Yahya’s enablers

Mahir Ali

THE hill station Nathiagali was abuzz with unusual activity in early July 50 years ago. There was a visible military and police presence, notably on the road that led to Government House. It was widely rumoured, and reported, that the elegant colonial-era mansion was hosting a VVIP — none other than Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, supposedly recuperating from a digestive ailment acquired during his subcontinental sojourn.

So when a helicopter unusually hovered nearby, my pre-teen eyes followed its progress, possibly through a pair of binoculars. Government House was at least partially visible from a somewhat higher vantage point behind my family’s rented summer abode. And as the helicopter attempted a landing in the conifer-surrounded lawns, its propellers got entangled in the greenery and the flying machine crash-landed with an almighty thud.

I imagine I raced back home to convey the breaking news to my parents. Had the Pakistani military inadvertently killed Henry Kissinger?

No such luck. No one was harmed in the crash, and Kissinger wasn’t even there. Reports of his evacuation to Nathiagali were part of an elaborate charade. Hardly anyone in the government or among the US embassy staff was privy to what was actually going on.

The bloodshed of 1971 had US backing.

Kissinger by then was well on his way to Beijing, to spearhead a historic breakthrough in international relations. The US had been late to wake up to the growing hostility betw­e­­en China and the USSR in the post-Stalin era. Nixon recognised the breach as an opportunity.

Things have come full circle in the intervening half century: the US today sees China as its primary adversary. In 1971, though, there was a realpolitik logic in Washington’s response to Beijing’s overtures — and Pakistan’s military dictator, Yahya Khan, was delighted to serve as a personal emissary. There were alternative avenues open to the US, but it’s unlikely any other head of state would have been quite as eager to serve as a messenger boy.

The White House had few, if any, qualms about reciprocating with backing for Yahya’s gruesome military misadventure in East Bengal, despite the fact that it was increasingly being seen as an attempted genocide.

The US consulate in Dhaka was witness to the outrageous brutality, and many of the diplomats were eager to enlighten Washington, but their protestations fell on deaf ears in the State Department.

Geopolitics ruled supreme, and it stretched from India’s strengthening alliance with the Soviet Union — partly a reaction to America’s refusal to nudge Pakistan towards accepting the outcome of the 1970 elections — to Nixon’s personal antipathy towards Indira Gandhi, which was reflected, absurdly, in a broader hostility towards India and Indians.

The obsequious Kissinger went along with that, as Gary J. Bass meticulously illustrates in his 2013 book The Blood Telegram. The title is a reference to a key missive signed by Archie Blood, the US consul-general in Dhaka, that was among the first-hand information the State Department felt obliged to ignore.

The US ‘tilt towards Pakistan’ in the context of 1971 has long been common knowledge, but what the Bass book — relying to a considerable extent on the Nixon tapes ie White House recordings, the bulk of which remained secret for 20 years after a small, Watergate-related portion of them rendered the Nixon presidency untenable — reveals is a bend-over-backwards tendency that stretched to efforts to illegally supply weapons to Islamabad through Uncle Sam’s deviously devoted Middle Eastern proxies such as the king of Jordan and the Shah.

What’s more, Kissinger — in the wake of Operation Marco Polo on July 8-9, 1971, the surreptitious journey to Beijing that incorporated his fictitious trip to Nathiagali as a cover story — attempted to persuade China to mount a show of force on its Indian border as a distraction. Thankfully, Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong did not take the bait, despite their thoroughly misguided backing for Yahya and, by extension, his military’s atrocities in East Pakistan.

It is perfectly likely that Operation Searchlight and its even bloodier aftermath would have been pursued even without the backing of Beijing and Washington. It is equally possible, though, that the carnage might have been curtailed much quicker without direct and indirect US and Chinese support for the Yahya regime’s vile democracy-thwarting enterprise.

At that stage of its diplomatic trajectory, China was absurdly keen to back anything the USSR opposed, and its empathy for military dictators is a tendency that both preceded and outlived Pakistan’s Yahya phase. For the US, the self-proclaimed beacon of Western democracy, to more or less follow suit might seem hypocritical, but in fact was pretty much par for the course across much of the world.

The blame for Bangladesh’s antenatal bloodbath rests squarely on Pakistan’s shoulders. But Yahya’s collaborators and enablers, both domestic and international, must not be ignored.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 7th, 2021

Looming Afghan disaster

Abbas Nasir

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.


AFGHANISTAN is heading towards a full-blown civil war, following the US-led troop pullout and, with Pakistan fearing the inevitable fallout of that slide into chaos, the military and intelligence chiefs briefed a parliamentary committee, notably including opposition members, this last Thursday.

In the words of Interior Minister Shaikh Rashid Ahmed, the meeting marked the beginning of a national consensus where all political parties shunned their differences and decided ‘to stand behind the army’ on this issue critical to national security.

Although bound by in camera rules and, therefore, unwilling to share many details of the briefing, all that some other participants were willing to say was that the meeting was marked by the bonhomie one parliamentarian attributed to a ‘timid’ opposition. Barring one nobody raised any thorny issue.

And the reported response to the member asking a difficult question or two or merely sharing an unwelcome observation perhaps deflated all others who might have been clenching their fists and convincing themselves to muster the courage to share their thoughts with candour. One clear message: institutional supremacy and interests trump all.

What was once seen as ‘strategic depth’ is threatening to turn into a nightmare.

Former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, one of the PML-N leaders said to be firmly in the ‘vote ko izzat do’ camp, told a journalist later what they did for some ‘five hours was indeed vote ko izzat do’, as a parliament that has largely remained ineffective for three years debated such a vital issue.

This was indeed a brand new meaning to the slogan ‘vote ko izzat do’. It remains to be seen if PML-N leaders Nawaz Sharif and Maryam Nawaz Sharif endorse this new definition. One is left wondering if their near-total current silence, while the Shehbaz Sharif school is ascendant, is a tell-tale sign.

Little surprise then a lot of pointless ‘I am also here’ half volleys were bowled which were played back with a gentle straight bat and the process continued for several hours before shifting to a dinner hosted by the speaker. The one or two substantive issues that were raised, like Ali Wazir’s release, were reportedly dismissed.

