SuperWeed

The attendees at the event I recapped in my last post surprised me with vegan cupcakes and a round of “Happy Birthday,” which was very dear of them but which provoked a bittersweet memory for me.

The last time a group of people sang that to me, I was in Islamabad, where I delivered this talk at a conference organized by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute. Today, some of the people who sang to me might be under arrest in the wake of President Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of virtual martial law in Pakistan.

Police attacking protesting lawyers in Islamabad

So, since I can’t stop thinking about Pakistan this week anyway, let me tell you about that trip as a way of interesting you in the unfolding emergency. Maybe by the time I’m done typing, I’ll have some news about what (if anything) we can do from abroad.

But first, here’s the soundtrack for this post, which I imagine sums up the feelings of many Pakistanis this week, “Fuck the Motherfucking President” [mp3 expired] by Witchypoo. (As usual, if you like thge music, support the artist.)

Probably, when you think of Pakistan, progressive social change activists aren’t the first people who come to mind, but those are the people I know, and grew to care about, in Pakistan. I first got to know several Pakistani activists in the course of my work with the Global Hunger Alliance. One, Zubaida, was indefatigable in helping GHA to find partners in Pakistan. Like many other Pakistani activists I would later meet, Zubaida turned out to be vegetarian and very receptive to me as an activist who includes animals within my sphere of concern. Our email correspondance sprawled from the political into the personal as we traded stories about our lives and families along with our activist projects and dreams. One of my favorite of her ideas was the use of fruit trees for municipal plantings in order to increase access to fresh fruit for city youth while also beautifying the urban environment.

On 11 September 2001, Zubaida wrote to me immediately, asking after the safety of my friends and family in NYC and DC. She was one of many, from Pakistan and elsewhere, to write with worry and sympathy. Thus I experienced first-hand the window of sympathy for the USA that our citizens slammed shut so vehemently by supporting the Bush regime’s decision to punish the people of Afghanistan for a mass murder perpetrated by individuals from Saudi Arabia.

Since Zubaida had been so central to our efforts, I invited her to be part of the GHA delegation to the 2002 World Food Summit and the parallel NGO Forum for Food Sovereignty in Rome. She asked if we could also include Abid, whose organization (another partner in GHA) was not sending its own delegation. I readily agreed, although I felt some trepidation, expecting Abid to be (on the basis of his email messages) a stuffy middle aged scholar with whom I might not get along warmly.

To my relief, Abid turned out to be an affable young man whose scholarly and political seriousness was leavened by a sometimes silly sense of humor. Zubaida turned out to be even warmer in person than in writing and our friendship deepened during the week that we roomed together in Rome. I recall one late-night conversation in which we discussed my lesbianism in relation to that of a friend of hers, both struggling to fully grasp the lived experience of freedom (or the lack thereof) of women in our respective cultures.

Stay with me. I’m telling you these things to make the news from the other side of the world more real to you. Zubaida lived in Multan, where police are beating lawyers and other demonstators today.

The GHA delegation in Rome included not only Zubaida and Abid but also representatives of partner organizations from Italy, Croatia, Rwanda, and the UK. Members of other Pakistani partner organizations were also in attendance as part of their own delegations. Here are some of us having an impromtu meeting at which Azra raised sharp and rightly discomfiting questions and Devinder made the kind of trenchant observations often found in his writings.

Impromtu GHA meeting at Forum for Food Sovereignty Rome, June 2002

Later that year, Abid’s organization invited me to speak at its regional conference on Sustainable Development. People here wondered if I felt uneasy about traveling to Pakistan, given the anti-Western sentiments of some religious zealots. But, even though the words “Islamic Republic” on the visa in my passport looked a little menacing to me, I felt much more worried about visiting a country ruled by a military man allied with the Bush regime.

So, my heart-rate skyrocketed when, upon arrival in Karachi to change planes for Islamabad, I encountered two unsmiling men, one in a business suit and the other in a uniform, holding a sign with my name on it. “Passport,” the man in the business suit demanded as the soldier took the suitcase from my hand. They turned without a word and strode down the long hallway, leaving me trailing along behind them. Groggy and disoriented after 15 hours in flight, I didn’t even try to puzzle out what was happening to me but instead reflexively slipped into the poker-faced wary watchfulness that kept me safe many years before on the streets of Baltimore.

Suddenly, we stepped through a passageway back into public space. After guiding me past long lines of people at checkpoints, the man in the business suit paused and mumbled something to a man behind at a counter. I caught the word “diplomatic” as the man at the counter stamped my passport. Only then did I understand: These men weren’t arresting me; they were guiding me. Still without saying a word, they marched me to the line for my departing flight, handed me my passport and suitcase, and melted into the crowd before I could say “thank you.”

