City Notes
I wonder at the crowd that burnt an Ahmedi place of worship in Chakwal district. One narrative says these were fearless sons of Islam intent on ridding their community of an excrescence. Another says that one of the instigators of the riot had a property dispute. I really don’t know the rights and wrongs of the matter, but I would incline to the latter. If the sons of Islam had truly been upset, they would have burnt tyres on the road. Have you ever wondered why protesters burn tyres? I suppose it beats them burning buildings. Or people.
No one in the USA has bothered burning tyres, even though the CIA has accused the USSR of interfering in the recent American presidential election by hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails and making them public through Wikileaks. The interference was supposed to be in favour of the eventual winner, Donald Trump. Trump was dismissive of the CIA. Just as much as Imran Khan accuses the bureaucracy and the judiciary of being on the side of the Sharifs, Trump accuses the CIA of favouring Hillary Clinton, even though she lost. The big difference between Imran and Trump? Trump won.
And Trump got to name the US Secretary of State. He has picked Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon. Remember our equivalent, Shaukat Mirza, the PSO MD? He was murdered, not made Foreign Minister. Of course, being dead is not necessarily a disqualification. I mean, ask the Governor of Sindh. Yes, he’s been discharged from hospital, where he had spent the beginning of his tenure.
Of course, Tillerson, whose boss has yet to take office, will have to handle Syria, where the rebel stronghold of Aleppo has fallen. The fall has grave consequences for the USA as well as for the rebels, and Tillerson will have the perfect opportunity to get involved in the Middle East, where a lot of the Exxon product comes from. And it’s a funny thing, but Mirza had come to PSO from Exxon, where he had spent most of his career. So Tillerson has heard of Pakistan, but not in the most favourable context. Not someone to burn tyres against, but quite close.
Someone else, with whom Tillerson will have to deal with, the new UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, was sworn in for a five-year term. His Predecessor, Ban Ki-Moon, plans a return to South Koren politics, where, 10 years ago, he was Foreign Minister. Now he might run for President. Instead of waiting until December 2017, when the election is due, he might run sooner, as the current President, Park has been impeached, and if the Constitutional Court upholds this, a fresh election has to be held in 60 days Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, ran for his country’s Presidency, his Nazi past was uncovered. Wonder what will unfold about Ban? Or Guterres, who might run for the Portuguese presidency later? He should be safe, because his past has probably been picked over when he ran for Prime Minister.
More recently, he had been UN Human Rights chief, where he had to deal with the humanitarian crisis in Syria. He wouldn’t have had to deal with the rebel demand for UN observers, but as Secretary General, it’s very much his pigeon.
Aleppo was not the only bad news for militants. Also, from Ludwigshafen in the Rineland-Palatinate state of Germany, in its south-west, comes the news of the failure of a bomb planted in a store, intended to kill Christmas shoppers. The bomber was impeccably German, a 12-year-old of Iraqi parentage. So how do you handle kids within your own boundaries, born and brought up there, who become radicalized? No wonder Europe is becoming even more intolerant of immigrants.
Militants in Pakistan may well be avoiding everyone’s gaze, because the country marked the APS massacre’s second anniversary. But perhaps the most heartfelt statement came from the new COAS, who must have felt relieved that he didn’t have to maintain the usual stony silence on December 16, which was the 45th anniversary of the Fall of Dacca. That had nothing to do with the Army, by the way, it was a political defeat, not a military.
The foiled attack on a Hyderabad imambargah was an attempt to mark the APS massacre, not the Fall of Dacca. However, militants haven’t been all defeated. They seem to be active in Turkey, where an attack on an Army bus in Kayseri killed 13 soldiers and injured 45. This was after Saturday’s car bombing at an Ankara Stadium last Saturday, which killed 38 and injured 155. The Turkish government has blamed the Kurdish separatists’ main party, the PKK, for this one too. If the PKK can be thought militant, why not the Modi government? Firing on a school van on the LOC, killing the driver and injuring 8 children was surely a wildly inappropriate way to mark the APS anniversary, and even inappropriate for Dhaka.