Whatever reality unfolds in the long run, for now the opposition is content to play within the existing scheme of things and the demand of the PML-N for a new social contract seems like nothing more than a dream abandoned. The PPP, for its part, hasn’t even had that dream of late.

In any case, the Afghan Taliban seem in a hurry to extend their control to more and more parts of their country and, while the ‘troika’ (US, China and Russia) meeting in March that included Pakistan agreed that the Afghan Taliban will not be allowed to establish an Islamic emirate, it is not clear how they can stop the Taliban if that were to happen.

In 1996, after the Taliban took Kabul in a lightning offensive, the declaration of the establishment of an Islamic emirate headed by the ‘amir’ Mullah Omar followed. And then came two decades of a US-led Nato military presence in Afghanistan — first to degrade Al Qaeda, which took responsibility for the 9/11 attacks on American soil, and then to prop up West-friendly governments.

Over the period, the US reportedly spent a trillion dollars and took heavy military casualties. An untold number of Afghans, including innocent civilians, lost their lives in the conflict. That dark, bloody night may be coming to an end, but the country is accelerating towards another.

Of course those at the helm in Kabul as we speak have air assets that could slow down or halt the Taliban march on the capital. They have also enlisted the help of the ‘warlords’ of yesteryear to come together to try and stop the resurgent Taliban, raising the spectre of a full-blown civil war.

From my memories of visiting Afghanistan in 1971 with my parents as a child and driving from Quetta-Chaman to Kandahar and on to Herat and across the border into Iran on a journey that ended in Beirut, the country I remember is long gone.

Kabul, friendly, calm, open, tolerant and incredibly cosmopolitan, is etched in my mind from our return journey that year and then the drive back home via Jalalabad-Torkham where I can never forget the joy that gripped me when I saw the Pakistan flag fluttering atop the FC fort, a picture of towering tranquillity.

Afghan war closet: 'US had decided to overthrow Taliban regime a month before 9/11'

That serenity is long gone. As are Pakistan’s hopes that the Taliban will always be a trusted ally who will pay heed to Islamabad’s concerns and never turn on Pakistan. What was once seen as ‘strategic depth’ by our military commanders is threatening to turn into a nightmare.

Ironically, it was Pakistan that served as the strategic depth for the Taliban. Many of their leaders, their families and even foot soldiers sheltered across Pakistan, and their war wounded were extended medical help as their forces faced a US-led onslaught.

Even in the past, when so much of their well-being depended on Pakistan’s goodwill, the Afghan Taliban refused to publicly condemn the terrorist activities of the TTP or to do anything to stop them. With the foreign forces gone, and much greater freedom of movement in Afghanistan one wonders what policy they’ll have towards their counterparts in Pakistan.

In recent weeks, there has been a spurt in attacks — whether via IEDs or direct fire — on Pakistani security forces. Shaikh Rashid says that 88 per cent of the border (Durand Line) has been fenced which should enhance security. Some of the attacks seem to be coming from within Pakistan.

This is a huge foreign security policy challenge. Let there be no mistake that an opposition treated with contempt by the hybrid government for the past three years is now suddenly being embraced by the former.

Is that happening because with an imminent policy disaster on the cards more and more bodies are needed to share the blame? Even if those being roped in had no role in the making of this fiasco? One of the main ‘knowns’ is that a compromised, defeated opposition is willing to play the game on any terms.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2021

The demons of conflict
Zahid Hussain

Published July 7, 2021

The writer is the author of No-Win War — The Paradox of US-Pakistan Relations in Afghanistan’s Shadow.


IT was not just the optics but also the substance that marked the national security briefing last week. The atmosphere in the National Assembly hall was completely different that day to the mayhem witnessed at the budget session recently.

Lawmakers from both the treasury and opposition benches sat for almost eight hours as the military leadership briefed them about the gravity of the situation in Afghanistan and its impending fallout on Pakistan. The discussion was substantive given the seriousness of the matter.

It was a rare change of atmosphere in the current parliament that has failed to be a forum for serious policy debate over the past three years. Ironically, it was the presence of the military leadership that, probably, brought harmony to the House. The prime minister who is also the leader of the House was conspicuous by his absence. He was addressing the National Kissan Convention that day, raising questions about his ability to provide leadership at this critical juncture.

While the intelligence briefing may have helped in understanding the developing situation in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the withdrawal of the foreign forces, there is still the question of whether we have a clear policy on the effects of the exit. One is not sure given the confusing and contradictory statements from the prime minister and his team. Foreign policy chaos has seldom been so stark.

How prepared the authorities are for the expected refugee inflow is still not clear.

Bizarre rhetoric does not inspire much confidence in the PTI government’s ability to navigate the country through challenges. The leadership’s twisted worldview and half-baked understanding of history and poor grasp of evolving geopolitics are scary.

More alarming is its divisive approach even on critical national issues. That could become the biggest impediment to developing a national policy with the opposition’s consensus.

One wonders if the same kind of serenity will prevail in parliament during the foreign and national security debate that must surely follow the intelligence briefing. It depends on whether the government and opposition demonstrate the same kind of discretion they showed during the national security briefing.

The situation is perhaps more serious than what the country faced in the 1990s following the Soviet withdrawal and the subsequent outbreak of civil war in Afghanistan. While the lawmakers were being briefed on the fast-unravelling situation in Afghanistan, the Taliban offensive in the northeast and south of the country was bringing the country ever closer to a fully fledged civil war. The fighting spread from north to the south as US forces vacated their largest military base in Bagram.

The Afghan Taliban’s military blitz has been more spectacular than was expected. It has been in the northeast where the insurgent forces have gained more ground in recent days though the region has never been considered their stronghold. There has been a near meltdown of Afghan government forces. Hundreds of soldiers have fled to Tajikistan and many others have surrendered.

But the Taliban forces have achieved their most symbolic, if not the most important, victory in southern Kandahar province as they establish their control over Panjwai district. The region, which is the birthplace of the Taliban movement, has also been the venue of fierce battles against Nato forces for more than a decade. It fell to the Taliban hours after the Americans vacated the Kandahar military base.