Boarding the packed plane, I noticed only one other female passenger. The well-dressed man sitting next to me “casually” started a conversation with me and then turned out to have remarkably specific knowledge of the government’s policies concerning corporate agriculture (against which I had helped to try to rally international opinion) for someone attached, as he said that he was, to the military. The coincidence felt eerie to me right after the airport incident.

A much happier coincidence befell me in Islamabad where, upon boarding the shuttle bus from the plane to the terminal, I saw Azra, who I had met in Rome. She greeted me very warmly, despite the coolness of our conversations in Rome. She and the other woman I had seen on the plane were also attending the conference, which was lucky for me, since I might not have found the van to the hotel without them.

You never know what will soothe you in unfamiliar circumstance. The conjunction of colors on the green-and-black taxicabs steadied me as Azra and her friend argued in Urdu with the hotel’s driver. Then we were on our way, speeding along the highway from Rawalpindi to Islamabad. Every few yards, it seemed, I saw a soldier with a machine gun patroling the roadway. These motionless men cradling death in their arms stood in sharp contrast to the ebullient buses decorated in bright colors and packed with people. My own sleep deprivation and disorientation contributed to the disjuntive sensation as we hurtled toward the Holiday Inn Islamabad, which turned out to be guarded by formally dressed men with machine guns.

All feelings of dislocation slipped away at the opening plenary session of the conference. I guess dissident scholars everywhere are more alike than not. Even though I was in South Asia amid people from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, I felt more at ease that I often am in the conservative rural region I call home. Surrounded by people who like to think about things and intend to make a difference in the world, listening to a famous scholar talking about post-colonial liberation strategies, I felt a bit like I have traveled back in time to my years in Ann Arbor.

Of course there were plenty of differences. The food, for one. Rather than expecting us to fend for ourselves, the conference organizers provided lunch and dinner buffets at which the vast majority of selections were vegetarian. Indeed, there would usually be only one platter of meat and I noticed that the few meat eaters filled their plates in a manner diametrically opposite that of people in the USA, balancing one small portion of meat against a plateful of assorted vegetable dishes. (Later, one of the conference organizers remarked that they had included meat only after being reminded that some conference goers might want it.)

I attended as many conference sessions as I could, taking particular interest in the sessions on partition — in which I had been abstractedly interested as a example of the traumatic ruptures perpetrated in the course of European imperialism but the ongoing emotional impact of which I had not before properly appreciated — and the panel on women’s issues which, as the Pakistani feminist sitting next to me murmered angrily under her breath, was “moderated by a Mullah.”

Here’s the panel on which I spoke at the SDPI conference. That’s me (in the same white shirt!) all the way on the right.

SDPI conference, Islamabad, November 2002

Here’s how one newspaper reported my talk: “Ms. Pattrice Jones of Global Hunger Alliance from USA condemned the policies of Bush Administration against its attacks on Afghanistan and on Iraq. She said President Bush is more interested in corporate interests. She said the small farmers in US are facing the problems because all privileges are for the corporate agriculture. She said the poultry industry in US is creating environment pollution as well as contaminating the soil and water. She appealed that the people in other countries should discourage the American products, which are promoted by the MNCs, only to maximize their profit by ignoring the environment.”

After prefacing the talk, as I did with all talks at the time, with a call for direct economic action against the Bush regime, I began my overview of the evils of industrial animal agriculture, as I always do, with the animals. Using the Delmarva polutry industry as my case in point, I surveyed the harms done to the chickens, local residents, local farmers, local workers, and local environments. I then surveyed the harms done to farmers and consumers at the national level before moving on to the global impact (hunger, water, etc.) of the massive waste of resources inherent in meat production and the likely impact on South Asia of the exportation of western models of meat production and consumption. I closed with some thoughts about more subtle subjects, such as the emotional and spiritual damage done to people who feel forced by economic circumstance to participate in abuses of animals that are not consistent with their own ethics.

What I noticed as I was speaking was that the people in the audience were really listening to, and thinking about, what I had to say, especially when I brought up ideas not usually raised at such conferences. For example, when I said that the rights and interests of the animals themselves is a substantial moral problem that is also a political question worthy of serious consideration, I saw surprised nods from several audience members. Similarly, although less suprisingly, I saw many nods of agreement when I spoke of globalized factory farming as agricultural imperialism and the worldwide increase in meat consumption as dietary colonialism.

A few months later, Abid wrote to me excitedly. Wanting to protest Musharraf’s ties to the Bush regime, a group of activists had decided to picket outside one of the many shops run by a US-based multinational corporation. But which to choose? Thinking back to what I said about the chickens, they chose KFC!

