is Sir Mark Lyall Grant, who was once the British High Commissioner to Pakistan.

Later, Sir Mark became the UK’s Ambassador to the United Nations and then the National Security Advisor to the UK Government. ‘Sir Mark knows Pakistan like none other and has also been the world’s foremost diplomats. His insight and depth of knowledge about how the world works are incomparable,’ exclaimed Dr Bangash while announcing his participation in the event. In 2020, ThinkFest Lahore will bring over a hundred speakers from across the world to Lahore for two days of creative thought and discussion.

Sunday, 22 December, 2019

06 WORLD VIEW

IndIa’s govt Is goIng to war agaInst Its own people WHAT THE IMF PROPOSES IS WHAT THE BJP GOVERNMENT WANTS TO DO—TO PUSH A MUCH DEEPER AUSTERITY AGENDA IN INDIA. THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT THE STUDENTS AND WORKERS, THE FARMERS AND THE YOUTH HAVE ARGUED AGAINST IN PROTEST UPON PROTEST Independent MedIa InstItute

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VIJAY PRASHAD

n December 13, the United nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law.

This “fundamentally discriminatory” Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 would expedite citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighboring countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians.

It does not name Muslims, despite the fact that there have been several important cases of Muslims being persecuted in Pakistan (the Ahmadis), in Afghanistan (the Hazaras), and in Myanmar (the Rohingyas). The Un said that not only does this law violate India’s obligations to conventions, treaties, and compacts that it has signed at the global level, but also that it is in violation of its own Constitution.

India’s ruling party—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—led by Prime Minister narendra Modi put this bill before both the lower and upper houses of India’s parliament. Apart from the Left and some regional parties, opposition in the lower house (the Lok Sabha) was weak; in the upper house (the Rajya Sabha), the bill passed by a slim margin—125 votes to 105 votes.

Protests against the Citizenship Act are now ongoing in every part of India, with a cross-section of society outraged by the religious implications of this law.

There are 200 million Muslim citizens of India—almost 15 percent of the population; this bill sends a clear message that they should see themselves as secondclass citizens. There is no other interpretation of the BJP’s agenda here.

The BJP government was particularly ruthless against protests at two major universities—Jamia Millia Islamia (new

Delhi) and Aligarh Muslim University (Aligarh), both historically Muslim universities. The police have been extraordinarily violent against student protests in the past several months, but this was at another level. At Jamia, the police beat unarmed students, chased them into their dormitories and continued to beat them, and fired tear gas into the library. There is video evidence of policemen burning buses, assaulting journalists, and creating the conditions of a full-scale police-driven riot; in Aligarh, there is video evidence of the police breaking student motorcycles.

Brinda Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who went to Jamia during the attack, said, “The police action is unacceptable.” Jamia, she said, must be “freed of police presence and action be taken against those responsible.” The Delhi Police has announced that it “will investigate” the violence, although Deputy Commissioner of Police M.S. Randhawa seemed to suggest that all the violence came from the students, none from the police. Senior advocate Indira Jaising appeared before the Supreme Court on December 16 to urge the bench—headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde—to take up the case since the violence “is a very serious human rights violation all over the country.”

As if on cue, the BJP government hastily shut down internet access in India’s northeast, and in parts of the country where the protests have been most virulent. Last year, India led all other countries in internet shutdowns. Overall, 67 percent of all shutdowns of the internet took place in India; this year, already, 63 percent of all shutdowns have been in India. Internet in Indian held Kashmir has now been off for 136 days (between August 4 and December 17); there is no sign that it will be restored. Indeed, the suffocation of Held Kashmir continues unabated. The Indian held Kashmir Chamber of Commerce says that Kashmiri businesses have lost over $1.4 billion in this period.

Several state governments have said that they would not fulfill the provisions of the new Citizenship Act, since they

argue that it is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of India will soon discuss this bill. In Kerala, the Left Democratic Front’s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said, “We are accountable only to the ideals of the Constitution of India, not to the fundamentalist ideology of the RSSBJP.” (The RSS refers to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the fascist movement that is behind the BJP.) The Left parties have called for demonstrations across the country against the Citizenship Act. AUSTERITY: International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Economist Gita Gopinath is in India this week. She said that the slowdown of the Indian economy has surprised many, “including us here at the IMF.” India’s Gross Domestic Product growth has slowed for the sixth consecutive quarter. All the noises made by the BJP government about “Make In India” are silenced by the slump in manufacturing and the low domestic consumption. not surprisingly, the IMF urges the Modi government to push ahead with its “structural reforms,” which include what is so euphemistically called “labor… market reforms” and “fiscal consolidation.” The former—labor market reform—means that the government should erase protections for workers, and regulations of businesses; the latter—fiscal consolidation—means that the government must cut spending to lower public debt levels. This means less earning power for the majority of the population, and lower government spending to create social programs for the public.

What the IMF proposes is what the BJP government wants to do—to push a much deeper austerity agenda in India.

This is precisely what the students and workers, the farmers and the youth have argued against in protest upon protest.

The BJP government pushed for a 150 percent rise in hostel fees for the flagship university in Delhi, Jawaharlal nehru University (JnU). This astronomical increase would force at least half the postgraduate students to leave their studies. A

#FeesMustFall protest dynamic opened up across the country in solidarity with JnU, it being clear to the students that what happens at JnU will spread outward. The police violence against unarmed students was shocking. It was equally outrageous that the intelligence services visited the home in Sopat, Indian held Kashmir, of a former student leader—Aejaz Ahmad Rather—and said to his family chillingly, “A bullet never asks for an address.”

Farmer, peasant, and trade union organizations have been consistently on the march against the government’s various economic policies. In the past five months, the price of onions—a good indicator of food inflation—spiked by 253 percent. Rather than fix the endemic internal problems in the domestic onion market, a demand of the farmer and peasant organizations, the BJP government has loosened rules for the import of onions, a demand of the big traders. BJP policy is not made to benefit the working class and peasantry. It is made on behalf of the big businesses. It is almost as if the BJP-IMF slogan is “Save the Billionaires,” or “Billionaires Bachao,” as Srujana Bodapati, the coordinator of the Delhi office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, writes. Little wonder that the farmer, peasant, and trade union federations have announced a

major general strike for January 8, 2020.

It is expected that hundreds of millions of workers and peasants will be on the streets on that day. Their charter of demands is a direct assault on the BJP-IMF austerity policies.

THE FIRST BULLETS: The temperature in India is very high. The BJP government feels that it has a mandate to push through a hard-right agenda, both in economic and social policy. It has received backing for this from the IMF (in terms of labor market reform and bank reform) and from its hard-right partners across the world (in terms of its citizenship and anti-immigration policies).

But the government faces stiff resistance that seems unwilling to abate. As night fell over Jamia, and the fires burned out, Chandrasekhar Azad, the leader of the Bhim Army—a social movement in nearby Uttar Pradesh—gave a powerful speech. He said that Muslims are an integral part of India, and that if the State fires on Muslim students, “we will take the first bullets.” This is the mood. It is something that the BJP and the RSS and the IMF need to consider.

Vijay Prashad’s most recent book is No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015).

I argued that Narendra Modi was India’s best hope for economic reform. Things have changed tIMe IAn BRemmeR

As the US gears up to test the limits of its democracy, India has been busy showing off the limitations of its own. Make no mistake: from a humanitarian perspective, what’s happening right now in India is tragic, particularly for the country’s roughly 200 million Muslims. But it’s also tragic for India’s future— both as a functioning and inclusive democracy, and as a modern and complex economy capable of delivering the kinds of services and opportunities its 1.4 billion citizens need.

For a TIME cover package ahead of India’s elections in May, I wrote a column arguing that Prime Minister narendra Modi represented the country’s best chance at much-needed economic reforms. That would have been true…so long as Modi kept focused on the economics, as he largely did throughout his first term from 2014-2019. During those years, Modi was able to radically simplify the country’s arcane tax system and institute a comprehensible goods and services tax (albeit one that still needs to be further simplified). By modernizing the country’s bankruptcy laws, Modi helped transform India into a serious destination for foreign investment. Significant infrastructure investment in roads, airports, public transportation and sanitation improved the lives of literally hundreds of millions of people in just the span of a few years. Modi was able to channel India’s gains from globalization into actionable policy; for the first time in generations, India had a leader who seemed to transcend the country’s sclerotic and corrupt politics to tangibly improve the lives of everyday Indians. Even his policies that didn’t pan out as expected—like pulling 86% of the country’s hard currency out of circulation in an ill-fated attempt to quash the country’s black market—still underscored

INDIA, AND MODI IN PARTICULAR, HAD A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY TO TAKE THE BOLD DECISIONS NEEDED TO REMAKE INDIA’S ECONOMY COMPETITIVE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY. THEY’RE NOW CLOSING THAT WINDOW, AND INDIA IS POISED TO FALL EVEN FURTHER that India was being led by a politician with both ambition and strategic vision.

The events of the last few months have irreparably tarnished that image. Of course, there have long been troubling undercurrents to Modi’s rise as a national political figure. His time as leader of the state of Gujarat displayed—at best—a striking indifference to violence targeting the region’s Muslims. (If you haven’t read the recent piece by Dexter Filkins in the new Yorker, I highly recommend it). His Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) party has long focused on Hindu nationalism as the foundation of their political movement (nearly 80 percent of the country is Hindu), but when Modi and his BJP stormed to national power in 2014—as much a result of their own brilliant campaigning as widespread disgust with the establishment figures of Indian politics—some held out hope that the responsibility of governing all of India would push Modi away from the Hindu nationalism that had animated his rise.

But then India’s economy began to slow, a product of the external global market environment, continued structural challenges on the domestic front and short-sighted government policies. Modi opted to turn to Hindu nationalism to bolster his poll numbers, a decision that helped him perform better than expected in national elections in spring 2019. And after securing re-election, Modi continued leaning his shoulder into Hindu nationalism, while neglecting issues like land reform or reducing trade barriers.

As that nationalism has taken a more prominent role in government policy, it has begun directly threaten-

ing the country’s constitutionally mandated secular democracy. (Secularism in India means the equal treatment of all religions by the state.)

In August, Modi’s decision to end the special status of Indian held Kashmir—the country’s lone majority Muslim state—and arrest regional leaders while shutting off the Internet (which recently became the longest internet shutdown in a democracy) grabbed international headlines. Then came the decision to implement a national Register of Citizens (nRC) in the state of Assam to identify any residents who arrived in India after Bangladesh’s civil war commenced in 1971. nearly 2 million people have lost their citizenship as a result of this new register; of them, 1.2 million were found to be Hindus, which helped prompt the BJP’s efforts to push forward this week’s passage of a law providing a fast-track lane to citizenship to immigrants from neighboring countries—as long as they are not Muslims. For the Muslims who lost citizenship thanks to the nRC, the government is building detention centers to house these newly stateless people. (While the BJP has insisted illegal Muslim immigrants will be deported, Bangladesh is unlikely to accept them.)

Modi seems to figure that once he solidifies his political hold on the country with his emphasis on Hindu nationalism, he will then be able to spur the Indian economy by striking one-on-one free trade deals with countries who don’t find his methods objectionable, the U.S. chief among them. And while a mini-trade deal with a U.S. president desperate for international wins headed into an election year is

possible, there’s little chance that a fully-formed free trade agreement (FTA) will be struck between the two sides given India’s well-established history of trade protectionism. Striking an FTA with Europe was always a long shot; even more so now given these recent developments. And for international investors who had been hoping for a stable investment environment, the waves of unrest caused by this nationalist turn make them even more wary of taking the plunge into India’s market.

While the economy was responsive to Modi’s moves, the Prime Minister was not so drawn to Hindu nationalism. now that this is no longer the case, he is falling back on identity politics to capture political momentum. The problem is that while this strategy has obvious dividends for him and his BJP party, it is dooming an Indian economy that is already falling behind China’s. Investors have longknown China is repressive, but still do business with it given its size, efficiency and predictability (much of that a result of its centralized system of governance). India has the size, but nowhere near the efficiency or predictability. For the last half decade, the hope was India’s move towards openness and inclusivity would provide some of that productivity and reliability. With recent anti-Muslim developments over the last few months, that’s a much less realistic bet. India, and Modi in particular, had a window of opportunity to take the bold decisions needed to remake India’s economy competitive for the 21st century. They’re now closing that window, and India is poised to fall even further.

Sunday, 22 December, 2019

iCC to Probe 'war Crimes' in Palestinian territories GAZA

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AGENCIES

HE International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor said Friday she wanted to open a full investigation into alleged war crimes in the Palestinian territories, sparking a furious reaction from Israel and condemnation from the United States.

The Palestinians welcomed the move by the ICC as a “long overdue step” following a nearly five-year preliminary probe by the prosecutor into the situation since the 2014 war in Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the decision made the Hague-based court, which Israel has refused to sign up to since its creation in 2002, a “political tool” against the Jewish state.

“I am satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation into the situation in Palestine,” ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in a statement. “In brief, I am satisfied that war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip,” she added, without specifying the perpetrators of the alleged crimes.

She said that before opening a full probe, she would ask the ICC to rule on the territory over which it has jurisdiction because of the “unique and highly contested legal and factual issues at-

taching to this situation.”

“Specifically, I have sought confirmation that the ‘territory’ over which the Court may exercise its jurisdiction, and which I may subject to investigation, comprises the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza.”

The prosecutor added however that she did not require any authorisation from judges to open a probe as there had been a referral from the Palestinians, who joined the court in 2015.

“We firmly oppose this and any other action that seeks to target Israel unfairly,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said of Washington’s top ally in the re-

gion. “We do not believe the Palestinians qualify as a sovereign state, and they, therefore, are not qualified to obtain full membership, or participate as a state in international organizations, entities, or conferences, including the ICC.” POLITICAL TOOL: The issue is highly sensitive, with former White House national security adviser John Bolton threatening last year to arrest ICC judges if they moved against Israel or the United States.

Both countries have refused to sign up to the court, which was set up in 2002 to be the only global tribunal trying the world’s worst crimes, war

FOREIGN NEWS 07

crimes and crimes against humanity.