The capture of Panjwai has helped the Taliban consolidate their hold over the southern Pakhtun-dominated areas. It has put Kandahar, the second biggest town in Afghanistan, under siege. The Taliban now claim to have control over 150 out of 460 districts. Most of them have fallen to the insurgents in the last one month after the withdrawal of the residual US forces began.

Recent setbacks in the battlefield have exposed the vulnerability of the Afghan security forces without the support of the foreign forces. Reports of soldiers surrendering to the Taliban without fighting in many places seem to have further dampened the morale of the Afghan security forces.

Some other developments such as the emergence of regional militias under different warlords have also raised the spectre of civil war, with many predicting the fragmentation of Afghanistan along ethnic lines thus sucking neighbouring countries into the conflict. It’s almost back to the Afghan situation in the 1990s.

In a recent statement, a Taliban spokesman said the group would present its peace proposal to the Kabul government next month but there is no indication as yet of the insurgents agreeing to a reduction in violence.

Panjwai is located just across the border and the Taliban control there brings the war closer to Pakistan’s frontiers. There have been reports of an exodus of Afghans as fighting intensifies. That could also lead to an influx of refugees into Pakistan. It may have already started and there is no way it can be stopped.

Pakistani authorities said they would confine the refugees to certain areas and not allow their free movement. While that kind of containment of the refugee population was possible in Iran, it may not work in Pakistan with the same tribes straddling the border. How prepared the authorities are for the expected refugee inflow is still not clear.

But the influx of refugees is only one of the challenges that Pakistan would be facing with the outbreak of a new Afghan civil war. The fallout of the conflict is ominously evident inside our borders with the rise of militant activities in parts of former Fata. The rising power of the Afghan Taliban across the border and the very real danger of civil war in Afghanistan presents a serious threat to Pakistan’s stability.

Last week’s intelligence briefing to the lawmakers may have covered all these issues but now it is the responsibility of the civilian leadership to put together a coherent strategy and a clear policy to deal with the situation. It’s not enough to say that Pakistan will not take sides in the Afghan conflict. There is a need for a more proactive approach to minimise the effects of its fallout. Can the prime minister rise to the challenge?

The writer is the author of No-Win War — The Paradox of US-Pakistan Relations in Afghanistan’s Shadow.

zhussain100@yahoo.com

Twitter: @hidhussain

Published in Dawn, July 7th, 2021

The roots of hate

Zarrar Khuhro



The writer is a journalist.


THE brutal murder of a Pakistani-origin family in the city of London, Ontario, by 20-year-old Nathaniel Veltman caused a wave of outrage in Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau openly condemned it as an act of terror and thousands rallied to pay respects to the slain members of the family and to pray for the health of nine-year old Fayez, the sole survivor of this hate crime. There is no doubt this was a genuine outpouring of revulsion at the crime, and of sympathy for those so brutally slain.

But beneath the surface is a miasma, the odour of which leaked out even during this time of tragedy.

Soon after the attack, a TikTok video was uploaded in which a man records three Mus­lim women walking down the road. As they stroll down the sidewalk, the man is heard saying: “Where’s Nathaniel Veltman when you need him?” Then a truck passes by and the man exclaims: “Buddy, you missed them. Back up,” before bursting into laughter.

In another video, a man named Craig Harrison said “he was surprised it [the attack] hasn’t happened sooner”, adding that “Canadians are rightfully getting upset about being out-populated in their own country by people from different cultures who don’t respect Western values”. Harrison, who has a criminal history that includes racially motivated attacks, was once the mayoral candidate for Georgetown, Ontario.

Anti-Muslim sentiments are on the rise.

The reference to being ‘out-populated’ is a popular theme in modern neo-Nazi and white supremacist thought, and revolves around the belief that white people are being ‘outbred’ by other races in the West, and that this is both part of and a precursor to what they call the ‘Great Replacement’. This was also the title of the manifesto published by Brenton Tarrant, the terrorist who massacred 51 worshippers at a Christchurch mosque in New Zealand in 2019.

As investigations continue, one question that will be asked is ‘where was Nathaniel Veltman radicalised?’ And one can safely surmise that perhaps more so than his immediate ‘real-world’ social circles, he was introduced to and indoctrinated by white supremacy online. That was the case with Alexander Bissonnette, who shot and killed six people at a Quebec City mosque in 2017, and was known to be a right-wing troll in online spaces.

How poisonous is this online discourse? In an analysis for the Globe and Mail, Amarnath Amarasingam and Jacob Davey write that in 2020 they examined close to 2,500 accounts, channels and groups on various social media platforms that disseminated extremist right-wing propaganda, producing “nearly four million pieces of individual content”, that were spread far and wide.

These groups, they concluded, were resistant to attempts to de-platform them and were incredibly resilient and determined in their effort to “drive hatred against minority communities and polarise Canadian society”.

More, despite their ideological differences, these groups converge on their shared hatred from immigrants, and in particular, their hate for Muslims. And they are increasing in both number and appeal.

Much like a plant needs suitable soil and conditions in order to be able to thrive, so too does the seed of hate need an enabling environment to be able to bloom into a bloody harvest. Across the Western world, we have seen a steady rise in right-wing ideology to the extent that many of the talking points of what was once the extremist fringe have become part of mainstream political discourse, which in turn legitimises the views of the (once) far right, bringing them closer to the centre and thus to wider acceptability. This, in turn, drives more and more people into their ranks, and by and large they avoid the label of ‘terrorist’ even when they carry out politically motivated attacks, simply because the diffused nature of the white supremacist movement means that individuals may not subscribe to, or be members of, specific organisations.

Canada is no exception; In Canada, as in much of the West, Muslims remain the most common target of online hate, outstripping any other group and the attacks are increasingly moving from online spaces to real life. This isn’t taking place in a vacuum: a 2020 report on Islamophobia in Canada submitted to the UN revealed that 46 per cent of Canadians have an ‘unfavourable’ view of Islam — more than for any other group. More than half of the people living in Ontario felt that Muslim doctrines ‘promote violence’ while 42pc of Canadians think that discrimination against Muslims is ‘mainly their fault’.

The report also points out the role of the media in creating this environment, noting that while negative stories about Muslims abound in Canadian media, attacks on Muslims receive relatively less coverage; the Quebec mosque shooting for “five minutes of airtime” on CBC the night it occurred while the 2017 London Borough attacks in the UK were covered for hours with live commentary. No wonder, then, that for too many Nathaniel Veltman is not someone to condemn, but to emulate.

The writer is a journalist.

Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2021

Kashmir dilemma

Owen Bennett-Jones

The writer is author of The Bhutto Dynasty: The Struggle for Power in Pakistan.


IN the darkest days of the conflict in Northern Ireland, there seemed to be no imaginable solution. The centuries-old dispute between the Catholics and Protestants — those who wanted to be part of Ireland and those who wanted to remain with the UK — was just too deep. But in 1998 Tony Blair did secure a peace deal and even though that historic achievement is now threatened by Brexit, it nonetheless prompts the question: might a deal on another apparently irresolvable dispute — Kashmir — be possible too?

Two Pakistani leaders — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf — have considered making the sort of compromise that might have led to a breakthrough. In the early 1960s, the US used the leverage over New Delhi it had acquired by supporting India vis-à-vis China, to tell Nehru he should be willing to hold direct talks with Pakistan on Kashmir. The first round of discussions took place in Rawalpindi in December 1962, followed by four more rounds in Delhi, Karachi (twice) and Calcutta.

Few thought that much would come of the negotiation but the dialogue revealed that Bhutto was capable of being more flexible than might have been expected. The young foreign minister indicated that Pakistan might be willing to settle for some adjustments to the ceasefire line in Kashmir — indeed, he asked India to make some suggestions for adjustments — and he also considered the idea that the issue at the heart of the dispute, the status of the Kashmir Valley, could be blurred by demilitarisation, soft borders, joint administration, free movement or Kashmir’s status being internationalised in some way. But by the time the talks reached a sixth round, both sides were reverting to their established positions and US pressure in Delhi softened, meaning Nehru saw no need to compromise.

Half a century later, Musharraf, after backchannel talks, proposed a package with some similarities to what was discussed by ZAB. First, there was agreement in principle on demilitarisation. Pakistan would withdraw troops from Azad Kashmir and reduce cross-border militancy if India took troops out of the Kashmir Valley. Furthermore, Pakistan would be willing to deepen the degree of self-governance in Azad Kashmir if India made similar arrangements on its side of the LoC. But alongside the self-governance there would be a joint mechanism involving the governments of India and Pakistan which would meet two or three times a year to facilitate issues such as trade, free movement and, crucially, water. The proposals eventually collapsed in the face of nationalist opposition in India.

Is some backchannel diplomacy exploring the options?

A comparison of the two sets of talks shows that the process became far more detailed under Musharraf than had been the case with the ZAB-led talks. As for the substance, some elements were clearly different. In the 1960s talks, the ceasefire line would remain important whereas in the Musharraf period the whole effort was to reduce the significance of the LoC. Nevertheless, there were also many shared elements including demilitarisation and the idea of a blurred constitutional status.

When Narendra Modi won his first election in 2014, some Pakistani military strategists argued that his coming to power could work to Pakistan’s benefit. They argued that the very fact that Modi was a hard-liner would mean he would be in a position not only to do a deal but also deliver it. Similarly, it would be difficult to imagine any civilian politician in Pakistan securing a settlement on Kashmir because the army would doubtless accuse them of selling out. Only the army could deliver the army.

Read: Kashmir question

On the face of it, however, Modi seems even less likely than his predecessors to do a deal. Not only is he a more nationalist politician but he has also, if anything, advanced India’s demands. His removal of Article 370 represented a hardening of India’s position. And the idea that India might accept the LoC as an international border has given way to suggestions that India is interested in advancing its claims on Azad Kashmir.

For all of that, some of those who have worked with Gen Bajwa say the army leader believes that there is little point in continuing with a strategy in Kashmir that doesn’t work. And President Alvi recently hinted to TV host Adil Shahzeb that Imran Khan is prepared to adapt his thinking on Kashmir. All of which raises the question: is something going on? Is some backchannel diplomacy already exploring the options? If that is the case, then when it comes to the nature of any possible deal, the history of the ZAB and Musharraf initiatives suggests some of the elements have probably already been discussed by the two countries and are, in a sense, already out there.

A deal may look impossible. But that was what they said about Northern Ireland too.

The writer is author of The Bhutto Dynasty: The Struggle for Power in Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2021

Houses of horror

Death came in many forms for the Native Americans.

Zarrar Khuhro

The writer is a journalist.


OF all the many genocides that history has witnessed, perhaps the most successful was the one perpetrated on Native Americans, entailing as it did not just the physical elimination of the original inhabitants of North and South America, but also the erasure and commodification of their culture.

Exactly how many died remains a subject of debate, but a recent study estimates that in 1492 the indigenous population of the Ameri­cas was around 60 million. This figure was arrived at by calculating the amount of agricultural land needed to sustain one person and then applying that to the total area far­med in the Americas. By way of comparison, Europe’s population at the time was 70m to 88m.

Once the Europeans reached the Americas the situation changed and data models tell us that by 1600, about 56m Native Americans had died. That means the wholesale elimination of 90 per cent of the American population, and about 10pc of the global population at the time. In absolute terms, this slaughter is second only to that of the European power struggle known as World War II, in which some 80m people died. The scale of this depopulation was such that global cooling took place.

Death came in many forms for the Native Americans, who saw their settlements and civilisations destroyed by murder, slavery and, most of all, disease. Smallpox, measles and the bubonic plague cut a swathe through the natives who, unlike the Europeans, had no immunity to such diseases. Once the colonialists figured this out, smallpox especially was used as a weapon against the natives in what is perhaps the first widespread modern usage of biological warfare.

Death came in many forms for the Native Americans.

Those that survived were herded off to ‘reservations’ far from their ancestral lands to eke out whatever existence they could, and thousands more died from exposure, hunger and exhaustion during these treks.

But it’s not enough to simply murder a people, one must also break them by erasing their very identity so that they can be recast in the mould of their oppressors and made ‘useful’, and so was launched a massive campaign to ‘civilise’ these ‘savages’.

Across North America, native children were forcibly removed from their parents and imprisoned in Indian Residential Schools where they were made to convert to Christianity, wear only Western clothes and were forbidden to speak their native languages. If they were to be caught speaking any language other than English, punishments ranged from beatings to having pins stuck in their tongues. These schools, run by the state and the church, were rife with physical, sexual and psychological abuse and countless children who entered them never came out again. In Canada, this continued until the mid-1970s. Repeated claims of abduction, abuse and murder were ignored.

But truth does not stay buried for long. Recently, a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years, was discovered on the grounds of what was once the largest such school in Canada, the Kamploops school in British Columbia.

How many more are out there? In 2008, a truth and reconciliation committee was founded to probe these accusations. It concluded that Canada’s abduction and education policy amounted to “cultural genocide”. It estimated that in the over 120-year history of this project, at least 3,200 children had died in these mini-concentration camps for children and countless thousands had been subjected to repeated sexual abuse.

But here’s the catch: the commission was only allowed to investigate 139 of the over 1,300 such schools that existed across Canada. When it asked for funding to probe allegations of mass graves, the government refused

and the commission was wrapped up after presenting its findings in 2015. The commission’s report on Missing Children and Unmarked Burials reads: “The most basic of questions about missing children — Who died? Why did they die? Where are they buried? — have never been addressed or comprehensively documented by the Canadian government.”

And the genocide of the native population, both physical and cultural, continues in other, more subtle ways. Broken and bleeding after centuries of state-sponsored abuse, rates of crime and alcoholism are far higher in indigenous communities than any other ethnic group in Canada. Also consider that while indigenous children make up less than 8pc of Canada’s child population (according to 2016 census data), they make up a staggering 52pc of all children in foster care. The murder and disappearance rate for indigenous women (twice marginalised by their ethnicity and gender) is 12 times that of other women in Canada thanks to entrenched systemic white supremacy and a police force that looks the other way when indigenous women and abducted, raped and murdered. All too often the police themselves are the abusers, a logical outcome when it comes to a state that was founded on genocide. The past isn’t another country; all too often, the past isn’t even past.

The writer is a journalist.

Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2021

Why markets exist

Samir Ahmed

Published July 5, 2021 - 

The writer is a financial markets professional and a teacher.


GEORGE Akerlof won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. His paper, The Market for Lemons, is a seminal work in the discipline. He wrote it in 1967 as a fresh assistant professor at Berkeley, having completed his PhD at MIT in 1966. The paper was rejected by three prestigious journals, by two on the grounds of triviality and by the third on the grounds that it would upend the then prevailing understanding of economics. It was finally published by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, in 1970. The Market for Lemons is about markets and transactions. In Akerlof’s own words “It concerns how horse traders respond to the natural question: ‘if he wants to sell that horse, do I really want to buy it?’”

Akerlof uses the example of the used car market to illustrate the point. In any given market, some cars will inevitably be of bad quality (lemons, in the slang) and some of good quality (peaches).

Any seller, as the current owner of the car, always has better information about the quality and inherent value of the car than any buyer. A buyer contemplating a purchase does not know if the car is a peach or a lemon. Let us say the fair value of a peach is Rs2,000,000 and that of a lemon Rs1,000,000. The buyer, under the circumstances, can expect equally to get either a peach or a lemon and will therefore offer an average of the two prices ie Rs1,500,000. At this price the owners of the lemons will be happy to sell but the owners of the peaches will withhold their cars from the market since the price offered is less than the fair value. There is thus a market malfunction.

We can take it a step further. If a certain number of peaches are withheld by the sellers, buyers will revise their expectations of the average proportion of lemons to peaches and will bid even lower than Rs1,500,000. The malfunction intensifies. The root cause of the problem is of course the existence of unequal information. Economists have a fancy phrase for it — information asymmetry.

Information asymmetry may make the investor hesitant and therefore the transaction less likely.

Any market malfunction is serious because it results in a loss of economic efficiency — transactions which could have added value to both parties do not happen. In response, markets — the institutions, rules and regulations which govern them — have evolved over time to become more efficient with positive repercussions for economic growth and development.

Let us take a leap from the used car market to financial markets to see this more closely. Financial transactions are highly susceptible to information asymmetries because of their inherent complexity. Financial markets, for all of their considerable sins, offer insights into the nature and role of markets in general by virtue of their size, scope and sophistication.

Financial markets, at their most basic, provide a mechanism to move money from those who have a surplus to those who have a productive need for money but do not have a surplus. Financial markets, as any other market, are a central meeting place for buyers and sellers (of funds). These meeting places can be physical or — increasingly — virtual. The presence of a large number of participants ensures that buying and selling is easier. Liquidity — the quantum and value of transactions that take place — is an important aspect of markets. The more liquidity you have, the more efficient the market.

Transparency is another key factor. Transactions in financial markets are recorded and the information disseminated. Information asymmetry is to a large extent mitigated. Since each transaction takes place at a certain price at a certain time, markets give critical information about the value of traded assets. This information is more valuable since it is arrived at, not in isolation, but as the net result of the aggregate buying and selling decisions of multiple participants. Economists have a fancy phrase for this too — price discovery.

Let us take a basic financial transaction. Say there is an entrepreneur who is looking to sell shares in her company to outside investors for fresh capital. The entrepreneur will always possess more information on the health of the company than any potential investor will. The position is exactly the same as the seller and buyer in the used car example. The entrepreneur may offer the shares of her company at a certain price. The potential investor has no way to judge the fair value. The information asymmetry may make the investor hesitant and therefore the transaction less likely.

Let us now contrast this with a share transaction at a formal financial market like the Pakistan Stock Exchange. Any company listed on the PSX is required by law to disclose certain information publicly. This includes quarterly financial results, an annual audited result, and all material information which can have an impact on the business and its value. The requirement for information disclosure and its mandatory dissemination by the exchange mitigates the information asymmetry problem. It enables investors to make informed investment decisions.

Furthermore, the share price information is publicly available, indeed during PSX trading hours it is available in real time. There can be no disagreement between a buyer or seller over its price at a given time. The buyer and seller may differ on whether the price is a fair valuation, in which case either may decide not to do the transaction. However, this will not be due to a lack of information.

Markets promote greater economic activity. If markets are non-existent or inefficient, such activity is starved, with consequences for economic development. This holds true for financial markets, goods markets and commodity markets. The latter are a particularly vexatious issue at present in Pakistan, their malfunction due largely to government intervention. One of the historical lessons from centrally planned economies — and why they failed — is that there were no markets and thus not enough information to make optimal economic decisions.

The writer is a financial markets professional and a teacher.

Twitter: @samirahmed14

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2021

The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?

Caffeine makes us more energetic, efficient and faster. But we have become so dependent that we need it just to get to our baseline

Photograph: Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images

The long read

by Michael Pollan
Tue 6 Jul 2021

After years of starting the day with a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea at intervals, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not something that I particularly wanted to do, but I had come to the reluctant conclusion that the story I was writing demanded it. Several of the experts I was interviewing had suggested that I really couldn’t understand the role of caffeine in my life – its invisible yet pervasive power – without getting off it and then, presumably, getting back on. Roland Griffiths, one of the world’s leading researchers of mood-altering drugs, and the man most responsible for getting the diagnosis of “caffeine withdrawal” included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, told me he hadn’t begun to understand his own relationship with caffeine until he stopped using it and conducted a series of self-experiments. He urged me to do the same.

For most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness. Something like 90% of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of fizzy drinks). Few of us even think of it as a drug, much less our daily use of it as an addiction. It’s so pervasive that it’s easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness but, in fact, an altered state. It just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, rendering it invisible.

The scientists have spelled out, and I had duly noted, the predictable symptoms of caffeine withdrawal: headache, fatigue, lethargy, difficulty concentrating, decreased motivation, irritability, intense distress, loss of confidence and dysphoria. But beneath that deceptively mild rubric of “difficulty concentrating” hides nothing short of an existential threat to the work of the writer. How can you possibly expect to write anything when you can’t concentrate?

I postponed it as long as I could, but finally the dark day arrived. According to the researchers I’d interviewed, the process of withdrawal had actually begun overnight, while I was sleeping, during the “trough” in the graph of caffeine’s diurnal effects. The day’s first cup of tea or coffee acquires most of its power – its joy! – not so much from its euphoric and stimulating properties than from the fact that it is suppressing the emerging symptoms of withdrawal. This is part of the insidiousness of caffeine. Its mode of action, or “pharmacodynamics”, mesh so perfectly with the rhythms of the human body that the morning cup of coffee arrives just in time to head off the looming mental distress set in motion by yesterday’s cup of coffee. Daily, caffeine proposes itself as the optimal solution to the problem caffeine creates.

At the coffee shop, instead of my usual “half caff”, I ordered a cup of mint tea. And on this morning, that lovely dispersal of the mental fog that the first hit of caffeine ushers into consciousness never arrived. The fog settled over me and would not budge. It’s not that I felt terrible – I never got a serious headache – but all day long I felt a certain muzziness, as if a veil had descended in the space between me and reality, a kind of filter that absorbed certain wavelengths of light and sound.

I was able to do some work, but distractedly. “I feel like an unsharpened pencil,” I wrote in my notebook. “Things on the periphery intrude, and won’t be ignored. I can’t focus for more than a minute.”

Over the course of the next few days, I began to feel better, the veil lifted, yet I was still not quite myself, and neither, quite, was the world. In this new normal, the world seemed duller to me. I seemed duller, too. Mornings were the worst. I came to see how integral caffeine is to the daily work of knitting ourselves back together after the fraying of consciousness during sleep. That reconsolidation of self took much longer than usual, and never quite felt complete.

Humanity’s acquaintance with caffeine is surprisingly recent. But it is hardly an exaggeration to say that this molecule remade the world. The changes wrought by coffee and tea occurred at a fundamental level – the level of the human mind. Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.

By the 15th century, coffee was being cultivated in east Africa and traded across the Arabian peninsula. Initially, the new drink was regarded as an aide to concentration and used by Sufis in Yemen to keep them from dozing off during their religious observances. (Tea, too, started out as a little helper for Buddhist monks striving to stay awake through long stretches of meditation.) Within a century, coffeehouses had sprung up in cities across the Arab world. In 1570 there were more than 600 of them in Constantinople alone, and they spread north and west with the Ottoman empire.

The Islamic world at this time was in many respects more advanced than Europe, in science and technology, and in learning. Whether this mental flourishing had anything to do with the prevalence of coffee (and prohibition of alcohol) is difficult to prove, but as the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued, the beverage “seemed to be tailor-​made for a culture that forbade alcohol consumption and gave birth to modern mathematics”.

A coffee house in 17th-century London. Photograph: Lordprice Collection/Alamy


In 1629 the first coffeehouses in Europe, styled on the Arab model, popped up in Venice, and the first such establishment in England was opened in Oxford in 1650 by a Jewish immigrant. They arrived in London shortly thereafter, and proliferated: within a few decades there were thousands of coffeehouses in London; at their peak, one for every 200 Londoners.

To call the English coffeehouse a new kind of public space doesn’t quite do it justice. You paid a penny for the coffee, but the information – in the form of newspapers, books, magazines and conversation – was free. (Coffeehouses were often referred to as “penny universities”.) After visiting London coffeehouses, a French writer named Maximilien Misson wrote, “You have all Manner of News there; You have a good fire, which you may sit by as long as you please: You have a Dish of Coffee; you meet your Friends for the Transaction of Business, and all for a Penny, if you don’t care to spend more.”

London’s coffeehouses were distinguished one from another by the professional or intellectual interests of their patrons, which eventually gave them specific institutional identities. So, for example, merchants and men with interests in shipping gathered at Lloyd’s Coffee House. Here you could learn what ships were arriving and departing, and buy an insurance policy on your cargo. Lloyd’s Coffee House eventually became the insurance brokerage Lloyd’s of London. Learned types and scientists – known then as “natural philosophers” – gathered at the Grecian, which became closely associated with the Royal Society; Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley debated physics and mathematics here, and supposedly once dissected a dolphin on the premises.

