• Investment World
• eWorld
• Catalyst
• Mentor
• Life
• Canvas
• Praxis
• Urban Pulse
• Brand Quest

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

REPORTS of a difference of opinion between the US Secretary of State, Gen Colin Powell, and the Defence Secretary, Mr Donald H. Rumsfeld, on how the Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners should be treated could be symptomatic of a deeper international divide that no one wishes to talk about. This is not Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations but the great divide between white and non-white of which race and religion are a part.

The three current issues that highlight this conflict are: The plight of captive Afghans whom the US treats as `illegal combatants' (whatever that might mean) for defending their own country against attack: the US President, Mr George W. Bush's endorsement of Israeli repression in the West Bank, and Australia's treatment of Afghan refugees. The Australian Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, would readily have granted asylum had the applicants been Christian Europeans instead of Asian Muslims. America's past — and not only the historical atrocity of slavery — is equally racist. During the Second World War, the US incarcerated ethnic Japanese but not immigrants from Germany and Italy which were also belligerent nations. The Chinese who were imported to build American railroads were barely tolerated once their work was done. Indians could not become citizens until the Oriental Immigration Act was revised in 1949. Sikhs were called `ragheads'.

Though this goes against the grain of today's India-US euphoria, it is something that the million or so NRIs, who are profoundly grateful for the chance to live in America, should never forget. The Afghan prisoners are denied the protection of the Geneva Conventions so that they can be interrogated by methods that can only be guessed at. They will then be tried by secret US military tribunals on unspecified charges and convicted without the benefit of jury. Given the circumstances, it seems clear that they will not be able to defend themselves properly.

This is worse than the `victor's justice' that Radhabenode Pal, the distinguished Indian jurist and only non-Caucasian member of the Bench, spoke of in his famous dissenting judgment at the Tokyo war crimes trial. Washington punished him by choosing Pakistan's Sir Mohammed Zafrullah Khan for the International Court of Justice at The Hague. True, Mrs Mary Robinson, the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, the International Committee of the Red Cross, some British politicians and American human rights organisations and the British press have criticised the US. But the Iranian President, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is the only government head to condemn reversion to the law of the jungle in the military camp in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay. Even the UN seems to have lost its independent identity.

It should have been a historic occasion last week when Mr Kofi Annan, Nobel laureate for peace, visited Kabul — the first Secretary-General to do so in several decades. But he merely delivered himself of pieties without a word about the prisoners. The UN has also abdicated its responsibility for peace and justice in West Asia where the US backs one of the world's most formidable military machines. Tit-for-tat violence will mean unending war if Mr Bush does not pressure Israel to vacate the West Bank and be content with secure, internationally-recognised frontiers. This is not to deny that no other nation has devoted as much money and manpower to international welfare without seeking a direct return as the US. India is especially grateful for grain when famine stared it in the face. India needs America to sustain its economic revolution and act as a brake on its enemies. But if India seriously wishes to engage the US, it must strike a healthy median between strident criticism of everything American, as in the Nehruvian years, and the fervent adoration of whatever Washington does that defines Mr Tony Blair's Britain.

As a warrior from a nation whose tribes traditionally show no mercy to defeated foes, Afghanistan's interim ruler, Mr Hamid Karzai, might want the Americans to execute every single Taliban prisoner and the Australians to drown every asylum-seeker. But he is also reputed to be a modern man who received part of his education in Shimla and is anxious to rebuild his country from the ravages of more than two decades of conflict. He is indebted to the US for his elevation and grateful for reconstruction funds but any self-respecting Asian leader should feel the insult to his national pride as Western governments divide Afghans into `good' and `bad' like plantation owners in the American Deep South differentiating their slaves. An America that will not easily allow its own citizens to be tried by foreign or even international courts should not underestimate Asian resentment of vengeance masquerading as justice.

Repeating Jawaharlal Nehru's comment when the atom bombs were dropped in Japan, whites would not have been subjected to the same treatment as Arabs and Asians. America's military and economic power is unmatched, but Asians provide the oil, strategic support and the democratic consensus that sustain its superpower status. There is surely the basis here for a more equitable balance between white and non-white. When heroes rode in triumph through ancient Rome, the deafening cheers of adulatory crowds ringing in their ears, the priest who held the laurel wreath above the victor's head intoned at regular intervals, "Remember that you are only a man!" Some such ceremony should bring home the transience of earthly power and the equality of races to the Bush administration as it strides a landscape that has been flattened into silent acquiescence.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section
Low inflation, high illusion

Copyright © 2002, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line