Bensouda launched a preliminary probe in January 2015 into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel and the Palestinian territories, in the wake of the 2014 Gaza war. A full ICC investigation could possibly lead to charges against individuals.

States cannot be charged by the ICC. “Palestine welcomes this step as a long overdue step to move the process forward towards an investigation, after nearly five long and difficult years of preliminary examination,” the Palestinian statement said. Netanyahu, however, lashed out at what he called a “dark day for truth and justice”. “The ICC prosecutor’s decision has turned the International Criminal Court into a political tool to delegitimise the State of Israel,” he said.

The ICC’s preliminary investigation has looked at the 2014 war which left 2,251 dead on the Palestinian side, the majority civilians, and 74 on the Israeli side, most of them soldiers.

It has also looked at violence near the Israel-Gaza border in 2018. Earlier this month, the ICC prosecutor refused to press charges over a deadly 2010 Israeli raid on a flotilla bringing aid to Gaza, and urged that probe to be shut.

Nine Turkish citizens died in May 2010 when Israeli marines stormed the Mavi Marmara, among eight ships trying to break a naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.

One more died in hospital in 2014.

Rouhani concludes Japan visit, seeks support for Iran economy TEHRAN AGENCIES

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani wrapped up his two-day visit to Japan on Saturday as Tehran, under US sanctions pressure, sought economic support from Tokyo.

Rouhani’s trip to Japan, the first by an Iranian head of state in two decades, came after deadly protests over fuel price hikes in his country, where the economy has been hit by US sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

The Iranian leader on Saturday held a closed meeting at a Tokyo hotel with Japanese business leaders, during which he criticised those sanctions and expressed hope for strengthening long-standing ties with Japan, public broadcaster NHK said, quoting the Iranian foreign ministry.

The American sanctions were reimposed last year after President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the multinational Iran nuclear deal.

In an interview with NHK on Saturday, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi lashed out at the

sanctions as “unilateral, illegal”.

Rouhani, during a summit with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday, had called on Japan and other countries to help the Iranian economy.

“We welcome any plan that can increase trade, especially in the field of energy and increasing the exports and sales of oil,” he told Abe, according to Iranian state news agency IRNA. Ahead of that summit, Rouhani had condemned Washington for “unilaterally and irrationally” withdrawing from the nuclear deal, saying: “I hope Japan and other countries will make efforts to maintain this deal.”

As a key US ally that also maintains close diplomatic and economic ties with Iran, Abe has tried to build bridges between the two rivals.

“The two leaders agreed to maintain their close communications,” a Japanese government official said.

Abe travelled to Tehran in June to try to ease tensions between the United States and Iran in the Gulf.

Japan was formerly a major buyer of Iranian crude but stopped purchases to comply with US sanctions.

Five dead as storm strikes iberian Peninsula LISBON: A storm sweeping across Spain and Portugal has killed at least five people, damaged buildings, cut power lines and forced authorities to shut roads hit by flooding and fallen trees, officials said on Friday. Storm Elsa hit the Iberian Peninsula on Wednesday and increased in intensity on Thursday afternoon, packing high winds and heavy rain. Authorities said it was being tracked by a second storm, Fabien. On Thursday, one man died in Montijo, near Lisbon, after a tree fell on his truck, and a second man was killed in Castro Daire, northern Portugal, when his house collapsed, officials said. In northern Spain, one person died in a landslide in Asturias, a second was killed when a stone wall crumbled in Galicia and a third person was swept away by floodwaters in Castile and Leon, a spokeswoman for the acting government said. Spanish authorities said Elsa was likely to continue pummeling central and southern Spain and that Fabien would bring winds of up to 140 km/hour and waves as high as 9 metres (30 ft) in the north. In Portugal, civil protection commander Pedro Nunes forecast that weather conditions would worsen on Friday afternoon and through the night. AGENCIES

braC Founder Fazle Hasan abed dies aged 83 DHAKA: Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), one of the world’s largest NGOs, has died in Dhaka aged 83, the charity said. Abed passed away while undergoing treatment for a brain tumour, according to a BRAC statement released Friday. “We will honour his legacy with the same resilience, dignity and humility that he has instilled in us,” the statement said.

Abed trained as an accountant in London and quit his well-paid job with oil giant Shell when war broke out in Bangladesh in 1971. Using the proceeds of the sale of his London flat, he founded BRAC after the bloody battle for independence ended the following year. At first, BRAC helped millions of refugees who streamed back into the new country, and then it diversified into healthcare, micro-finance, agriculture and education. The NGO’s approach has been hailed as one factor behind the drop in the proportion of Bangladeshis living in extreme poverty from 80 per cent to around 40 per cent of the population. The approach proved so successful that BRAC, which has more than 100,000 local employees worldwide expanded into Africa — including southern Sudan — and has been lauded by world figures such as former US president Bill Clinton. AGENCIES

Russia, backed by China, casts 14th UN veto on Syria to block cross-border aid UNITED NATIONS AGENCIES

Russia, backed by China, on Friday cast its 14th U.N. Security Council veto since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011 to block cross-border aid deliveries from Turkey and Iraq to millions of Syrian civilians.

The resolution, drafted by Belgium, Kuwait and Germany, would have allowed cross-border humanitarian deliveries for a further 12 months from two points in Turkey and one in Iraq. But Syrian ally Russia only wanted to approve the two Turkish crossings for six months and had proposed its own draft text.

Russia and China vetoed the text while the remaining 13 members of the Security Council voted in favour. A resolution needs a minimum of nine votes in favour and no vetoes by Russia, China, the United States, Britain or France to pass. US Ambassador Kelly Craft told the council after the Russia and China vetoes that she was in a state of shock, saying the consequences “will be disastrous.” She

described Russia and China’s opposition as “reckless, irresponsible and cruel.”

The council then voted on the rival Russian draft resolution that would have approved the two Turkish crossing points for six months, but it failed with only five votes in favour, six against and four abstentions. “Who won today? Nobody.

Who lost? The Syrian people,” Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, told the council. He had argued that the humanitarian situation in Syria has improved dramatically and that the council had to recognize that change.

“Do not attempt to shift blame for this on us,” he said. Deputy UN aid chief Ursula Mueller had warned the council on Thursday that without the cross border operations “we would see an immediate end of aid supporting millions of civilians.”

“That would cause a rapid increase in hunger and disease, resulting in death, suffering and further displacement – including across borders – for a vulnerable population who have already suffered unspeakable tragedy as a result of almost

nine years of conflict,” Mueller said.

Since 2014 the United Nations and aid groups have crossed into Syria from Turkey, Iraq and Jordan at four places annually authorized by the Security Council. In a bid to compromise with Russia, the Jordan crossing was dropped by Belgium, Kuwait and Germany from their draft. The current authorization for the four border crossings in Turkey, Iraq and Jordan ends on Jan. 10, so the Security Council could still attempt to reach an agreement, though some diplomats acknowledged this could now be difficult.

In a December 16 report to the council, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the council to extend authorisation of the cross-border deliveries. “We very much hope a solution can be found in the days ahead,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Friday.

Russia has vetoed 14 council resolutions on Syria since a crackdown by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on pro-democracy protesters in 2011 led to civil war. Islamic State militants then used the chaos

to seize territory in Syria and Iraq. Indonesia’s UN ambassador, Dian Triansyah Djani, told the council on Thursday: “The world is watching. The international com-

munity is watching. But we are not here to just watch … we are here to help and take action … It is not about us. It is all about saving Syrian people on the ground.”

Sunday, 22 December, 2019

08 COMMENT

The Musharraf verdict

Training for the military The USA sends a positive signal

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He uSa’s resumption of Pakistan’s participation in its military education and Training Programme is not just a signal, but has intrinsic value. The suspension of this programme was considered one of the uSa’s most significant steps, because this is the programme through which Pakistani midcareer officers attend uS military training institutions. Since its suspension in 2018, along with other security aid programmes worth $2 billion, Pakistani officers have been unable to obtain training in the uSa. apart from its intrinsic value, in the re-opening of opportunities for the military leaders of the future, the resumption also signals an uS desire to re-engage with Pakistan. While the suspension was over the allegation that Pakistan was assisting the Taliban, whose insurgency was taking the lives of uS troops, the resumption can be seen as a uS recognition of the Pakistani role in facilitating both the original uS talks with the Taliban, and the recent resumption of those talks after President donald Trump suspended them. There is also the recent uS visit

by Prime minister imran Khan, and some of the credit should go to his successful meeting with President Trump, but a clearer signal was the visit of COaS Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa to the Pentagon, where he was accorded a very warm welcome.

However, while the Pakistani armed forces may be enthused by the reopening of opportunity that the resumption represents, the government would find itself better served if the various joint economic programmes and understandings were followed through. Pakistan has too much experience of being used by the uSa when it is needed, and then discarded, to deal with the resulting mess. That was its experience when it backed the uSa in afghanistan against the uSSR. The most binding ties are not those forged between the two militaries, but economic links, which have been limited to the uS commitment to send trade delegations in the coming year. Pakistan would also require uS support in the FaTF to be taken off its grey list. The uSa has so far focused on the military in reviving relations, even though the help it has sought has been essentially diplomatic. The government must ensure that the interest of the entire nation is kept paramount, not just one section of it.

Deadly riots India losing its secular credentials

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HeRe has been considerable and understandable outrage over india’s BJP government passing the Citizenship amendment act (Caa) that discriminates against muslims by providing amnesty to non-muslim illegal immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and afghanistan. This is in tandem with the BJP government’s plans to publish a nationwide registrar of citizens (NRC) to identify illegal immigrants that has already resulted in 1.9 million people being made stateless overnight in the north-eastern state of assam. mass detention camps are being built to house them, exemption from which would depend on the production of birth certificates and similar documents that date back decades and would be near impossible to possess given the informality of record keeping in rural india.

People have taken to the streets to protest against Prime minister Narendra modi’s state-sponsored persecution of indian muslims, who are the largest minority in the country making up 14.2 percent of the population. The protests have been nationwide and violent, so far resulting in over 10 deaths and several people injured. much of the backlash has originated on university campuses where indian law enforcement agencies have brutally retaliated, beating up protesters including females and using live rounds, causing the deaths reported so far. Opposition party mPs and progressive liberals of india have spoken out against the Caa and NRC but there is little they can achieve as long as the BJP is in power with a thumping majority.

This episode simply throws india’s secular credentials out the window. The RSS agenda of a Hindu-only india is progressing at a blistering pace with the BJP at the wheel.

The world’s largest democracy, which also happens to be a global economic and trading powerhouse, is degenerating into an autocratic intolerant state that actively thwarts peaceful protests and has started disrupting mobile phone services in its capital to recreate a situation similar to the one in indian Occupied Kashmir where there has been an information blackout for close to five months. india no longer enjoys the pedestal it put itself on and accuses other countries, primarily Pakistan, of violating the basic human rights of religious minorities. mr modi is reacting strongly to condemnations coming from muslim-majority states but he should notice how Western countries, that are non-muslim democracies, are also criticizing his actions.

Dedicated to the legacy of the late Hameed Nizami

Arif Nizami Editor Aziz-ud-Din Ahmad

Umar Aziz

Asher John

Joint Editor

Executive Editor

Deputy Editor

Lahore – Ph: 042-36300938, 042-36375965

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Not so palatable

aRif Nizami

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S it is, a special court holding former dictator, Gen (retd) Pervez musharraf guilty of high treason and sentencing him to death under article 6 of the Constitution was a bombshell. despite some having deep reservations on invoking capital punishment in this day and age, the historical verdict was generally lauded by democratic forces of the country.

However in the detailed judgment one of the members of the bench, mr Justice Waqar Seth, declaring that General musharraf is hanged dead or alive and his body is dragged to d-Chowk islamabad and displayed for three days, was an outrage.

This portion of the judgment has been widely condemned by lawyers as well as civil society.

The spokesman of the military, maj Gen asif Ghafoor, visibly emotional, termed the verdict’s language and import as being against religion and humanity. The military already had expressed deep reservations about the original verdict. in its view General musharraf, as former chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff committee and an ex-army chief, had served the army well for over 40 years and fought wars for the country.

Surely he was not a traitor.

The outrage, albeit understandable, was somewhat misplaced. Nobody, or even the special court, had accused the former dictator of being a foreign agent. The judges did not question his patriotism, but rather sentenced him for subverting the Constitution.

Notwithstanding the affront over the remarks of mr Justice Waqar Seth, the detailed judgment has far reaching and wide implications. it should be welcomed in the sense that for the first time in the country’s history– where virtually half the time of its existence have been spent under martial laws or quasi-military regimes– an article of the Constitution has been invoked to punish a coupster, albeit in absentia. musharraf’s predecessors, General ayub Khan, General Yayha Khan and General ziaul Haq literally got away with murder by trampling the Constitution under their boots. The former dictator, suffering from a life-threatening ailment while in self-imposed exile in dubai, is not expected to return to the country to defend himself.

according to musharraf, the verdict is part of a deliberate vendetta against him. This is a bit of a stretch as none of the three members of the special court have any personal bone to pick with him.

The ruling of the special court deterring future usurpers is more symbolic in nature. it is quite puzzling why the present military leadership is so upset about it. The present army Chief, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, not only by his pronouncements but also by his actions, has proved that the institution he heads supports democracy. in the checkered history of the country rarely have the military and civilian leadership been on the same page. But in the case of the Khan government, the army is firmly behind the civilian setup. So much so that opposition leaders, especially PPP (Pakistan Peoples Party) chairperson Bilawal Bhutto, accuse Khan of being ‘a selected prime minister’, clearly implying that the PTi (Pakistan Tehreek e insaf) was ushered into power through political engineering in the 2018 elections.

Perhaps the biggest guarantee against a future military takeover is not merely an article of the Constitution, but the strengthening of civilian institutions. unfortunately meddlesome military leaderships of the past as well as our politicians have miserably failed on this very count.

Take the case of the present government. it has not only been unable to provide good governance but also simply unwilling to develop consensus politics in the country.