Here’s the most important thing I want to tell you about the people at that conference. During my talk and at every session I attended, the participants listened thoughtfully to each other, asking questions that really were questions (rather than little speeches with a question mark at the end). I’ve never seen so much listening at a conference. At most of the academic and activist conferences I’ve attended, there’s been a lot more talking than listening. Here, I saw people going out of their way to see each other’s point of view. I also noticed the especial care that the Pakistani conference organizers took to make the Indian attendees comfortable in the context of the strained relations between the two countries.

All of that leads me to agree with the blogger who calls Pakistan “a democratic society trapped in an undemocratic state.”

There are many more tales to tell from my brief trip to Pakistan but my main point in writing this is to tell you about some of the people I met at the conference — I’m thinking right now one audacious young woman who held a position of remarkable responsibility (for her youth) at a major newspaper and later used that position to publish some of my antiwar and pro-animal editorials — so that you can imagine individuals, rather than faceless masses, caught up in the current emergency.

For those who haven’t kept pace with the rapidly unfolding events, let me summarize the situation as best I can: Pervez Musharraf has staged what many are calling a “coup within a coup,” having originally seized power by force in 1999 and now declaring a state of emergency in which he has, among other things: (1) suspended the constitution; (2) dismissed the Supreme Court; (3) arrested or placed under house arrest hundreds of judges, lawyers, and members of opposition parties; (4) shut down or blocked radio and television transmissions other than those sponsored by the state; (5) placed strict restrictions on print media, including a ban on reports of terrorist attacks and a prohibition against mocking the army. Since the declaration of emergency on Saturday, police have violently repressed expressions of dissent, arresting thousands of protesters as well as hundreds of judges and lawyers who showed up to do their jobs on Monday despite their dismissal.

The USA is deeply implicated in this, even though Musharraf seems on the surface to be defying the wishes of the Bush regime. Consider this: The stated aim of the stated emergency is to squelch terrorism by right-wing Islamic fundamentalists but most of those arrested have been progressive defenders of civil liberties or other politcal opponents of Musharraf. The proximate cause of the emergency appears to be the risk that the Supreme Court was about to rule, perhaps unfavorably, on the legitimacy of Musharraf’s Presidency. Since the emergency, the army has actually released several Talibani terrorists. And yet, the Bush regime (along with our friends the Brits) intend to continue funnel military funding to Musharraf under the guise of, you guessed it, the war on terrorism.

Bush and Musharraf do the dance of the despots

The backstory is much deeper, going back to George H.W. Bush’s days at the CIA, but we don’t have time for that today. Now let’s look at what our true friends in Pakistan are doing to defend themselves, their civil liberties, and — since Pakistan is a nuclear state — all of us from the the possibility of the country either becoming a true military dictatorship or devolving into a chaos that might allow the fundamentalists to seize power.

Protesters have rallied, despite violent police repression, in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, and Multan. Deposed judges have shown up for work anyway, only to be arrested. Lawyers have staged massive rallies outside of courthouses, again facing massive arrests and violent police repression. Students rally daily at several universities. Journalists had one protest meeting and continue to report the news, even though one newspaper was briefly shut down and all face arrest if they stray too far into critique of the regime.

Here are some links to help you keep pace with the protests as they evolve:

The Emergency Times (collective student blog)
Chapati Mystery blog (on-the spot coverage of protests)
Metroblogging Karachi (ditto)
Metroblogging Lahore (ditto)

Let’s think about what we can and must do to help. Some demonstrations are planned outside of Pakistani embassies here and in the UK. I don’t hold out hope that such protests will in any way sway the governments of Pakistan, the UK, or the USA but they are likely to bolster the morale of protesters within Pakistan and might add some momentum to their push. One blogger has called for everyone to ask hard questions of every candidate for President here and, again, this seems like something that ought to be done, if only to keep the media from turning its attention elsewhere. (I’d especially enjoy seeing someone demand that Barack “let’s bomb Pakistan” Obama to live up to his self-image as a creative problem solver and offer a less destructive solution to the crisis.) Other bloggers have other ideas.

But, of course, it is only the people of Pakistan who can, by means of active protest and passive resistance, undermine the police state in which they are living. From a distance, it seems to me that a general strike would be the only tactic likely to have sufficient impact on the regime (particularly if it were coupled with a pull-out of the military aid now provided by the USA and UK, which is why we need to do our part too). We need to stand ready to offer whatever aid and comfort we can give from abroad.

To do that, we have to be paying attention. Every day. Here are some links to help you do that:

Global Voices special coverage: Pakistan Emergency 2007
Emergency 2007 at Wiki Pakistan

November 8th, 2007 | Category: Activism, Politics, Speech | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL