The way forward

We need a core group of intellectuals, politically aware progressive thinkers to formulate a critical history of the socialist struggle internationally and at home. Only coming to terms with this track record in theory and practice can point the way forward and inspire new generations of revolutionaries. Simply repeating formulae from the past does not provide convincing answers to the defeat and retreat since 1989, nor does it provide clarity in a globalised world for Pakistan’s entrapment in external neocolonialism and internal colonialism. We also need a fresh analysis of our own state and society rather than relying blindly on other revolutionary experiences.

Rashed Rahman

Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) (link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com)

Director, Research and Publication Centre (RPC) (on Facebook)

Business Recorder Column March 11, 2025

No lessons learnt

 

Rashed Rahman

 

Pakistan is a unique country in which the authorities seem incapable of learning from past experience. Here we are in the middle of trying to unravel the Independent Power Producers’ (IPP’s) ‘Take or Pay’ conundrum, the wisdom having dawned three decades after this idea was mooted that it does not take cognizance of market fluctuations, thereby landing the country in impossible financial trouble. The initial 1994 induction of IPPs taught us nothing, and was duly followed by another round in the 2010s, landing us with further burdens of paying for electricity whether taken or not. Some sceptics allude to murkier reasons than simply an inability to learn from the track record, corrupt practices being top of the list. Someone, somewhere, they allege, made a lot of money out of this (repeated) skullduggery.

Now we are confronted with the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority’s (OGRA’s) brilliant suggestion that the Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) adopt a ‘Take or Pay’ model in their fresh Sale and Purchase Agreements (SPAs) to either lift their allocated petroleum product quotas from local refineries or pay penalties for failing to do so. This is ostensibly meant to support local refineries by ensuring them a guaranteed offtake, thereby reducing excessive fuel imports that were undermining domestic production, causing reduced capacity utilisation and financial losses. An added grey area is the accusation by some OMCs and refineries that a specific OMC was being favoured by OGRA through approving petrol and diesel imports despite sufficient local stock availability. As the criticism of OGRA mounted, it proposed the new brilliant ‘Take or Pay’ arrangement. The Oil Marketing Association of Pakistan (OMAP) has expressed grave concerns regarding this suggestion, pointing to the significant risks posed to the OMCs’ financial sustainability and arguing that such an arrangement will only serve (at best) the interests of refineries and large OMCs at the expense of smaller players, perhaps driving the latter to closure and consolidating further the monopolistic control of the big fish in the oil sector, which would end up severely hampering competition, discourage new entrants and ultimately harm the overall efficiency (if not existence) of the petroleum supply chain. OMAP pointed to the refineries’ opportunistic behaviour in routinely withholding their product when price increases are anticipated, thereby forcing the OMCs to resort to costly imports. Conversely, when prices are expected to decline, refineries attempt to offload maximum stocks to the OMCs, resulting in financial losses for the latter. (This is a tenuous claim since the timeframe of domestic price fluctuations and imports do not come even close to matching.) In essence this controversy shows our inability (i.e. in this instance OGRA’s) to learn the appropriate lessons from the past (the IPPs experience) and arguably militates against the current ‘consensus’ (in official circles at least) on free markets being allowed to work their ‘magic’ unhindered.

As though the above were not enough to prove our learning deficit, we are confronted by a conflict on the Torkham border between us and our Afghan neighbours, whom we once lauded as ‘freedom fighters’ and supported over many decades in our Afghan adventures. Now that our Afghan ‘friends’ are in power, they have returned our generosity by continuously violating agreed protocols on the Torkham border (the main trade route between the two countries and further with Central Asia and beyond). These violations, consisting of constructing posts at the border on the Afghan side, have led in recent days to severe clashes between the militaries on both sides. Now a joint tribal jirgacomposed of elders from both sides is bending its back to restore peace and confidence on the border to relieve the millions of rupees trade losses. Not just this ‘aggressive’ stance on the Torkham border, the Afghan military has been trading fire with its ‘brother’ Pakistan Army at various points along the mutual border, sometimes to support their other ‘brothers’, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in its campaign to overthrow the state in Pakistan and impose a Taliban-type regime. Remonstrations to Kabul to cease such ingratitude has met with diplomatic fobbing off (at best) or downright rejection of the charge of supporting the TTP operating from Afghan soil (at worst). And how did the TTP land up in Afghanistan? This occurred courtesy our brilliant military strategists when they failed (allowed?) to prevent the TTP from retreating across the border to escape our military offensive against them following the Peshawar Army Public School massacre in 2014. Clearly, there is room to argue that we have misconstrued the real nature of the ‘friendship’ with the Afghan Taliban (‘transactional’ to use the current Trumpian phrase) as well as badly failed to prevent the Pashtun tribes on our frontier from transmogrifying over time from logistical supporters of the Afghan religiously inspired fighters to their ‘comrades’. No lessons learnt?

If there was any room left to mourn our mental density, it is more than filled by the report of an international human rights platform, Civicus Monitor (CM), that ‘elevates’ Pakistan into the company of countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Serbia, Italy and the US, a list describing countries in 2025 that are experiencing rapid declines in civic freedoms. Pakistan’s status on CM’s website is listed as “repressed”. According to CM’s report, Pakistan has been awarded this honour due to narrowing civil space, human rights activists being arbitrarily targeted by the authorities, and the media being clamped down on through draconian laws. The report adds: “Pakistan’s recent criminalisation of activists, stifling of opposition and minority protests, and digital space restrictions have resulted in the country being added to Civicus Monitor’s watchlist.” It goes on to point to the government’s “trumped up charges” against Dr Mahrang Baloch, the leader of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, and human rights lawyer Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir. Mahrang, the report says, “faces multiple criminal charges, including under the Anti-Terrorism Act, for organising sit-ins (peaceful, one might add) across the country and attending gatherings” (!). Mazari-Hazir was “targeted on terrorism chargesfor actively supporting legal redress for victims of violence and persecution and advocating for the rights of persecuted religious and ethnic communities.” CM comes to the logical conclusion that the charges against both ladies are a political witch-hunt and attempts at silencing dissent. CM also underlines the government’s tender treatment of opposition, Sindhi and Baloch protests.

Standing up peacefully for the ‘disappeared’, fighting legal battles for the oppressed, and agitating peacefully for rights, it seems, are not allowed in Pakistan. Why does all this sound so drearily familiar? Lessons not learnt perhaps?

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

The March 2025 issue of Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) is out

The March 2025 issue of Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) is out. Link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com

Contents:

1. Navid Shahzad: The Elusive Self.
2. Chris Harman: The return of the National Question – III: Nationalism since the First World War.
3. W B Bland: The Pakistani Revolution – VIII: The ‘Six Points’.
4. Jamison Heinkel: Book Review: The genesis of Baloch nationalism: Politics and ethnicity in Pakistan, 1947-77.
5. From the PMR Archives: September 2019: From the Editor: Capitalism’s ‘gift’: climate change.

Rashed Rahman

Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) (link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com)

Director, Research and Publication Centre (RPC) (on Facebook)

Business Recorder Column March 4, 2025

The Kurd struggle

 

Rashed Rahman

 

The Kurds are a people divided between four countries: Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. This reflects the fact that state boundaries were drawn in many parts of the world depending on factors other than ethnic homogeneity, reflecting the relative reach and control of territory by states that included peoples of the same ethnic origin, in the process dividing them. Closer to home, we can refer to the similar case of divided ethnic groups and nationalities: the Baloch (Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan) and the Pashtuns (Pakistan and Afghanistan). In the case of the Kurds, despite the division, sentiments of solidarity and expressed desire for self-determination in the shape of a unified Kurd state have been part of their history. However, the divisions into different states have proved stronger than this aspiration, leading to struggles by the Kurds within the confines of the respective states they find themselves in.

The Iraqi Kurds fought a long guerrilla war against their state for independence, led by Mulla Mustafa Barzani and his Peshmerga fighters from 1961 to 1975, but were eventually defeated, leading to the exile of Barzani in the Soviet Union and Iran, where he eventually died in 1979. After the overthrow of Saddam by the US in 2003, the Iraqi Kurds, now led by Mustafa’s son Masoud Barzani, gained autonomous control of their oil-rich territory in northern Iraq in a tenuous alliance with the new regime imposed on Baghdad through US arms. The Iranian Kurds took advantage of the Soviet Union’s control of northern Iran after WWII to declare an independent Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, but it was crushed after the Soviets withdrew. An attempt to resurrect the Mahabad Republic after the Iranian revolution of 1979 was also brutally crushed. Iraq, Iran and Turkey have long followed forced assimilationist policies against their respective Kurd populations.

In Turkey, recovering after WWI from the loss of the Ottoman empire, this forced assimilationist policy denied the Kurds’ very existence, dubbing them ‘Mountain Turks’ in the 1930s and 1940s. The words “Kurds”, “Kurdistan”, “Kurdish” were officially banned. After the military coup in 1980, the Kurdish language was officially prohibited in public and private life till 1991. Many who spoke, published, sang in Kurdish were arrested and imprisoned. It was initially against this assimilationist loss of identity and to gain cultural and political rights that the Kurdish Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane (PKK) was formed in 1978 under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan with a programmatic demand for autonomy. However, it was the Turkish state’s continuing fierce repression, including systematic executions, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, destruction of villages, the murder of Kurdish journalists, activists, politicians, the prosecution and sentencing of teachers providing, and students demanding education in Kurdish, and the entire panoply of the modern state’s oppressive capabilities that incrementally persuaded the PKK to pick up the gun and wage an armed guerrilla struggle for independence in 1984.

The trajectory of the PKK’s guerrilla war has constantly fluctuated between conflict and unilateral ceasefires by the PKK in an attempt to restore peace through negotiations. But successive Turkish regimes, including the present Erdogan government, have never abandoned the mailed fist even while paying lip service to a peaceful solution through negotiations. The Turkish military pressure over the years on the PKK resulted in retreats into Syria, Lebanon, and eventually northern Iraq, the Iraqi Kurd area, where the leadership of the PKK is currently based. Unfortunately, the prime leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, who was snatched in an operation in Nairobi allegedly with the help of the CIA and Israel, has been in solitary confinement in a prison in the Sea of Marmara since 1999. Even from that isolation, Ocalan has attempted again and again to negotiate a peaceful solution with successive Turkish governments but to no avail.

This time though, through the intermediary role of the pro-Kurdish DEM party, whose delegation met Ocalan in prison, his message announcing the “end of the armed struggle” of the PKK has been made public, adding the PKK should now dissolve itself. The message and its import have been accepted by the PKK leadership in Iraq. What remains to be seen is whether the Erdogan government will accede to the PKK’s demand for the release of Ocalan from his long and lonely incarceration, and whether that will be accompanied by negotiations that frame a new future for the Kurds in Turkey and, indeed, for Turkey as a whole.

The Kurd example, whether in Turkey, Iraq, Iran or Syria, points to the futility and risks involved in denying a minority nationality its cultural and political rights in an attempt to wipe out its very existence through forced assimilation. Let us hope wisdom prevails and Ankara finds a fresh path to apply salve on the deep wounds of its Kurd people and adopts a democratic attitude to the vexed Kurd problem.

We in Pakistan too should learn the lessons embedded in the Kurdish problem in the four states between whom the Kurdish people are divided. The flowering of diverse cultures is the best means of achieving genuine unity between the federating units of any state. Pakistan can only be enriched and strengthened by its open hearted embrace of its minority nationalities, allowing an organic coming together of our diverse peoples to forge a voluntary, respectful unity, not one maintained by the knout.

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com