Vendetta against the opposition politicians and shrinking of media freedom became its hallmark. it is far too dependent on the army leadership not only in foreign and security policies, but also in the field of the economy, as well as making key appointments.

How the government has mishandled the matter of the army Chief’s extension speaks volumes about its inherent incompetence. ironically, as a result of the Special Court’s decision, the government is faced with a legal conundrum. despite the fact that the Prime minister, on numerous occasions while in the opposition, was extremely critical of musharraf and strongly in favour of his trial under article 6 of the Constitution, now the government is forced to oppose the Special Court’s verdict. although admittedly Khan himself has been rather circumspect about the sentence, his legal team is opposing it tooth and nail. it is no coincidence that Law minister Fargoh Nasim and attorney General anwer mansoor are former members of musharraf’s team. in fact the Law minister was his lawyer in this very case.

The Law minister, with prime minister’s special assistant on accountability Shahzad akbar in tow, announced in a presser that the government has decided to move the SJC (Supreme Judicial Council) against mr Justice Waqar Seth for having an unsound mind. it will be a first where a judge is hauled up for his verdict in the SJC. it militates against the very concept of independence of judiciary. more importantly, how does the government expect to prove

that the offending judge is mentally challenged?

The Special Court’s denouement against musharraf is subject to appeal in the apex court.

But owing to the fact the military and the government are firmly behind the former strongman, it will create a ludicrously anomalous situation.

Who will prosecute musharraf?

The former COaS is a politician as well. He heads his own party, the all Pakistan muslim League (aPmL) that contested the 2013 elections. musharraf would have run for the National assembly from Chitral had he not been disqualified.

He should therefore be organizing his own defence team. and the honourable course for the government’s legal team bending backwards to come to his rescue, should be to resign and rejoin his defence team. musharraf might have been a brave commando. But how can any democratic government worth its salt condone his conduct as a usurper?

Post 9/11, becoming a willing tool of the uS in its so-called War on Terror, but at the same time propping up the Taliban was the hallmark of his double-dealing.

He is remembered not very fondly for the Lal masjid massacre in which 154 persons, including women and children, perished and also for the murder of Nawab akbar Bugti. Sacking of an independent Judiciary and imposing a counter coup (after his earlier coup in 1999 ousting Nawaz Sharif as prime minister) by declaring emergency-plus are his hallmark.

He contemptuously once said that the Constitution was just a piece of paper that he can tear up whenever he so desired. even after being ousted, on a visit to the uSa while talking to high-ranking administration officials, he was seen seeking their covert help to usher him back into power ‘to save Pakistan.’

Why is the government so keen to defend and rehabilitate a megalomaniac of his time? Khan correctly stated that he would play a role to thwart a clash of institutions. Then why is his government abetting Bonapartists of the past? Surely this anomaly is not by default but by design.

Before officially addressing a full court reference on his retirement on Friday, the outgoing Chief Justice of Pakistan, mr Justice asif Saeed Khosa, complained that a vicious campaign had been initiated against the judiciary. Obviously he was referring to the government’s, as well as the military’s, severe criticism after the special court’s verdict against musharraf.

This was but to be expected. in most of the past the higher judiciary has been pliant to the mechanizations of the ubiquitous establishment.

Hence the new normal is not so palatable for the powers that be.

The role of the attorney General is highly questionable. He did not show up at the CJP’s farewell reference and instead sent his deputy aamir Rehman to read his speech that was highly critical of the CJP. it is rather to act as a bridge between the government and the judiciary. But he has queered the pitch even before the new CJP, mr Justice Gulzar ahmed, had taken the oath of office.

Arif Nizami is Editor, Pakistan Today. He can be contacted at arifn51@hotmail.com

Was that a judge speaking?

Genneral Musharraf was guilty of taking over, but dragging his corpse to a public spot was going too far Rabia ahmed

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uaid-e-azam muhammad ali Jinnah addressed the Constituent assembly of Pakistan on the 11th of august 1947 and said: “…Remember that you are now a sovereign legislative body and you have got all the powers. it, therefore, places on you the gravest responsibility as to how you should take your decisions. You will no doubt agree with me that the first duty of a government is to maintain law and order… …therefore make sure that the corpses of all convicted person, if found dead are dragged to a public spot in our capital city and hanged there for three days.”

With due apologies to the Quaid. Of course he never ended his speech that way. He had no such monstrous inclinations, he was an intelligent man and a dignified one to boot, so one can respect him and his opinions. Which is more than one can say about whoever added those lines in a grisly injunction at the end of the official verdict against General musharraf, a verdict which is otherwise fairly good and should not come as a surprise. The idea of pretending Jinnah said that was to make the reader start in surprise since we all knew he was too principled a man to indulge in any such ideas, and also to show up the reality on the ground today.

The other persons who imposed martial law on this hapless country are beyond punishment, but Gen musharraf is not, so he should suffer the consequences of his actions. The Quaid said it Karachi – Ph: 021-35381208-9

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best in the same speech above: “We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.”

Which means that all citizens of the state– even if they breathe the rarified air of the armed forces– are equally answerable for their actions.

When in 1999 an elected government was sent packing the army took over– as it has done several times in this supposedly democratic country. General Pervez musharraf then became the Chief executive, and when the then President of Pakistan left office wheb his tenure expired, he took over as President. elections were held in 2002 and Pakistan got another Prime minister, but there was a tacit understanding that decisions would be made by General sahib.

Five years later, General musharraf declared a state of emergency, which is in effect a martial law. The constitution of Pakistan was suspended as a result of his actions, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the country was fired.

Whoever does such a thing is undermining the country and therefore committing treason, and he or she should then face the consequences.

Quite contrary to what maj. Gen asif Ghafoor says, the judgement contains nothing objectionable, other than the grisly rider. Nor is it, as the inimitable dr Firdous ashiq awan, suggests some kind of a sinister conspiracy by “anti-state elements” either internal or external, it is not a conspiracy that must be foiled.

Islamabad – Ph: 051-2204545

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Web: www.pakistantoday.com.pk

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The only thing that must be foiled is whatever it is that produces such a mindset, which allows such sentiments to take root in this country.

What is there about the legal system and education in Pakistan that allows such sentiments to arise among the legal fraternity in particular, sentiments that lead for example to lawyers marching on a hospital treating patients with heart disease, causing the death of three of those patients? Our lawyers and judges appear to be confusing justice with revenge of the most sordid kind. also, instead of being taught that justice must be blind and dispassionate, our legal fraternity appears to imagine to the contrary. is hanging the body of a convicted person for three days in a public spot dispassionate? does it gel with anything we stand for as a country, as muslims (seeing that this is supposed to be an islamic Republic), or as human beings? Where in medieval times does the honorable judge imagine us to be?

Politics is rife with instances of diversions and convenient footholds. You cannot help wondering if these bloodthirsty lines were deliberately planted, inserted on purpose to give a handle to those who would like to condemn and overturn the entire judgement. it does not appear to be a commonly possessed skill to separate different aspects from the whole. in this case justice is in danger of being subverted by those who like to set certain segments of the country above the law, those who view this judgement as a dangerous precedent.

Rabia Ahmed is a freelance columnist.

Read more by her at http://rabiaahmed.blogspot.com/

Email: editorial@pakistantoday.com.pk

Sunday, 22 December, 2019

COMMENT 09 Editor’s mail

Send your letters to: Letters to Editor, Pakistan Today, 4-Shaarey Fatima Jinnah, Lahore, Pakistan.

E-mail: letters@pakistantoday.com.pk Letters should be addressed to Pakistan Today exclusively

Water tank mafia in Karachi acute water shortage in the port city has forced Karachiites to buy water tankers on excessive rates as the major water supplying organisation in the city – Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KW&SB) – has failed to provide water tankers on official rates.

The long-standing water shortage has managed to become worse. Citizens are forced to depend on private water tanker services. The private water tanker proprietors, taking advantage of this situation, charge Rs 5,000 for 1,000 gallons water, Rs 7,000 for 2,000 gallons and Rs 9,000 for 3,000 gallons despite the water rates fixed by the KW&SB as per the government’s official rates of Rs 1,000 for 1,000 gallons, Rs 1,300 for 2,000 gallons and Rs 1,700 for 3,000 gallons for residential consumers.

Residents in every part of the city have complained that they are unable to obtain water through water supply and thus have been forced to purchase water from private tanker suppliers on high rates.

TAHA KHAN Karachi

Tax burden

Et tu, Brute?

Military being the target, all constraints are erased

Candid Corner Raoof hasaN “Great is the issue at stake, greater than it may appear, whether a man is to be good or bad. And how will anyone be profited if, under the influence of money or power, he may neglect justice and virtue?”

—Plato

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could never think that a day may come when i would be seen speaking for a military dictator. But, i am not. i am not speaking for General musharraf, the dictator. i am speaking about the manner in which he, as a citizen of this country, has been dealt with by the judiciary which is reckoned as one of the three pillars of the state and upon whose adjudications is built the edifice of justice. The construction and substance of the high treason case judgement sham and shame the judicial processes and raise serious questions about the conduct of the institution and the judges who represent it. i am even more disturbed about the fact that this is being projected as a sign of the judiciary having come of age. But, then, all such acts are projected in the same manner. When Caesar was stabbed by his closest aides, they also proclaimed the death of tyranny and the onset of liberty and freedom. But, let’s not forget that this was preceded by the vile act of a murder: Caesar: et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar! (Dies) Cinna: Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!

Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.

Cassius: Some to the common pulpits, and cry out ‘Liberty, freedom and enfranchisement!’

History is full of calumnious acts which have been replicated in the matter of trying General musharraf for high treason. This would clearly pass for a portentous case of settling some old scores. Let’s just go back to what the former Chief Justice Khosa said a few days before the pronouncement of the judgement. during one of his addresses, he cautioned the Prime minister that judiciary was not afraid of anyone.

He went on to recount that it was the judiciary which had disqualified a former Prime minister and sent another one to jail. Then, shockingly,

he went on to mimic General musharraf, raising corpse be “dragged to D-Chowk and be hanged his arms in the latter’s trademark style, saying for three days”. Besides being incontrovertibly (without taking his name) that “His judgement degenerate, this injunction speaks of a dominant animus factor. That’s why the credibility of the is also due in a couple of days”.

This obviously speaks of a deep-set preju- whole process has been rendered controversial.

There is palpable evidence that it was never dice that he harboured against the former dictator. The personal interest that he reportedly took a question of punishing an individual alone. in in expediting the trial need not be recounted fact, the whole drama was directed to send a here, but there are a host of other issues that message to the institution of the military. The petition challenging the award of extension to must be discussed: article 6 under which General musharraf the Chief of army Staff (COaS) was kept pendwas tried and awarded capital punishment was ing for months and was taken up barely three reframed as part of the 18th amendment. The act days before the retirement of General Bajwa. of suspending the Constitution was not men- The request of the mover to withdraw the petitioned in the article as it existed before the tion was rejected on the plea that it was a public interest case. The consequent instructions to amendment; application of article 6 retrospectively after Parliament to legislate in a certain manner it was amended in 2010 required an act of Par- within a specified time frame belie a conscious incursion into the executive domain. liament. The same was not secured; However, what makes it even more omiConsequently, General musharraf was tried on the basis of an article of the Constitution in nous is that the judgement in the high treason a form it did not exist when the act (of treason) case was pronounced barely two days after sending a strong message was committed; to the incumbent COaS There were serious regarding extension in his questions raised regarding service tenure. it cannot be the mechanism followed to a mere coincidence. more constitute the Special Moving into the next realm likely, this comes across as Court. These were never properly rehearsed and addressed which added to under a new Chief Justice, it aorchestrated act on the part the perception of this of some stalwarts of the jubeing an act of vendetta; must tread its path more diciary.

The proclamation of carefully to regain its People are reading a lot emergency was not the act of an individual. it was destanding as a non-partisan into the symbolism of the pronouncement to act as bated among all close associates and members of the pillar of the state, committed deterrence against proclamations of martial laws in government. But, holding a to dispensing equal and the future. This is myopic. single individual responsible for what was definitely equitable justice to all. This in fact, a clash among two powerful institutions would a collective decision said, I see some testing precipitate this crisis. speaks volumes of the perin the ultimate analysis, sonal rancour that the then times ahead the pronouncements in the Prime minister harboured matter of the incumbent for General musharraf; COaS and General musharit was broadly perraf stand out as testaments of ceived that periodic absurdity. The judiciary trychanges were made in the Special Court bench to impact the trial, thus re- ing to stamp its ascendance simultaneously over flecting prejudice against the former dictator, and the Prime minister and the military is an act reflectProclamation of capital punishment without ing an abysmal paucity of good sense, logic and giving the accused a chance to be heard in per- rationale.

With institutions pandering to their egos son is a violation of the enshrined principles of jurisprudence, thus further accentuating the per- and protecting their not-so-blue-blooded scions, it is the state which is rendered an orphan. Seeds ception of bias.

Let me recount an incident. Back in 2005 which are being sown now will sprout forth into when an effort was initiated to forge reconcili- a spread that would be repugnant to judiciary’s ation between the then-ousted Prime minister honour and inimical to its prestige. as a sequel Nawaz Sharif and General musharraf, i met the of these last few days, judiciary has downformer while he was in exile. during the course graded itself in stature and relevance as a key of the ensuing discussion, he was categorical in institution of the state. moving into the next realm under a new stating his animus both for the dictator and the institution that he represented. i still remember Chief Justice, it must tread its path more carehis words when, responding to the prospect of fully to regain its standing as a non-partisan pilrapprochement with musharraf, he said that, lar of the state, committed to dispensing equal once he returns to power, he would ensure that and equitable justice to all. This said, i see some the “military does not remain in a position to testing times ahead. do this to him again”.

Raoof Hasan is a political and security The manner in which the judgement has been authored, particularly Clause 66 which strategist, and heads the Regional Peace deals with the prospect of General musharraf Institute – an Islamabad-based think tank. He dying before the punishment is administered, is can be reached at: raoofhasan@hotmail.com; abhorrent. it is ordered that, in such an event, his Twitter: @RaoofHasan

i am writing this letter to you as a concerned member of this society. i belong to a middle class family, therefore increasing inflation, falling incomes, rising taxation is one of the matters of great concern.