The conversation in London’s coffee houses frequently turned to politics, in vigorous exercises of free speech that drew the ire of the government, especially after the monarchy was restored in 1660. Charles II, worried that plots were being hatched in coffeehouses, decided that the places were dangerous fomenters of rebellion that the crown needed to suppress. In 1675 the king moved to close down the coffeehouses, on the grounds that the “false, malicious and scandalous Reports” emanating therefrom were a “Disturbance of the Quiet and Peace of the Realm”. Like so many other compounds that change the qualities of consciousness in individuals, caffeine was regarded as a threat to institutional power, which moved to suppress it, in a foreshadowing of the wars against drugs to come.

But the king’s war against coffee lasted only 11 days. Charles discovered that it was too late to turn back the tide of caffeine. By then the coffeehouse was such a fixture of English culture and daily life – and so many eminent Londoners had become addicted to caffeine – that everyone simply ignored the king’s order and blithely went on drinking coffee. Afraid to test his authority and find it lacking, the king quietly backed down, issuing a second proclamation rolling back the first “out of princely consideration and royal compassion”.

It’s hard to imagine that the sort of political, cultural and intellectual ferment that bubbled up in the coffeehouses of both France and England in the 17th century would ever have developed in a tavern. The kind of magical thinking that alcohol sponsored in the medieval mind began to yield to a new spirit of rationalism and, a bit later, Enlightenment thinking. French historian Jules Michelet wrote: “Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illumines the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”

To see, lucidly, “the reality of things”: this was, in a nutshell, the rationalist project. Coffee became, along with the microscope, telescope and the pen, one of its indispensable tools.

After a few weeks, the mental impairments of withdrawal had subsided, and I could once again think in a straight line, hold an abstraction in my head for more than two minutes, and shut peripheral thoughts out of my field of attention. Yet I continued to feel as though I was mentally just slightly behind the curve, especially when in the company of drinkers of coffee and tea, which, of course, was all the time and everywhere.

Here’s what I was missing: I missed the way caffeine and its rituals used to order my day, especially in the morning. Herbal teas – which are barely, if at all, psychoactive – lack the power of coffee and tea to organise the day into a rhythm of energetic peaks and valleys, as the mental tide of caffeine ebbs and flows. The morning surge is a blessing, obviously, but there is also something comforting in the ebb tide of afternoon, which a cup of tea can gently reverse.

At some point I began to wonder if perhaps it was all in my head, this sense that I had lost a mental step since getting off coffee and tea. So I decided to look at the science, to learn what, if any, cognitive enhancement can actually be attributed to caffeine. I found numerous studies conducted over the years reporting that caffeine improves performance on a range of cognitive measures – of memory, focus, alertness, vigilance, attention and learning. An experiment done in the 1930s found that chess players on caffeine performed significantly better than players who abstained. In another study, caffeine users completed a variety of mental tasks more quickly, though they made more errors; as one paper put it in its title, people on caffeine are “faster, but not smarter”. In a 2014 experiment, subjects given caffeine immediately after learning new material remembered it better than subjects who received a placebo. Tests of psychomotor abilities also suggest that caffeine gives us an edge: in simulated driving exercises, caffeine improves performance, especially when the subject is tired. It also enhances physical performance on such metrics as time trials, muscle strength and endurance.

True, there is reason to take these findings with a pinch of salt, if only because this kind of research is difficult to do well. The problem is finding a good control group in a society in which virtually everyone is addicted to caffeine. But the consensus seems to be that caffeine does improve mental (and physical) performance to some degree.

Whether caffeine also enhances creativity is a different question, however, and there’s some reason to doubt that it does. Caffeine improves our focus and ability to concentrate, which surely enhances linear and abstract thinking, but creativity works very differently. It may depend on the loss of a certain kind of focus, and the freedom to let the mind off the leash of linear thought.

Cognitive psychologists sometimes talk in terms of two distinct types of consciousness: spotlight consciousness, which illuminates a single focal point of attention, making it very good for reasoning, and lantern consciousness, in which attention is less focused yet illuminates a broader field of attention. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do many people on psychedelics. This more diffuse form of attention lends itself to mind wandering, free association, and the making of novel connections – all of which can nourish creativity. By comparison, caffeine’s big contribution to human progress has been to intensify spotlight consciousness – the focused, linear, abstract and efficient cognitive processing more closely associated with mental work than play. This, more than anything else, is what made caffeine the perfect drug not only for the age of reason and the Enlightenment, but for the rise of capitalism, too.

The power of caffeine to keep us awake and alert, to stem the natural tide of exhaustion, freed us from the circadian rhythms of our biology and so, along with the advent of artificial light, opened the frontier of night to the possibilities of work.

What coffee did for clerks and intellectuals, tea would soon do for the English working class. Indeed, it was tea from the East Indies – heavily sweetened with sugar from the West Indies – that fuelled the Industrial Revolution. We think of England as a tea culture, but coffee, initially the cheaper beverage by far, dominated at first.

Soon after the British East India Company began trading with China, cheap tea flooded England. A beverage that only the well-to-do could afford to drink in 1700 was by 1800 consumed by virtually everyone, from the society matron to the factory worker.

Tea pickers in Assam, India. Photograph: AFP/Getty

To supply this demand required an imperialist enterprise of enormous scale and brutality, especially after the British decided it would be more profitable to turn India, its colony, into a tea producer, than to buy tea from the Chinese. This required first stealing the secrets of tea production from the Chinese (a mission accomplished by the renowned Scots botanist and plant explorer Robert Fortune, disguised as a mandarin); seizing land from peasant farmers in Assam (where tea grew wild), and then forcing the farmers into servitude, picking tea leaves from dawn to dusk. The introduction of tea to the west was all about exploitation – the extraction of surplus value from labour, not only in its production in India, but in its consumption by the British as well.

Tea allowed the British working class to endure long shifts, brutal working conditions and more or less constant hunger; the caffeine helped quiet the hunger pangs, and the sugar in it became a crucial source of calories. (From a strictly nutritional standpoint, workers would have been better off sticking with beer.) The caffeine in tea helped create a new kind of worker, one better adapted to the rule of the machine. It is difficult to imagine an Industrial Revolution without it.

So how exactly does coffee, and caffeine more generally, make us more energetic, efficient and faster? How could this little molecule possibly supply the human body energy without calories? Could caffeine be the proverbial free lunch, or do we pay a price for the mental and physical energy – the alertness, focus and stamina – that caffeine gives us?

