Reviewed By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
Men wage wars but the chief victims of war are invariably women. The truth of this has been so clearly established in Kashmir, which has been in the grip of an insurgency for the last 13 years. Yet surprisingly one doesn’t get to read much about how violence has impacted on the lives of women in that unhappy valley, which many years ago claimed to be the spot where “the world ended and paradise began”.
Continue reading A cry in the wilderness?
By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
IN his recent “neighbourhood diplomacy” which took him to Dhaka and Colombo, President Pervez Musharraf took a major step in his bid to muster support for Islamabad in the region. He expressed “regrets” at the “excesses” committed 31 years ago by the Pakistan Army in what was then East Pakistan.
Thus he emerges as an army general with the moral courage and dignity to concede the wrongs done by his predecessors, the power-hungry rulers of the day who unfortunately also happened to be men in uniform. Earlier in 2001, he had released the Hamoodur Rahman Commission report, which exposed the wrongdoings of those at the helm in 1971.
Continue reading Time to say sorry
By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
MAY 28 is the fourth anniversary of Pakistan’s nuclear tests at Chaghai. On Yom-i-takbir, which the government celebrated in a big way in 1999, it informed the people through boastful newspaper ads: “We are the seventh nuclear power of the world”.
Today, as war clouds gather on the horizon, this nuclear status gives us no joy or confidence. Those in power might reassure us that nuclear weapons will not be used. But who will believe them? Can states, which possess nuclear arsenals, keep their confrontation limited to warfare with conventional weapons?
Continue reading Nuclear war: an insane option
By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
LAST week, Pakistan experienced the horror of its first case of suicide bombing in which 14 people were killed, 11 of them French engineers working on a naval submarine project.
This act of terrorism will have far-reaching implications for Pakistan’s politics, economy, security and foreign policy, apart from the effect it has had of besmirching the country’s image even further at a time when a turnaround was thought to be near at hand.
The authorities had no definitive information about the identity of the attacker, his motive and his connections with a terrorist network, if any. Yet the knee-jerk reaction in official circles was to point an accusing finger at India for this horrendous crime.
These allegations surprised no one, for it has been the traditional practice for the two countries to make the other the scapegoat when such criminal incidents occur.
Continue reading Globalization of terrorism
By Zubeida Mustafa
It was April 6, 1992, Eid for the Muslims of Bosnia, when the Yugoslav army struck. The Serbian soldiers had been taking up position on the hills surrounding Sarajevo since winter and we sensed that something out of the ordinary was taking place. However, we never really anticipated a war. Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic society but we had never been conscious of our ethnic distinctiveness. Many of my friends were Serbs and Croats with whom I had grown up, and none of us believed that we would fight each other.