Recent increase in the tax and rising petrol prices have made it difficult to meet the end meets. Rising petrol prices have made the public transport more expensive. Government should burden the business community or the ones at the top of the chain rather than a middle class person. Considering that you voice the opinions of commoners in your newspaper, i would be very grateful if you would transfer this message.

ADEEL TAmImI Lahore

Ban plastic bags i want to request the sindh government to put ban on the plastic bags.earlier, federal government also imposed a ban on the plastic bags in the federal captial and now Punjab government has also banned the use of polyethene bags in the province.but Sindh government has not shown any concern regarding this issue.due to the usage of plastic bags,there is a problem of rising ocean temperatures and the plastic itself is killing fish life and other mammals.Plastic harms the wildlife because of the element of the toxic chemicals in the plastic it harms the environment when burned and when tried to recycled.i request the sindh government to take action on this issue and introduce cloth bags in the province like the federal government introduced in islamabad and put a ban on usage of plastic bags. muHAmmAD RAzA Karachi

Foreign relations SiNCe coming into power last year, the PTi government has been cultivating strong ties with the arab countries,including Saudi arabia, united arab emirates and Qatar.But, Saudi arabia and Pakistan have long maintained a strong,strategic relationship.The both countries have worked together very closely within the framework of several bilateral,regional and global forums.The history books show that Pakistan-Saudi arabia relations are rooted in the pre-partition period of British-ruled india.Presently, Pm imran Khan during a telephonic conversation with Saudi Crown Prince mohammed bin Salman stressed that developing relations with Saudi arabia was a top priority for Pakistan.in fact,the premier described Saudi arabia a trustworthy friend of Pakistan and thanked the crown prince for his efforts and support to Pakistan and its interests.The distinguished relations between the two countries was praised by the crown prince also.We hope the relations benefit both Saudi arabia and Pakistan and continue further.

ImRAN RASHEED Kech

Climate change LaST Friday, the public marches were held in as many as 30 cities of Pakistan to draw attention towards climate change emergency. Though Pakistan contributes little to the world’s carbon footprint, it is unfortunately eight on the list of the countries most affected by climate change. in 2012, Pakistan was the first country to establish a Climate Change ministry, and framed, later on, Climate Change Policy. But the former remained dormant and the latter was not implemented properly. according to a 2012 report of the World Wildlife Fund, owing to Pakistan’s geographical location, the overall temperature increase in the country is much higher and faster than the global average, causing record-breaking temperatures, heat waves, long-drawn-out droughts, unpredictable rain patterns and recurrent flooding etc. Besides, climate change has had a number of adverse impacts in the country. The Global Climate index Report, 2018, states that more than 10,000 people have died in Pakistan during the past 20 years out of approximately 140 extreme weather events that also incurred losses of almost $4bn. The concerned authorities, therefore, need to act—now, least it is too late.

RIAz AHmED SOOmRO Shikarpur

Sunday, 22 December, 2019

10 FOREIGN NEWS

in PHone Call witH trumP, CHina's Xi says us interFering in internal aFFairs WASHINGTON D.C.

u

AGENCIES

S President Donald Trump spoke on Friday with Chinese President Xi Jinping and claimed progress on issues from trade to North Korea and Hong Kong, but China said Xi accused the United States of interfering in its internal affairs.

The two leaders spoke a week after their envoys sealed a “Phase 1” agreement aimed at ending an 18-month trade war that has rattled markets and raised tensions. Trump announced the phone call in a tweet. A White House official said they spoke on Friday morning. China Central Television said Xi spoke to Trump at the request of the U.S. president.

“Had a very good talk with President Xi of China concerning our giant Trade Deal. China has already started large

scale purchase of agricultural product & more. Formal signing being arranged.

Also talked about North Korea, where we are working with China, & Hong Kong (progress!)” Trump tweeted.

China’s Xinhua news agency said Xi told Trump that China is deeply concerned about “the negative words and deeds” of the United States on issues related to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet. “These actions have interfered in China’s internal affairs, harmed China’s interests and undermined mutual trust and cooperation between the two sides,” Xinhua said.

The United States has called for the closure of mass detention camps in China’s western region of Xinjiang and expressed concern about the treatment of demonstrators in Hong Kong.

Xinhua said Xi hoped Trump would implement “the important consensus” reached during their meetings and phone

calls and “pay close attention to and attach importance to China’s concerns, and prevent the interference of bilateral relations and the important agenda.”

China was angered when Trump last month signed legislation that authorizes sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials responsible for human rights abuses in Hong Kong, in what was seen as support for pro-democracy activists.

Of paramount concern to the United States is a threat by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for what Pyongyang has called a “Christmas gift.”

U.S. officials have interpreted this to mean either a nuclear weapons test or a ballistic missile test. Trump and Kim have held three summits but failed to reach an agreement on lifting sanctions on North Korea in exchange for denuclearization by Pyongyang.

China and Russia on Monday proposed that the U.N. Security Council lift

a ban on North Korea exports such as seafood and textiles, in a move the Russian U.N. envoy said was aimed at encouraging talks between Washington and Pyongyang. The State Department, in response, said the U.N. Security Council should not be considering “premature sanctions relief” for North Korea as it is “threatening to conduct an escalated provocation, refusing to meet to discuss denuclearization.”

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng met U.S. special envoy for North Korea Stephen Biegun on Friday, China’s foreign ministry said, Biegun’s second high-level meeting in Beijing in two days amid growing tension on the Korean peninsula.

In rare move, US, Iranian envoys talk after UN meeting on nuclear deal WASHINGTON D.C. AGENCIES

The US Ambassador to the United Nations made a rare compassionate public gesture toward her Iranian counterpart in the Security Council chamber on Thursday, expressing condolences over the death of an Iranian toddler.

But after a contentious UN Security Council meeting on compliance with the 2015 accord between world powers and Iran, Ambassador Kelly Craft walked over to talk to Iran’s UN Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi.

Ravanchi had spoken about a twoyear-old girl during his statement to the 15-member council. He said the girl had

died in June from a rare disease known as EB and blamed the death on US sanctions. An official from the US mission to the United Nations said Craft was expressing her condolences to Ravanchi.

Iran’s UN mission spokesman Alireza Miryousefi said they “merely had a short conversation on EB patients affected by sanctions”.

“It is not out of the ordinary for UN diplomats accredited to the UN to run into each other, or to have brief encounters, at HQ,” Miryousefi tweeted.

However, such direct interactions between Iranian and US officials have been very rare in the past years.

Since US President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the nu-

clear deal, his administration has reimposed sanctions on Tehran with the aim of choking Iranian crude oil sales, the Islamic Republic’s main source of revenues. While food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are exempt from US sanctions, the US measures targeting everything from oil sales to shipping and financial activities have deterred several foreign banks from doing business with Iran, including humanitarian deals.

Ravanchi had told the council: “It is a shame that the US bullying has resulted in discontinuation of export of certain medicines to Iran, causing a nightmare for some patients.”

“For instance, a European com-

pany, under the pressure of US sanctions, has stopped exporting special bandages for patients suffering from EB, a rare genetic condition resulting in easy blistering of the skin,” he said.

He then went on to tell the council that the Iranian toddler, named Ava, was unable to get the treatment she needed.

Craft had told the Security Council: “The United States is willing to engage in dialogue with Iran to negotiate a deal that will better serve international peace and security. But we will not sit idly by while Iran continues to destabilize the region.”

The Trump administration has complained that the 2015 accord did not go far enough in restricting Iran’s missile program or its proxy wars in the Middle East.

'Catastrophic' conditions as bushfires rage in Australia SYDNEY AGENCIES

A scorching heatwave intensified bushfires ravaging parts of Australia on Saturday, and out-of-control blazes surrounding Sydney worsened under “catastrophic” conditions.

Australia’s eastern coast has been hit by a recordbreaking heatwave, which has moved in from the west of the country, fanning hundreds of fires in its path.

Sydney was shrouded in toxic smoke as blazes flared to its north, south and west, some just 130 kilometres (80 miles) from Australia’s largest city.

“Today has been an awful day,” New South Wales sate fire commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said Saturday afternoon. Temperatures were expected to peak at 47 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit) in parts of the state — the country’s most populous — including in parts of west Sydney.

Australia endures bushfires every year but the early and intense start to this season, along with the record temperatures, has fuelled concerns about global warming. The fires have torched at least three million hectares (7.4 million acres) of land across the country — an area equivalent to the size of Belgium — with at least 10 people killed and more than 800 homes destroyed. A “mega fire” burning over 460,000 hectares north of Sydney escalated Saturday, as did a fire burning on multiple fronts in the Blue Mountains, where authorities said an unknown number of properties were burning. Some 3,000 firefighters across the state were bracing for a wind change in the afternoon, expected to bring “dangerous and difficult, volatile conditions”, Fitzsimmons added. “We will not get on top of these fires until we get some decent rain,” Fitzsimmons said of the outlook. “We are seeing a relentless pattern of hot, dry air dominating the weather features at the moment,” he added. Evacuations were being carried out in the town of Bargo, on the front of a 185,000-hectare blaze which tore through the nearby area on Thursday.

“It’s horrific, it’s devastating driving around. We feel pretty isolated where we are with the roadblocks.

North Korea has conducted a series of weapons tests in recent weeks and some experts say the reclusive state may be preparing for an intercontinental ballistic missile test soon.

Such a test would mark a break from the detente reached with the United States last year, dash any hopes of resuming talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs and put the two countries back on a path of confrontation.

Xinhua said that Xi stressed to Trump that all parties need to seek a political settlement on the North Korean issue and that “all parties should meet each other halfway and maintain the momentum of easing dialogue, which serves the common interests of all parties.”

north korea warns us could 'pay dearly' for human rights criticism SEOUL: North Korea lashed back at the United States for taking issue with its human rights record on Saturday, saying Washington’s “malicious words” would only aggravate tensions on the Korean Peninsula, state news agency KCNA reported. The KCNA statement, attributed to a foreign ministry spokesperson, warned that if the United States dared to take issue with the North’s system of government by citing human rights problems, it would “pay dearly”. The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday condemned North Korea’s “long-standing and ongoing” violations of human rights in an annual resolution sponsored by dozens of countries including the United States, that Pyongyang’s UN envoy rejected. The North Korean Foreign Ministry statement is its first since US special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, publicly urged Pyongyang on Monday to return to talks.

There has been no direct response from North Korea to Biegun’s entreaty. US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Friday that he remains hopeful the United States can restart diplomacy with North Korea, as the clock ticks down to North Korea’s declared year-end deadline for new U.S. concessions in talks over its nuclear arsenal. North Korea has repeatedly called for the United States to drop its “hostile policy” before more talks. But tension has been rising in recent weeks as Pyongyang has conducted a series of weapons tests and waged a war of words with US President Donald Trump. AGENCIES

uk's Johnson says he will keep pressing us over fatal crash Loved ones can’t come and see us,” Bargo resident Corey Cartes told AFP. Cartes was told to leave two days ago, but has stayed behind to defend his property.

“Everyone is offering to help, but there is nothing they can do. Not for us now, just stay out and stay safe and we hope the fireies (firefighters) can do their job.”

In the state of South Australia, which in the past few days has borne the brunt of the heat wave, more than 1,500 firefighters have been battling fires that ripped through more than 40,000 hectares.

Two people died in fires there over the past two days, and dozens of firefighters and residents have been treated for injuries and smoke inhalation.

Emergency crews were also on alert in the southern state of Victoria, where fires were burning following days of scorching temperatures.

HEALTH EMERGENCY: Leading doctors have warned of a “public health emergency” given the unprecedented toxic smoke pollution choking Sydney.

“It is pretty much the whole New South Wales population being exposed to prolonged smoke and be-

cause we have never experienced this before, we don’t know what the eventual outcome will be,” Kim Loo told AFP. “It probably won’t be obvious for months, or even years,” added Loo, also a member of advocacy group Doctors for the Environment.

Hospitals have been recording sharp increases in emergency room visits for heat exhaustion and respiratory problems. Loo said elderly patients, as well as children and outdoor workers were the most at risk, warning the health sector is “not prepared” to deal with such cases. Vulnerable people in New South Wales have been urged to stay indoors amid worries the scorching heat combined with the toxic smoke could cause “severe illness, hospital admissions and even death”. Sydney resident Len Renekov told AFP Saturday he was most worried about “getting all the smoke particles into my lungs and into my heart.”

The 67-year-old was wearing a mask, still a rare sight, while nearby a dozen Sydneysiders sweated through their regular Saturday morning workout under the harbour bridge, without face coverings.

CMYK

LONDON: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Saturday he would carry on trying to help the family of 19-year-old Briton Harry Dunn, killed in a road collision with a US diplomat’s wife who then left the country. “The law should take its course and we will obviously be following that case with keen interest and continuing to make representations on behalf of Harry Dunn’s family in the US at every level,” Johnson said. He was speaking to British broadcasters during a visit to Estonia.

British prosecutors said on Friday they would charge Anne Sacoolas with causing death by dangerous driving and seek her extradition over the crash in August in which Dunn was killed while riding his motorbike. Sacoolas’ lawyer said her client would not return voluntarily to Britain to face a potential jail sentence for “a terrible but unintentional accident”. Johnson has previously said he wants Sacoolas to return to Britain and that she was wrong to use diplomatic immunity to leave. AGENCIES

Sunday, 22 December, 2019

BUSINESS 11

PIA losses cut by half: CEO Arshad Malik

2019 sEEs uP TO Rs1.5M hIkE In suzukI CAR PRICEs ISLAMABAD

BUSINESS DESK Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) Chief Executive Officer Air Marshal Arshad Malik announced on Saturday that the management was successful in "bringing down the losses of the national flag carrier to 50pc". He said this during PIA's annual employees and shareholders meeting, where the 2018 audit report and accounts of the airline came under discussion. According to media reports, the PIA CEO said that the only challenge the airline was left with was to conduct an audit of the airline, a matter that been delayed for the last three years. He said that the PIA would be including two more planes in its air fleet to improve their performance. The participants of the meeting applauded the policy measures taken under the incumbent administration. On Friday, PIA and other private airlines had jacked up their fares for their domestic passengers.

After the revision of fares, a one-way trip from Karachi to Lahore-Islamabad stood at Rs35,000 and while that from Lahore to Karachi-Quetta was increased by Rs10,000 and Rs15,000 respectively.

Pakistan asked to submit replies to 150 FATF queries

A

GHULAM ABBAS

S car sales have decreased drastically due to a slowdown in economic activities, documentation process and rising inflation, the local assemblers have raised the prices of various models of their cars during the last 12 months.

According to documents available with this scribe, Pak Suzuki Motor Company (PSMC) has increased the prices of its vehicles by up to Rs1.5 million during January -December 2019.

As per the data, the price of Mehran VX was raised by Rs50,000 during the last 12 months, while that of Mehran VXR jumped by over Rs63,000 during the same period.

Currently priced at Rs1,745,000 (as of December 2019), Cultus VXR registered an increase of over Rs335,000 in the past 12 months, whereas the price of Cultus AGS surged by

Rs337,000 to Rs1,975,000.

The highest increase in price among Suzuki car models was witnessed in the Swift DLX variant, as it surged by Rs440,000. The car was priced at Rs155,5000 in January 2019.

Meanwhile, Swift DLX AT, which was available in the market at Rs2,050,000, registered an increase of Rs359,000 in the past 12 months. The price of the same model in January 2019 was Rs1,691,000.

Wagon-R VXR and Wagon-R VXL registered Rs381,000 increase in the last 12 months, currently standing at Rs1,605,000 and Rs1,695,000, respectively.

The new price of Alto VX has been fixed at Rs1,135,000, depicting an increase of Rs136,000 since the time of its launch earlier this year. Similarly, the price of Alto VXR was increased by Rs295,000 in the last 12 months to Rs1,398,000.

Among other variants of PSMC, Suzuki Jimny was the one which registered the highest

increase in the past 12 months, surging by Rs1,497,000 to stand at Rs3,990,000. The same car was available in the market at Rs2,493,000 in January. The price of Suzuki Bolan registered an increase of Rs225,000 in the last 12 months, while that Suzuki Ravi increased by Rs203,000 in one year.

According to sources in the auto industry, the major reason behind the jump in prices was the depreciation of Pakistani currency against US dollar. However, they observed, the price of US dollar has decreased below Rs155 as compared to Rs164 on June 24, which signals declining cost of import.

The overall car sales plunged 44pc to 49,110 units during the first five months of FY20, as demand for various cars slumped by around 35-75pc.

Car assemblers and their vendors had claimed achieving up to 70 per cent localisation but pushing up prices despite stability in the exchange rate since June has nullified their claim.

CCI to discuss proposed amendments in Petroleum Policy

ISLAMABAD BUSINESS DESK

AHMAD AHMADANI

Pakistan has received a questionnaire, comprising 150 questions, from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a private media outlet reported on Saturday. According to the finance ministry sources, the FATF has asked Islamabad details regarding the actions that have been taken to achieve the targets set by the intergovernmental organization. The FATF has demanded Pakistan to sentence those who were associated with banned outfits and summoned copies of cases registered against the outlawed organizations. It has also asked Pakistan about the legal steps taken with regard to religious seminaries. It is pertinent to mention that the questionnaire was sent in response to Islamabad’s report that was forwarded to the FATF on December 3. Pakistan has to respond to the questions by January 8. In its Dec 3 implementation report, Pakistan had informed the FATF about measures taken for the prevention of terror financing and transfer of assets to banned outfits. The report stated that the government had tightened its noose around 190 people while 700 cases of money laundering were being investigated against terrorists. The report further read that 170 people who transferred money to terrorists were arrested while 1,000 properties of banned outfits were also seized. “Investigations are underway against the owners of 35 of these properties, while a probe has also been initiated against another 150 properties. The government is also taking vigorous measures against currency smuggling.”

The Petroleum Division has proposed six amendments in the Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Policy 2012, and the next meeting of the Council of Common Interests (CCI) is likely to take its final decision on these proposed amendments, Pakistan Today has learnt.

As per the documents available with this scribe, the Petroleum Division is all set to table the proposed amendments during the next CCI meeting. Energy Minister Omar Ayub Khan has already seen the draft of proposed amendments and has approved the summary’s submission to the CCI for final approval.

The proposed amendments in Petroleum Policy 2012 are mainly related to the carried interest of Government Holding Private Limited (GHPL) and provincial holding companies

(PHCs) in the creation of new zones, award of blocks to strategic partners, extension in petroleum exploration license period and extension/renewal of lease period etc.

The initial summary was circulated to all stakeholders on 9th August 2019, seeking their comments. All stakeholders, including the governments of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Punjab, ministries of law & justice, finance, planning, as well as Pakistan Petroleum Exploration and Production Companies Association (PPEPCA), conveyed their comments on the proposed amendments in Petroleum Policy 2012 except the Balochistan government, as its comments are still awaited.

As per documents, PPEPCA has strongly opposed the proposal of 2.5pc carried interest each for PHCs and GHPL, saying that this would fatal for the E&P investors. The association feared that this may

result in reduced interest in E & P activities in the country.

Similarly, the KP government has opposed the increase in gas price which has been proposed to neutralise the impact of carried interest. The KP government has also suggested to include a provision for post commerciality enhancement in working interest to 10pc.

Documents further disclosed that the Petroleum Division has planned the bidding of few blocks in February 2020 and has proposed amendments in the existing Petroleum Policy before initiating the next bidding round because federal cabinet’s economic coordination committee (ECC) last month decided that the forthcoming bidding for petroleum exploration licensing may be carried out under the existing Petroleum Policy 2012. It had also directed the Petroleum Division to carry out a detailed consultation with all stakeholders prior to the revision of Petroleum Exploration and Production Policy 2012 and submit the same to CCI for its approval.

In this regard, the petroleum minister held meetings with the chief ministers of KP, Sindh and Balochistan to review the issues in the oil and gas sector being faced by the respective provinces. All issues related to oil and gas sector in the post 18th Constitutional Amendment scenario were deliberated in detail.

‘OGRA-proposed gas rates under active consideration’ BUSINESS DESK The Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA) carries out the natural gas price determination for Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) and Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited (SNGPL), inter alia, in the light of next fiscal year revenue requirements. “It is well within the government’s ambit to advise OGRA of any concessions/special price regimes for specific sectors to be considered while determining the sale price,” OGRA said in a statement issued on Saturday. “The latest OGRA gas price determination issued on 10 December 2019 is under active consideration by the Ministry of Energy.”

As per the statement, this recommendation is for an increase in natural gas prices for the consumers all across the spectrum. The purported increase in the fertilizer feedstock price is over 236pc, from Rs300/MMBTU to over Rs706/MMBTU. At the same time, the fuel price increase is also on the cards, though nowhere close to the unjust and uncalled for increase in the feedstock prices. The government has 40 to act/decide on the advice of OGRA. “It is given to understand that the latest agreement between the government and International Monetary Fund (IMF) necessitates that the government fulfils this obligation,” the statement said.

History suggests rally may slow for US stocks in 2020 NEW YORK AGENCIES

The outsized rally in the US stock market this year may give way to a more muted performance in 2020 if history is any guide.

The benchmark S&P 500 is up nearly 28pc for the year, which if the market closed this week for the year, would mark the second-best annual performance for the index since 1997.

However, investors who are hoping the rally will continue charging ahead through next year may be disappointed.

The S&P 500 has returned an average of 6.6pc in the year following a rally of 20pc or more since 1928, slightly below the 7.6pc return in all years, according to research from Bespoke Investment Group.

Fund managers and strategists say there are several reasons to believe that the stock market will not continue on a path of notching double-digit annual returns like it did during the late ‘90s tech bubble.

“We’re up a lot this year, but we had a historically bad 4th quarter last year,” said Ryan Detrick, senior market strategist for LPL Financial. “This isn’t because of spectacular growth in the economy but the market realizing that we’re not going to have a recession.”

The S&P 500 posted its biggest drop since the 2008 financial crisis last year as investors worried that the trade war between the United States and China would push the global economy into a recession.

The Federal Reserve’s decision to change course in early January from its path of

raising interest rates helped fuel the rally in the stock market this year.

The Fed also helped spark a bond rally that pushed 10-year Treasury yields near historic lows and boosted dividendpaying stocks, further pointing to concerns about the strength of the US economy, said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab.

“There are not a lot of investors in the bond markets losing their shirts because the economy is running ahead of expectations,” she said. The November presidential and congressional elections will likely weigh on politically sensitive sectors like healthcare as 2020 progresses, Sonders said, adding another market headwind that could prevent another string of outsized gains like the late 1990s.

“You had a bunch of strong years back then because we were in the midst of a tech bubble and there was no cap on valuations. Now we have real legitimate companies but there’s not the same sign of excess valuation,” she said.

Few on Wall Street expect a bear market in 2020. There are few signs of a recession looming in the year ahead, while the market has seemed unfazed by issues such as President Donald Trump’s impeachment or ongoing trade tensions, said Jonathan Golub, chief US equity strategist at Credit Suisse Securities.

“Given historically low interest rates and risk premiums, we believe valuations have further to run,” he said. He added that he expects the S&P 500 to end 2020 near 3,425, a roughly 7pc gain from its

Thursday trading price.

Investors may realize larger gains by investing in smaller companies next year, said Steven Chiavarone, a portfolio manager of the Federated Global Allocation fund.

Large-cap stocks in the S&P 500 are over-valued compared with the smaller companies in the Russell 2000 index, he said. At the same time, the Russell 2000 slightly underperformed the larger index this year by posting a 23.2pc gain, leaving it primed for a “catch-up trade” given that smaller companies tend to benefit more from low interest rates, he said.

“We think there’s a chance that you will see upside surprises from earnings next year and that could draw investors back to an asset class they’ve been overlooking,” said Chiavarone.

Sunday, 22 December, 2019

12 BUSINESS

MAssEs bEARInG ThE bRunT OF ‘unREAlIsTIC’ REvEnuE TARGETs: PEW ISLAMABAD

serena hotel offers guests complimentary smartphones with free WiFi, calls ISLAMABAD SYEDA MASOOMA

Until now, the hospitality industry provided fixed phones and paid local and international calling facility, but guests of one hotel in Pakistan will now have complimentary smartphones that they can take anywhere during the length of their stay. The guests of Serena Hotel will now be getting a special smartphone, 'S Tel', for free local and international calls. Bearing 4G and hotspot options, this solution comes from Telenor Pakistan, as a first of its kind digital platform, and holds significance for the hospitality industry in the country. This is also a technological collaboration between Serena Hotels and Telenor Pakistan. S Tel was unveiled at an event held at Serena Hotel in Islamabad where the management of both organizations was present alongside their teams. Speaking on the occasion, Telenor Pakistan CEO and Head of Emerging Asia Cluster Telenor Group Irfan Wahab Khan said, "Telenor Pakistan's 'S TEL' is an innovative breakthrough not only in Pakistan's but in the region's hospitality industry. We take pride in being industry leaders in introducing technological innovations and after our digital interventions on agriculture and social inclusion fronts, we are now aiming to transform businesses by providing them state of the art solutions that makes their processes more efficient. I am pleased to partner with Serena Hotel for this solution and hopeful that this partnership will go a long way in setting new trends that are necessary to boost the tourism and hospitality industry in Pakistan." Serena Hotels South & Central Asia CEO Aziz Boolani said, "We are ecstatic to have partnered with Telenor Pakistan for making this digital platform a reality.

Being the country's hospitality leaders, we want to deliver our guests a wholesome digital and connectivity experience that is hard to match. With 'S Tel', we have come closer to achieving our goal as it offers the guests a robust connectivity solution that makes their stay comfortable, safe, and memorable. This feature-rich application not only makes roaming charges and connectivity issues a thing of the past for our guests but also works to lift tourism in the country with features such as the city guide." As the guests check in to their room, the smartphone already has its basic details on ‘S Tel’ that can be accessed and used instantly. The smartphone is removable and the guest may take it with them to anywhere in the city. This means that the guests may place an order for their favourite meal or request for laundry pickup remotely, even before reaching back to the hotel. S TEL also works as a virtual local city guide which includes tourist attractions and sightseeing spots. Both organizations have ensured that this platform keeps user privacy a priority. To keep the user data secure, the device operates in Kiosk mode only allowing guests to stay connected to their friends, family and hotel management. Upon check-out, it ensures privacy and protection of guest information by wiping all usage and communications data.

I

INP

NDUSTRIAL production was being compromised for the sake of unrealistic revenue targets, which was not in the national interests, said Pakistan Economy Watch (PEW) in a statement issued on Saturday.

It observed that the conditions set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have resulted in the negative growth of important sectors, while tax measures have made it difficult for the masses as well as the business community to manage their routine matters.

"The interest rate is kept one per cent above the IMF-desired rate. This has damaged the economy and pushed many industries in the ICU," said PEW President Dr Murtaza Mughal.

He said that compression of imports has saved $4 billion but inflicted a revenue loss of Rs200 billion in five months, adding that GDP

has reduced by tens of billions.

"Discouraging imports has left many industries closed, resulting in massive unemployment, loss of revenue and runaway inflation," he noted.

Dr Mughal said that economy and the masses were paying the price of the central bank's policies, which would result in a revenue loss of almost Rs500 billion in the year 2019-20.

He said that failure to achieve unrealistically high revenue targets has resulted in squeezing of the business community and blocking of refunds which was hitting export industry badly.

Dr Mughal noted that all the economic experts, who negotiated the deal with IMF, were well-aware of the ground realities but, shockingly, they agreed to the conditions that were damaging for Pakistan.

Meanwhile, contrary to PEW’s claims, State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Governor had said on Thursday that economic sentiment in the country has become positive and with the mobilisation of

national resources, more relief would be provided to the private sector so that it could catalyse the national economy.

Speaking to the business community at the Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FCCI), Baqir had highlighted various steps taken to turn the deficit into surplus and said in the first six months of the current fiscal year, the exchange rate had switched from a fixed to a market-driven regime. Moreover, Adviser on Finance Abdul Hafeez Sheikh on Friday revealed that Pakistan’s current account deficit reduced by 73pc during the first five months of current fiscal year as compared to the corresponding period last year.

In his tweet, he had said the foreign exchange reserves of SBP increased by $1.8 billion during the same period.

“Reduction of $3 billion in foreign exchange swaps and forward liabilities increased the foreign exchange buffer by $4.8 billion which provided further stability to external account,” he had stated.

LAHORE: A vendor prepares traditional parathas at his food stall in Alhamra Arts Council. ONLINE

BMP sees ‘tough competition’ in upcoming FPCCI election KARACHI INP

The elections of Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI) for the year 2020 would be held on December 27, 2019, at the Federation House.

The biggest democratic process in the business community will decide the chamber's fate as well as its economic policies for the year 2020.

The two groups contesting the election in-

clude United Business Group (UBG) and Businessmen Panel (BMP). From BMP side, Mian Anjum Nisar was contesting for the president's slot, while Dr Nouman Idris Butt was contesting for the same from the UBG side.

BMP Secretary General Ahmad Jawad has said that the FPCCI should enhance the role of the private sector in the country's economic development.

He said that Mian Anjum Nisar will have a tough competition in the FPCCI's presiden-

tial election.

"The UBG group had disqualified Anjum Nisar to contest the FPCCI election but he moved the high court which allowed him to take part in the election," he informed.

Jawad said around 340 votes would be cast this year and it was hoped that FPCCI elections 2020 would change the federation's fate in real terms. "We have received immense feedback and support from different corners of the business community in this regard," he added.

Trump approves Russia-Europe gas pipeline sanctions WASHINGTON AGENCIES

President Donald Trump has signed off on US sanctions against companies building a Russian natural gas pipeline to Germany that Congress fears will give the Kremlin dangerous leverage over European allies.

The sanctions, which are opposed by the European Union, were included in a sprawling defence spending bill Trump signed at a ceremony on Joint Base Andrews, an air force installation outside Washington, DC. They target companies building the nearly $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea with the aim of doubling deliveries of Russian natural gas to Europe’s leading economy, Germany.

US lawmakers have warned the pipeline would enrich a hostile Russian government and vastly increase President Vladimir Putin’s influence in Europe at a time of heightened tension

across the continent.

Both houses of Congress overwhelmingly approved the sanctions, with the Senate voting Tuesday to send the measure to Trump’s desk.

Trump, who has been accused by Democratic opponents of being soft on Putin, had little choice but to give his approval.

The sanctions were inserted into a much wider $738 billion annual Pentagon funding bill and, given the level of congressional support, a veto would likely have been overturned.

The US measures have angered Moscow and the European Union, which says it should be able to decide its own energy policies.

Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, discussed the issue during a phone call Friday with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said.

Pompeo expressed “strong opposition” to the project, Ortagus said in a statement.

The US sanctions target pipe-laying vessels for Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream, a Russia-Turkey pipeline, and include asset freezes and revocation of US visas for the contractors.

One major contractor that could be hit is Swiss-based Allseas, which has been hired by Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom to build the offshore section.

The power of Gazprom, which is closely integrated with the Russian state, is at the centre of concerns about the pipeline in the United States, and also in eastern and central European countries.

Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican ally of Trump, said that halting Nord Stream 2 should be a major security priority for the United States and Europe alike.

“It’s far better for Europe to be relying on energy from the United States than to be fueling Putin and Russia and dependent on Russia and subject to economic blackmail,” he told the Senate last week.

However, Senator Rand Paul, another Republican, voted against the bill, object-

ing to its bid to “sanction NATO allies and

potentially American energy companies.”

GERMANY, EU HIT OUT AT US OVER SANCTIONS BERLIN: Germany accused the US of interfering in its internal affairs on Saturday, in an increasingly angry spat over Washington's decision to impose sanctions on companies involved with a major project to supply Western Europe with Russian gas. Moscow and the European Union also issued statements criticising the sanctions, a day after President Donald Trump signed off on asset freezes and visa restrictions on those involved in the Nord Stream 2 project. In the first sign that the sanctions were beginning to bite, Swiss contractor Allseas suspended its Nord Stream 2 activities while it awaited clarification from the US authorities on the detail of the measures. Although US Congress overwhelmingly backed the sanctions, there was some criticism among lawmakers of a move that in effect punishes NATO allies such as Germany.

While an EU spokesman criticised "the imposition of sanctions against EU companies conducting legitimate business", the German government said Berlin rejected "these sorts of extra-territorial sanctions". "They will hit German and European companies and constitute an interference in our internal affairs," said Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the United States of pushing an ideology that hindered global trade, adding on her Facebook page: "Soon they will demand that we stop breathing."

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Sunday, 22 December, 2019

We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore

T

The New York Times

By Tim Kreider

He release of the latest, and allegedly last, installment in the “Skywalker Saga,” comprising the canonical triad of trilogies in the eternally expanding “Star Wars” universe, seems like an appropriate time to pose a wistful little thought experiment: What if “Star Wars” — the original 1977 film — had performed at the box office about as everyone expected, in the range of a ’70s Disney film, earning, say, $16 million? Let’s imagine that some film historian or revisionist critic circa 2019 were to rediscover this forgotten gem, an oddity of ’70s cinema buried among all the Watergate-paranoia thrillers, demonic horror films and disaster blockbusters. Can we, with 40 years’ retrospect, evaluate it as a film instead of a phenomenon?

Before “Star Wars” became a commercial behemoth, most critics found it a charming diversion: The Times called it “the most elaborate, most expensive, most beautiful movie serial ever made.” They were bemused to see such high production values — state-of-the-art special effects, a full orchestral score — lavished on subject matter previously associated with cardboard props. It was, unlike all the tragic masterworks of American cinema of that decade, innocent good fun.

Had innocent fun not become a cynical commodity and conquered the multiplex, George Lucas would still be remembered as a lesser member of the Movie Brats, and his third feature as a curious synthesis of his first two: “THX 1138,” a pessimistic future dystopia, and “American Graffiti,” a nostalgic homage to a bygone era. At the very least, “Star Wars” would be remembered as an interesting, if eccentric, children’s film, a subversive sleeper like 1971’s

“Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”

It’s dispiriting to recall the dismal crudscape of children’s entertainment in the 1970s, the indifference and contempt with which most of it was produced: Disney at its nadir, “Benji” movies, a lot of Saturday morning TV made by people on drugs. “Star Wars” was made with evident care by master craftsmen — Ralph McQuarrie, John Dykstra, Ben Burtt and John Williams, among others. There was humor in the film, but it took its world, its ethos and its audience seriously. As almost every film that is not “Star Wars” demonstrates, it’s extremely difficult to strike this balance between treating your subject with respect but not too solemnly, being self-aware without condescension or camp.

Mr. Lucas’s interests as a filmmaker were initially abstract and formal, his ambitions avant-garde (watch his student film “electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4eB”), so his reversion to traditional, mythic plotting and what David Foster

Wallace called “single-entendre values” was so unfashionable as to be radical. His dialogue is as deliberately over-the-top as John Williams’s comic-opera blasts of sinister brass whenever we see the bad guys.

Like the other filmmakers in his cohort, Mr. Lucas crammed his films with allusions to the 1960s pantheon of auteurs, from Kurosawa to Ford, and some grad student might revisit “Star Wars” as a postmodern mashup of American film genres — Western gunslingers and World War II dogfights, Flynn and Rathbone dueling, Tarzan and Jane on the vine. As Umberto eco said of “Casablanca”: “It is not one movie.

It is ‘the movies.’” now that it’s one franchise among many, “Star Wars" seems timeless, but the original is very much a product of the 1970s: Mr. Lucas began writing it while American troops were still in Vietnam and nixon was being consumed by his dark side. It’s remembered now as a protoReaganesque, reactionary backlash

against the morally ambiguous cinema of the ’70s, but it’s also a countercultural, anti-fascist fable about shaggy young outsiders fighting a revolution against the faceless, armored henchmen of a military technocracy. The empire is comfortably identified with our favorite movie enemies, the nazis, which helps disguise the fact that they are also, metaphorically, the imperialist invaders of Vietnam, confident in their devastating firepower to crush an ill-equipped insurgency. This subtext got a lot less subtextual in “Return of the Jedi,” in which the occupiers’ superweapons are thwarted by the guerrilla tactics and crude boobytraps of a pretechnological people.

By the time James Cameron’s “Avatar” made this allegory painfully overt, it felt uncomfortably weird watching American audiences cheer fantasies of indigenous peoples defeating capitalist invaders bent on exploiting their resources, even as our own battle droids were blowing up insurgents in oil-rich Iraq. you could imagine Al Qaeda or Timothy McVeigh identifying with Luke blowing up the Death Star — plucky underdogs destroying symbols of invincible power with dollar-store equipment and an audacious, suicidal plan. How did we end up on the wrong side of this story?

Lots of critics pointed out that the coda of “Star Wars,” when three heroes march up a corridor between columns of massed soldiers, is a visual quote of the wreath-laying at nuremberg in “Triumph of the Will,” but everyone seems to assume this is a random allusion, devoid of historical context. It’s not as if Lucas was oblivious of the source.

His film is full of fascist iconography — all, up until this moment, associated with the empire.

Assuming this final image is deployed intentionally, it might be most hopefully interpreted as a warning: Don’t become the thing

you’ve fought against. The intimation of a hidden kinship between our hero and his enemy was right there in Darth Vader’s name all along — the dark father.

The ostensible moral of “Star Wars” is anti-technology, pro“feelings” — a very ’70s sensibility.

The empire is a rigid, militaristic hierarchy, obsessed with its hightech weaponry. But underlying it is an older tradition, represented by Darth Vader, that’s religious, mystic.

The “technological terror” is obliterated, but Vader escapes: Like Sauron, he can’t be destroyed, only driven out. It’s a prescient parable for our own governing technocrats, who thought they were exploiting atavistic fanatics to do their bidding, only to learn too late that the force of hatred was more powerful, and they’d been its servants all along.

“Star Wars” is ultimately a religious film — one of a wave of them in the decade of the Jesus Movement, films as disparate as “The exorcist” (1973) “Oh, God!” (1977) and “Close encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). It’s a caution against allowing your humanity to be effaced: The storm troopers and Vader are masked, robotic, like the police and surveillers in “THX 1138.” Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels (an influence on “Star Wars”) describe how, when people lose faith in science, it must be presented to them in the guise of religion to get them to accept it again. “Star Wars” did the opposite, selling religion and traditional values back to people disenchanted with the church in alluring, futuristic packaging.

Whether the message or the packaging prevailed is hard to gauge. The generations raised on “Star Wars” did not exactly heed Obi-Wan’s advice to turn off their computers (and dread “catching feelings”), but the religion Lucas invented, based vaguely on ’70s West-coast Zen, is now an official one: Jediism received tax-exempt status in the United States in 2015.

BOOK REVIEW

Conversations With Friends (Who Are Also Writers)

J

The New York Times

By ConCepCión de León

enny Zhang was in sweatpants, wrestling one Sunday afternoon with a short story that wasn’t coming together.

She typed out an email to seven other writers: “yo. Can we meet up next week? I have something that I kinda semiurently” — the g key on her keyboard was broken — “need help on.”

The story, which jumped back and forth between plotlines, was intentionally nontraditional, and she didn’t want to lose that. The peers whose advice she sought, she said, “would let the jagged edges remain” while making the story “better than it was.”

When she met with them, they helped her find the thread in the story, which she finished and included in her 2017 book “Sour Heart.”

Writing is often considered a solitary act, but some writers have figured out a way to make the process more collaborative even before editors, agents and other publishing professionals get involved. Zhang’s group, which includes Alice Sola Kim, Karan Mahajan and Tony Tulathimutte, has been meeting about every month since most of them were undergraduate students at Stanford University. Their sessions are highly structured, with deadlines for submitting drafts and detailed manuscript notes, while other groups gather more informally to talk about their careers, commiserate over deadlines or gossip about

the publishing industry. “you will feel like writing is very lonely and very difficult and very frustrating and that you don’t really know what you’re doing,” said the Chicago-based writer Mikki Kendall. But in a writing group, “you can talk to other people in that place and that are feeling their way out.”

For Zhang, the group grew out of a need for a more supportive space than the ones she was encountering in creative-writing classes.

“There would be, like, racist stories being put up and praised in workshops,” she said. “I didn’t have adults or published writers to look

up to, so it was nice to have this horizontal space.” Over the years, aside from editing one another’s work, they’ve also turned to each other for advice on choosing an agent or applying to writing residencies.

That these groups are self-selecting means they can be modeled after their members’ specific needs. Last year, David Greenberg, who teaches history and media at Rutgers University, was on sabbatical working on a biography of Representative John Lewis when he decided to form a writing group to keep him accountable. He emailed about a dozen academics and journalists who specialized in

history, and most of them were game.

“We have a certain degree of expertise and knowledge about both content and approach that makes it a particularly informed, highlevel discussion,” Greenberg said. Critiquing a chapter of a forthcoming Judah Benjamin biography by James Traub, another member of the group, “We got in a big discussion about slavery and Benjamin’s slave-owning, and it led someone to encourage him to draw a more detailed portrait of slavery in new Orleans, where Benjamin lived.” One of the members also recommended a recent academic book that helped Traub’s research on the topic.

Mira Jacob’s critically acclaimed graphic memoir “Good Talk,” which reflects on her life through the lens of race, sexuality and identity, came about partly through challenging discussions with her writing group. She left an earlier one, she said, after a member dismissed an early draft of her book as an example of what “was ruining America.”

Her new group, which includes the novelists Alexander Chee and Julia Phillips, is made up mostly of people of color, and Jacob said their conversations resulted “in my most vibrant book.” “Good Talk” closes with an open letter to Jacob’s young son, whose questions about race and politics frame the book. At first, Jacob said, the writing was made more difficult by her anger at having to write it, but the group pushed her to go deeper: Who was the anger directed toward?

What did it mean to be angry in a letter to her son? What exactly was she trying to convey?

Sunday, 22 December, 2019

14 SPORTS

Carlo anCelottI appoInted everton ManaGer LONdON

e

AGENCIES

VERTON haved turned to the vastly experienced Carlo Ancelotti as their new manager, with a brief to return the faded Premier League club to former glories.

Ancelotti, 60, was sacked by Napoli last week but comes with a trophy-laden CV from spells at a clutch of Europe's top clubs, including Juventus, AC Milan, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich.

His arrival, which was confirmed on Saturday, is a coup for the Toffees, who are languishing in 16th place in the Premier League, just three points above the relegation zone. Everton have not won silverware since 1995 but they have a proud tradition and, with nine league titles, are still fourth in the alltime list of winners behind Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal.

Ancelotti is used to dining at European football's top table, but his imme-

diate task will be to guarantee survival before trying to fulfil the ambitions of Everton's majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri. The British-Iranian businessman has ploughed in hundreds of millions of pounds since buying a 49.9 percent stake in the club in 2016. He has since increased his stake further.

However, that investment has not reaped much reward on the pitch as

NEW YORK AGENCIES

Surfing legend Kelly Slater, seen by many as the greatest of all time, won't be competing at the Tokyo Olympics.

The 47-year-old American was edged for a spot on the US squad for the sport's Olympic debut next July, with John John Florence returning from knee surgery to edge Slater for the final spot at an event in Hawaii on Thursday.

Slater, an 11-time world champion who became the youngest and oldest to win the crown, inspired a generation of surfing stars with videos of his amazing efforts becoming must-see viewing for fans and competitors. Competing as an Olympian would have been an epic farewell for a 40-year career than began at age eight in a youth event but instead he will be watching the event.

"I'm going to enjoy it as a spectator," Slater told the New York Times, dismissing any notion he would end his career early after missing out on the Olympics.

"Be sure that in 2020, they will continue to see me at the top of a wave," he added.

Slater needed a victory at the Pipeline Masters on Oahu's North Shore to secure the title but lost in the semi-finals, leaving him ranked eighth in the world but one spot behind 2016 and 2017 world champion Florence, who took the second US men's team spot behind already qualified Kolohe Andino.

Florence, an Oahu North Shore native 20 years younger than Slater, was a former protege of the surf icon. "He has been my idol since I was a child," Florence said. "He's like a member of my family, like an uncle." Florence, who missed five of 11 tour events this year with a knee injury, returned for the season finale but was eliminated in the Pipeline quarter-finals. He sealed his Olympic spot when Slater lost to Brazil's Italo Ferreira in the semis.

Everton have finished seventh, eighth and eighth in the three full seasons since Moshiri's takeover. Much of his money has been wasted in settlements for sacked managers. Roberto Martinez, Ronald Koeman, Sam Allardyce and Marco Silva have all been dismissed over the past three-and-a-half years.

However, Moshiri's commitment to make Everton a relevant player in what

he once described as the "Hollywood of football" alongside Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City in England's north-west has seen him splash out once more for a three-time Champions League winner in Ancelotti.

The Italian has won league titles in four different countries among 15 major honours and will reportedly be one of the highest-paid managers in the league. Yet, there are doubts whether Ancelotti's skillset is the right fit for what Everton currently need.

Ancelotti has built a reputation on massaging big egos in the dressing rooms and boardrooms of Europe's biggest clubs, but has always been able to count on supremely talented squads over the past two decades since leaving Reggiana for Parma in 1996.

The lack of intensity to his day-today training sessions have been blamed for a return of just four league titles from his 20 years at prominent clubs, two of which came with a huge financial advantage over the competition at PSG and Bayern. His time in Munich ended just two months into the 2017/18 season with the players claiming they had to organise extra training for themselves such was the sharp slip in demands from the coaching staff after three years under Pep Guardiola. At Napoli, progress to the last 16 of the Champions League was not enough to save his job after a seven-game winless run in Serie A left them well adrift of the top four.

Surfing legend Slater won't compete at Tokyo Olympics

Struggling Fiorentina fires manager Montella FLORENCE: Fiorentina announced on Saturday that they had fired coach Vincenzo Montella with the club struggling in 14th in Serie A. "Vincenzo Montella has been relieved of his duties as head coach of the first team," the club announced on its web site. "The decision was taken following a long and detailed analysis of the team's performances and results." "Given the need to rediscover the necessary grit and determination on the pitch and produce an immediate turnaround, the owners and management decided that a change of coach was the best option," the club continued.

Fiorentina promised a new coach would be announced "in the next few days". Montella, a 45-year-old former Italy winger, managed Fiorentina from 2012-15 leading the club to two fourth-place finishes in Serie A before he was fired. After spells in charge at Sampdoria, AC Milan and Sevilla, he returned to Florence in April. Fiorentina lost 4-1 at home to Roma on Friday and have taken just two points from their last seven games. Buoyed at the start of the season by the arrival of Franck Ribery, the team has been struggling since the Frenchman suffered a serious ankle injury that will keep him out until February. AEGNCIES

I have to earn new deal, insists Guardiola LONDON: Pep Guardiola insists he still has to earn a new contract at Manchester City despite winning five major trophies in the past two seasons. City are keen for Guardiola to commit to a deal beyond the current one that ends in 2021. But, in the midst of a frustrating season that sees City trailing Premier League leaders Liverpool by 14 points, the 48-year-old says there is no rush to agree an extension, partly because performance will be a factor in his future. "I have one more year and always I have to deserve to extend my contract," Guardiola told reporters on Friday. "Managers, we have to get results. At this club you have to win.

In football, we spoke about this, the situation changed a lot, managers today, even in this country, they change a lot. "In just four or five months, how many managers have been sacked? So that's why we have to be patient and do our job. "We still have a lot of time.

So we have patience, we have an incredible relationship with the board, with the people who decide, and we will take the decision that is best for the club. AGENCIES

Tennis in 2019: Nadal on top as new faces make mark in women's game LONdON AGENCIES

Rafael Nadal finished the season on top of the world to give the men's rankings a familiar look but a new crop of women is showing the old guard can be overthrown.

The Spanish world number one and Novak Djokovic won two Grand Slams each in 2019, holding Father Time and their young rivals at bay for another year.

But Ashleigh Barty and teenager Bianca Andreescu were two new faces on the list of women's Major winners as familiar names slipped from view.

AFP Sport looks at some of the big talking points of the season.

CaN NaDaL stay ON tOp iN 2020? Rafael Nadal arrived at the Italian Open in May without a title in 2019.

He beat Novak Djokovic in the final and lost just three matches in the rest of the season, winning the French Open and the US Open before inspiring Spain to Davis Cup glory on home soil, finishing as world number one for a fifth time.

With a combined age of 103, Nadal, Djokovic and Roger Federer continue to dominate men's tennis and it takes a brave punter to predict their imminent demise.

But there is at last the sense of a credible challenge from an exciting crop of youngsters including Daniil Medvedev, who pushed Nadal all the way in the US Open final, and ATP Finals winner Stefanos Tsitsipas. "I believe I'm really close to being crowned a Grand Slam champion," said Tsitsipas after beating Dominic Thiem in the final in London.

WOmEN's NExtGEN shOW thE Way: Australia's Ashleigh Barty, 23, rose from the relative anonymity of 15th in the world at the end of 2018 to top the rankings a year later, winning the French Open and the WTA Finals along the way.

Teenager Bianca Andreescu of Canada soared even more dramatically, from 178th to fifth in the world, beating Serena Williams in the final of the US Open to become the first Canadian to win a Grand Slam singles title. "NextGen is here," Andreescu announced during her winning run at Flushing Meadows. "You see many fresh faces and I think we're only going to get better from here."

FEDERER's WimbLEDON paiN: Roger Federer had two Wimbledon championship points on his own serve to beat Novak Djokovic and win his 21st

Grand Slam title. That would have taken him six clear of the Serbian on the alltime list and three clear of Rafael Nadal at the time. Instead, he faltered. Djokovic, in a match lasting a shade under five hours, won his 16th Grand Slam and two months later Nadal won his 19th.

"It's such an incredible opportunity missed," said the Swiss veteran, now 38 and who must fear his days as the all-time leader on the list are numbered. sERENa's COuRt pRObLEm: Serena Williams is running out of opportunities to win the 24th Grand Slam singles title that would pull her level with Margaret Court's record.

The 38-year-old American reached the final at both Wimbledon and the US Open but she won just four games against Simona Halep in London and lost in straight sets to Bianca Andreescu in New York. It followed defeats in the finals of both events the previous year, suggesting Williams is feeling the pressure.

Speaking after her US Open defeat, she downplayed the pursuit of Court's record. "I'm not necessarily chasing a record. I'm just trying to win Grand Slams," she said. "It's definitely frustrating, but for the most part I just am still

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here. I'm still doing what I can do."

COmEbaCk OF thE yEaR: In January, British former world number one Andy Murray admitted the 2019 Australian Open could be his last tournament during a tearful press conference.

But the Scot, 32, returned to the court after hip resurfacing surgery and beat fellow veteran Stan Wawrinka in the final of the European Open in October.

"It means a lot," Murray said after his triumph. "The past few years have been

extremely difficult.... I didn't expect to be in this position at all, so I'm very happy." a staR is bORN: Having been the youngest player to come through Wimbledon qualifying, 15-year-old Coco Gauff stunned five-time champion Venus Williams in the first round in straight sets, belying her ranking of 313. "My dream was to win. That's what happened," said the American whose run at the All England Club was eventually ended by champion Simona Halep in the fourth round.

Sunday, 22 December, 2019

SPORTS 15

Shaheen aFrIdI and ChandIMal Star on day oF FluCtuatInG FortuneS KARACHI

o

AGENCIES

N a day that threatened to mirror the script of its predecessor in the first hour, Sri Lanka dug in and clawed their way to, and then well past, Pakistan's first innings total. The lead of 80 came courtesy lower-order contributions that will have frustrated Pakistan no end, with Dinesh Chandimal tying the innings together as Sri Lanka held off a surging Pakistan pace attack. The home side, for their part, did well enough to ensure there wasn't any bloodletting in the tricky final hour the openers had to deal with, as Shan Masood and Abid Ali reduced the deficit to 23 by stumps.

From 80 for 5, partnerships of 67, 37, 51 and 36 extended Sri Lanka's innings well into the third session, Dhananjaya de Silva and Chandimal robbing Pakistan of the momentum they had generated in an opening hour of hostile fast bowling. Nightwatchman Lasith Embuldeniya was dropped early in the day but fell soon after in a bizarre attempt to slog-sweep Mohammad Abbas, while Shaheen Afridi - who picked up his first five-for in Tests - needed no such largesse from Angelo Mathews, bringing one in to tickle the batsman's inside edge through to the keeper.

Pakistan may well have felt this was their chance to come away with a lead, but swift counterattacking - and an ineffectual spell from a confidence-sapped Yasir Shah - poured water over those plans. When de Silva strode down the crease to loft Yasir over his head, following it up with a back-foot punch through cover, the shackles were broken. Yasir was unable to settle on either length, line

or pace, with both batsmen taking advantage of the inconsistency as Sri Lanka neared 150.

The breakthrough came thanks to Afridi, with de Silva unable to get on top of a short-pitched delivery and sending it straight down fine leg's throat. But the wicket did little to stem the flow of runs before lunch, and by now, even Niroshan Dickwella, who had used up more than his fair share of luck in his first half hour at the crease, was emerging from his shell. Then Abbas would castle him with perhaps the ball of the day, beating him on the inside edge with an inward-seam-

ing delivery that clipped the top of off, and at 182 for 7, with Sri Lanka nine short of Pakistan's first-innings total, it seemed this would become a second-innings shootout.

Pakistan were guilty of letting the game drift for large spells, and the eighthwicket partnership at one point scored at nearly 4.50 runs per over. Dilruwan Perera was perfectly comfortable keeping Chandimal company as Sri Lanka brought up the 200 and then beyond, the highlight being Chandimal spanking Naseem Shah for three fours in an over.

When Chandimal fell, Dilruwan took

on. It took the return of Afridi to finally clean Dilruwan up two runs shy of a welldeserved half-century, and the left-arm quick removed No. 11 Lahiru Kumara a couple of balls later to bring an end to what had appeared an interminable innings. It was the first time he had taken five wickets in an innings, but for Pakistan's most consistent fast bowler over the last couple of tours, you feel sure there is more to follow.

At that stage, Sri Lanka walked into the changing PakiSTaN room, likely confident it 191 aNd 57 fOr 0 was their day, maybe their Test match, (abid 32*, MaSOOd 21*) even and the final hour repTrail Sri laNka 271 resented an opportunity to ram that point (ChaNdiMal 74, further home. But PakdilruwaN 48, afridi 5- istan came out determined not to block their 77. abbaS 4-55) by way through the fourteen 23 ruNS overs they faced, both openers taking the attack to the quicks right from the outset. Abid Ali's confidence wasn't surprising, given his form, and Shan Masood didn't shy away from putting bat on ball either, and got off over the mantle. Pakistan duly spread the to a start evocative of the form he disfield for him; practically begging him to played on Pakistan's tour of South Africa take a single and turn the strike over. De- at the start of the year, when he regained spite this, Dilruwan continued to find the his place in the side. boundary, despite seven fielders staSri Lanka turned to Embuldeniya tioned in the deep at most points during within five overs, and while he got the his ninth-wicket stand with Vishwa Fer- ball to turn, there were no genuine nando. Haris Sohail may have been suc- chances. The 50 partnership came up becessful getting rid of Chandimal, but fore the end of the day, and when the when they tried his occasional left-arm light finally faded, Pakistan were a mere spin against Dilruwan, he carted him 23 runs away from levelling the scores. down the ground for a six off the first The Test match may be evenly poised, ball of his spell. but the evidence of the last half-session Tea came and went, and Sri Lanka suggests Sri Lanka's fourth-innings chase moved past 250, and continued to march will be anything but routine.

Can west indies bowlers keep up the pressure in decider?

CUTTACK AGENCIES

This is the second successive bilateral series at home in which India have come to the deciding ODI with the series still even. The last time it happened, against Australia, India ended up losing.

Is a repeat likely? Perhaps not, given India's strength in the 50-overs format, but it's not out of the question. West Indies showed in the first ODI that when their batting and bowling come together, they are a side that's hard to stop too.

India have had injury issues with their bowling attack, but the batting wears an extremely powerful look.

Shreyas Iyer has settled in as a No. 4 who can explode if coming in late, or rebuild if early wickets have fallen. With Rishabh Pant and Kedar Jadhav to follow, Iyer has become the link between an irresistible top three and a power-packed finish.

West Indies also have most bases covered with their batting, but their bowling has the tendency to fall apart under pressure. To be fair, when a batting line-up like India's gets going in familiar conditions, any attack will be under pressure. The best way to counter that for West Indies will be early wickets.

Two matches, four runs, five balls, two dismissals. This is alien territory for Virat Kohli, especially in ODIs, and especially against West Indies. He set the scene on fire in the T20Is, but he has barely given spectators enough time to settle down from applauding him into the crease when he has been walking back.

Cricket odds don't work in this fashion but it will take a brave, possibly foolhardy person to bet against Kohli

making a big score in this match. Despite the two failures in this series, he is still averaging 71.66 at a strike rate of 97.06 against West Indies.

Coming into this match on the back of becoming an IPL millionaire, Sheldon Cottrell had a below-par outing in the second ODI, but he was quite irresistible in the opening game.

His first spell there read 5-3-12-2, the wickets being of KL Rahul and Kohli.

His left-arm angle, changes of pace and ability to move the ball off the pitch make him a consistent threat.

India lost Bhuvneshwar Kumar to injury, and are now without Deepak Chahar too. Their replacements are Shardul Thakur and Navdeep Saini. India's choice of playing XI will depend on whether they want to go with three seamers or three spinners. If they pick only two seamers, Saini will have to beat Thakur to make it to the XI. He was impressive for Delhi in the recent second round of the Ranji Trophy, while Thakur wasn't particularly penetrative in the second ODI.

pitCh aND CONDitiONs: The last ODI at this ground was played nearly three years ago, and it was a very high scoring one. India made 381 for 6 and England responded with 366 for 8. There haven't been List A matches at the ground since March 2017, though in the domestic T20s earlier this year, the scoring rates, in general, weren't high. Iyer said on the eve of the match that the pitch will be "really fast" in the second innings and the dew factor will play a "massive role".

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Bug-struck england call up dom Bess and Craig overton as cover JOhaNNEsbuRG: The Somerset duo of offspinner Dom Bess and medium-pacer Craig Overton have been called up to England's Test squad ahead of the first Test against South Africa - starting on Boxing Day in Centurion - after a bug swept through the touring party, leaving a number of players unwell. The two are expected to reach Johannesburg on Saturday morning.

As reported earlier, England's tour match against South Africa A, which starts on Friday, was downgraded from first-class status because of the ongoing effects of illness in the line-up. Among those to have fallen ill were Jofra Archer, Stuart Broad and Jack Leach, none of whom travelled to the game. The ECB said in a statement that the match will be a "three-day friendly match with only 11 players batting or fielding at any point in time". The call-ups highlight England's level of concern ahead of the first Test after such a disrupted build-up. Leach travelled to New Zealand last month as the Test team's first-choice spinner, but was left out in Hamilton and then hospitalised by a bout of gastroenteritis. Although legspinner Matt Parkinson is with the squad in South Africa, he has yet to play a Test and only appeared in four Championship games for Lancashire in 2019. Bess made his Test debut at Lord's last year when Leach, his Somerset team-mate, suffered a broken finger. Although he has had to play the understudy role at Taunton, he provides more of an allround option, having impressed with the bat during his two Tests against Pakistan. The call for Bess also confirms England's cautious approach to plans for a Moeen Ali comeback. After being dropped during the summer, Moeen has taken an indefinite break from Test cricket and Ashley Giles, England director of men's cricket, said earlier this week that the allrounder "needs to make sure he's ready" before he is selected again.

Overton, meanwhile, featured as recently as the fourth Ashes Test at Old Trafford in September. AGENCIES

Sunday, 22 December, 2019

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ISPR refutes reports of attack in Neelum valley Pakistan Army spokesperson Major General Asif Ghafoor on Saturday rejected reports concerning an attack in Neelum Valley by the Indian forces. In a statement, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Gen Ghafoor said the Indian forces violated ceasefire agreement in Deva Sector of the Line of Control. “The Pakistan Army responded befittingly and destroyed Indian checkposts across the border,” the statement added. Earlier in the day, the Indian Army rejected social media rumours that it opened the fence at the Line of Control (LoC) and captured a village in Pakistan part of Kashmir, according to Indiatvnews .Incidentally, earlier in the day, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan took to Twitter to criticise the Indian government over its handling of the citizenship law protests. In a series of tweets, he threatened of a “befitting response” from Pakistan in case of an escalation at the border by the Army. “…Now with the Citizens Amendment Act, all those Indians who want a pluralist India are beginning to protest & it is becoming a mass movement,” Khan wrote on the social networking site. Pakistan’s PM said that as the protests in India are increasing, “threat to Pakistan from India is also increasing” and the Indian Army chief General Bipin Rawat’s remarks on the situation along the Line of Control adds to Pakistan’s “concerns of a false flag operation”. news Desk

PBC suspends licences of Buzdar, Basharat The Punjab Bar Council on Saturday suspended the practicing licences of Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar and Law Minister Raja Basharat over their failure to apply for a suspension before assuming their respective offices. The council has issued notices to the duo and asked them to appear before the vice chairman of the PBC on January 4, 2020. They are also told to bring along a written reply on “why their matter may not be referred to the Punjab Bar Council Disciplinary Tribunal for further action in accordance with the law”. On December 2, the PBC had suspended Federal Minister for Law Farogh Naseem’s licence to practice law after he re-joined cabinet. news Desk

US denies public was lied to about Afghan war progress WASHINGTON: Top US defence officials denied on Friday that the military had for years hidden from the public its lack of progress in the Afghan war. Defence Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley rejected allegations that the Pentagon and other government agencies had falsely reported progress while internally officials were deeply skeptical about the war. “This has been very transparent. It’s not like this war was hiding somewhere,” Esper told reporters. “Between all the folks looking at this conflict over the years, some type of insinuation that there’s been this large-scale conspiracy is just, to me, ridiculous,” he said. “I know there’s an assertion out there, of some sort of coordinated lie over the course of 18 years […] I find that a mischaracterisation,” added Milley. “I know that I and many, many others gave assessments at the time based on facts that we knew at the time,” he said.

“And those were honest assessments and they were never intended to deceive either the Congress or the American people.” Last week The Washington Post began publishing what it called “The Afghanistan Papers,” a trove of internal government documents documenting the failure to defeat the Taliban group and to strengthen the Afghan government.

‘Very GOOd’ jOurNAlISm: Milley called the Post reporting “a very, very good piece of investigative journalism”. But he insisted that documents were “backwards-looking” interviews and assessments made to review the US experience and not to mask it — unlike the Pentagon Papers, which when leaked in 1971 showed much more manipulative behaviour by the government over the Vietnam war. Milley said US forces have been successful in rooting out Afghanistan-based Al-Qaeda, which was behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and to punish their protectors, the Taliban.

SaudiS deny 'blackmailing' PakiStan over kl Summit SAUDI EMBASSY SAYS TIES BETWEEN PAKISTAN, SAUDI ARABIA ‘SUPERIOR TO THE LANGUAGE OF THREAT’ ISLAMABAD

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HE Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Pakistan denied the “information and fake news” broadcasted by some media channels, claiming that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia “pressurised and threatened Pakistan” to refrain from participating in the Kuala Lumpur Summit.

The embassy “affirms that the relations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan are superior to the language of threat”, the statement claimed, adding that the ties between the countries were “long-standing and strategic based on trust, understanding and mutual respect”.

“The two countries enjoy a consensus of views on most regional and international issues, especially the issues of the Islamic nation,” it added.

The embassy also “confirms that the Kingdom has always stood with Pakistan in difficult times based on fraternal relations, and we strive always to stand with Pakistan to be a successful and stable country”.

On Friday, a Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah quoted President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying that Saudi Arabia threat-

ened Pakistan with extreme measures, which include the imposition of economic sanctions and deportation of its citizens working in the Kingdom, to stop it from attending the Kuala Lumpur Summit.

According to Erdogan, Saudi Arabia also threatened to withdraw $6 billion from Pakistan’s central bank and warned of further economic sanctions in case it became part of the event.

“Unfortunately, we see that Saudi Arabia pressures Pakistan. Now, there are promises that the country has given to Pakistan regarding the central bank. However, more than that, there are 4m Pakistanis working

in Saudi Arabia. They (threaten by saying that they) would send (Pakistanis) back and re-employ Bangladeshi people instead,” Erdogan was quoted as saying by Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah.

However, Foreign Office (FO) Spokesperson Aisha Farooqui said that Pakistan did not participate in the summit as time and efforts were needed to address the concerns of major Muslim countries regarding possible division in the Ummah. “Pakistan will continue to work for the unity and solidarity of the Ummah, which is indispensable for effectively addressing the challenges faced by the Muslim world,” she said.

Muslim nations consider gold, barter trade to beat sanctions KUALA LUMPUR Agencies

Iran, Malaysia, Turkey and Qatar are considering trading among themselves in gold and through a barter system as a hedge against any future economic sanctions on them, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Saturday.

At the end of an Islamic summit in Malaysia, Mahathir praised Iran and Qatar for withstanding economic embargoes and said it was important for the Muslim world to be self-reliant to face future threats.

“With the world witnessing nations making unilateral decisions to impose such punitive measures, Malaysia and other nations must always bear in mind that it can be imposed on any of us,” Mahathir said.

United States-allied Arab states Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic and trade links with Qatar about 2-1/2-years

ago over allegations it backs terrorism, a charge Doha denies. Iran, meanwhile, has been hit badly after the US reimposed sanctions on it last year.

“I have suggested that we re-visit the idea of trading using the gold dinar and barter trade among us,” Mahathir said, referring to the Islamic medieval gold coin.

“We are seriously looking into this and we hope that we will be able to find a mechanism to put it into effect.”

The leaders agreed they needed do more business among themselves and trade in each other’s currencies.

The summit, which was snubbed by Saudi Arabia, was criticised for undermining the Saudi-based Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which represents 57 Muslim-majority nations.

Malaysia said all the OIC members had been invited to the Kuala Lumpur summit but only about 20 showed up. By the fourth and final day of the summit, no joint statement

had been released. The summit had been expected to discuss major issues affecting Muslims, including Palestine, Kashmir and the plight of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and China’s camps for Uighur Muslims in its western Xinjiang region.

Without naming any country, Mahathir said there was concern that Muslims in nonMuslim countries were forced to undergo assimilation.

“We support integration but assimilation to the extent of shedding our religion is unacceptable,” he said.

At a news conference, he said the summit participants had been told that Uighurs were being detained in China. “We have to hear the state, we have to hear the people who complain, then only it will be fair,” he said.

He called India’s new citizenship act unfortunate. The act facilitates for faster naturalisation of non-Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who had settled in India prior to 2015.

India protests rage on as death toll rises to 21 NEW DEHLI Agencies

Thousands of people joined fresh rallies against a contentious citizenship law in India on Saturday, with 21 killed so far in this month’s unrest.

The death toll jumped after demonstrations turned violent on Friday in the most populous state Uttar Pradesh, leaving at least 11 dead including an eightyear-old boy, who was trampled.

Another protester died Saturday after clashes in Rampur, also in Uttar Pradesh, as police used tear gas and batons against a stone-pelting crowd, police told AFP. Disquiet has been growing about the law, which was passed by parliament on December 11 and gives people from persecuted minorities from three neighbouring countries an easier path to citizenship—but not if they are Muslim.

Critics say the law discriminates against Muslims and is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nation-

alist agenda, a claim his political party has denied. Authorities have scrambled to contain the situation—imposing emergency laws, blocking internet access, and shutting down shops in sensitive areas

across the country.

Demonstrators have vowed to keep up their fight until the law is revoked.

Protests were held Saturday in numerous states, including in the cities of

Chennai, Gurgaon and Guwahati.

As day broke in the capital New Delhi, demonstrators held up their mobile phones as torches at India’s biggest mosque Jama Masjid in a show of dissent.

In Patna in the eastern state of Bihar, three demonstrators suffered bullet wounds and six were hurt from stonepelting after clashing with counter-protesters, police said.

At an all-women protest in Assam state’s Guwahati city in the northeast— where the wave of protests started amid fears the immigrants would dilute their local cultures—participants said it was time to speak up.

“We came out to fight for our motherland, we came to fight without any arms and ammunition, we will fight peacefully,” Lily Dutta told AFP. ‘Stampede-like situation’ – Since being re-elected this year Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have stripped Muslim-majority Kashmir of its autonomy and carried out a register of cit-

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izens in Assam.

The BJP has said it wants to conduct the National Register of Citizens (NRC) nationwide, fuelling fears Muslims—a 200-million minority in India—were being disenfranchised.

BJP’s general secretary Bhupender Yadav told reporters Saturday the party would “launch an awareness campaign” and hold 1,000 rallies to dispel “lies” about the law.

In northern Uttar Pradesh, Muslims make up almost 20 percent of the 200million population. The state’s police spokesman Shirish Chandra told AFP 10 people died Friday after being shot.

The boy also died Friday in a “stampede-like situation” when 2,500 people including children joined a rally in the holy city of Varanasi, district police chief Prabhakar Chaudhary told AFP. The unrest had already seen one death in Uttar Pradesh, two in the southwestern state of Karnataka and six in Assam.