Alas, there is no free lunch. It turns out that caffeine only appears to give us energy. Caffeine works by blocking the action of adenosine, a molecule that gradually accumulates in the brain over the course of the day, preparing the body to rest. Caffeine molecules interfere with this process, keeping adenosine from doing its job – and keeping us feeling alert. But adenosine levels continue to rise, so that when the caffeine is eventually metabolised, the adenosine floods the body’s receptors and tiredness returns. So the energy that caffeine gives us is borrowed, in effect, and eventually the debt must be paid back.

For as long as people have been drinking coffee and tea, medical authorities have warned about the dangers of caffeine. But until now, caffeine has been cleared of the most serious charges against it. The current scientific consensus is more than reassuring – in fact, the research suggests that coffee and tea, far from being deleterious to our health, may offer some important benefits, as long as they aren’t consumed to excess. Regular coffee consumption is associated with a decreased risk of several cancers (including breast, prostate, colorectal and endometrial), cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, dementia and possibly depression and suicide. (Though high doses can produce nervousness and anxiety, and rates of suicide climb among those who drink eight or more cups a day.)

My review of the medical literature on coffee and tea made me wonder if my abstention might be compromising not only my mental function but my physical health, as well. However, that was before I spoke to Matt Walker.

An English neuroscientist on the faculty at University of California, Berkeley, Walker, author of Why We Sleep, is single-minded in his mission: to alert the world to an invisible public-health crisis, which is that we are not getting nearly enough sleep, the sleep we are getting is of poor quality, and a principal culprit in this crime against body and mind is caffeine. Caffeine itself might not be bad for you, but the sleep it’s stealing from you may have a price. According to Walker, research suggests that insufficient sleep may be a key factor in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, arteriosclerosis, stroke, heart failure, depression, anxiety, suicide and obesity. “The shorter you sleep,” he bluntly concludes, “the shorter your lifespan.”

Walker grew up in England drinking copious amounts of black tea, morning, noon and night. He no longer consumes caffeine, save for the small amounts in his occasional cup of decaf. In fact, none of the sleep researchers or experts on circadian rhythms I interviewed for this story use caffeine.

Walker explained that, for most people, the “quarter life” of caffeine is usually about 12 hours, meaning that 25% of the caffeine in a cup of coffee consumed at noon is still circulating in your brain when you go to bed at midnight. That could well be enough to completely wreck your deep sleep.

I thought of myself as a pretty good sleeper before I met Walker. At lunch he probed me about my sleep habits. I told him I usually get a solid seven hours, fall asleep easily, dream most nights.

“How many times a night do you wake up?” he asked. I’m up three or four times a night (usually to pee), but I almost always fall right back to sleep.

He nodded gravely. “That’s really not good, all those interruptions. Sleep quality is just as important as sleep quantity.” The interruptions were undermining the amount of “deep” or “slow wave” sleep I was getting, something above and beyond the REM sleep I had always thought was the measure of a good night’s rest. But it seems that deep sleep is just as important to our health, and the amount we get tends to decline with age.

Caffeine is not the sole cause of our sleep crisis; screens, alcohol (which is as hard on REM sleep as caffeine is on deep sleep), pharmaceuticals, work schedules, noise and light pollution, and anxiety can all play a role in undermining both the duration and quality of our sleep. But here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes – which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates.

The time came to wrap up my experiment in caffeine deprivation. I was eager to see what a body that had been innocent of caffeine for three months would experience when subjected to a couple of shots of espresso. I had thought long and hard about what kind of coffee I would get, and where. I opted for a “special”, my local coffee shop’s term for a double-​shot espresso made with less steamed milk than a typical cappuccino; it’s more commonly known as a flat white.

My special was unbelievably good, a ringing reminder of what a poor counterfeit decaf is; here were whole dimensions and depths of flavour that I had completely forgotten about. Everything in my visual field seemed pleasantly italicised, filmic, and I wondered if all these people with their cardboard-sleeve-swaddled cups had any idea what a powerful drug they were sipping. But how could they?

They had long ago become habituated to caffeine, and were now using it for another purpose entirely. Baseline maintenance, that is, plus a welcome little lift. I felt lucky that this more powerful experience was available to me. This – along with the stellar sleeps – was the wonderful dividend of my investment in abstention.
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And yet in a few days’ time I would be them, caffeine-tolerant and addicted all over again. I wondered: was there any way to preserve the power of this drug? Could I devise a new relationship with caffeine? Maybe treat it more like a psychedelic – say, something to be taken only on occasion, and with a greater degree of ceremony and intention. Maybe just drink coffee on Saturdays? Just the one.


How Nespresso's coffee revolution got ground down


When I got home I tackled my to-do list with unaccustomed fervour, harnessing the surge of energy – of focus! – coursing through me, and put it to good use. I compulsively cleared and decluttered – on the computer, in my closet, in the garden and the shed. I raked, I weeded, I put things in order, as if I were possessed. Whatever I focused on, I focused on zealously and single-mindedly.

Around noon, my compulsiveness began to subside, and I felt ready for a change of scene. I had yanked a few plants out of the vegetable garden that were not pulling their weight, and decided to go to the garden centre to buy some replacements. It was during the drive that I realised the true reason I was heading to this particular garden centre: it had this Airstream trailer parked out front that served really good espresso.

This is an edited extract from This Is Your Mind on Plants: Opium-Caffeine-Mescaline by Michael Pollan, published by Allen Lane on 8 July and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk

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Native children didn’t ‘lose’ their lives at residential schools. Their lives were stolen

Erica Violet Lee

Terms like residential school are deeply inadequate. These were not schools; they were prisons and forced labour camps

People march during an anti-Canada Day rally in Edmonton, Alberta. Photograph: Canadian Press/Rex/Shutterstock

Tue 6 Jul 2021 

We’d all heard the stories, long before they started to receive this summer’s 24/7 coverage by every news station in Canada. Long before ground-penetrating radars confirmed the presence of unmarked graves, we knew that our missing family members did not simply “disappear” nor attempt and fail to run away from residential schools, despite what we were told by missionaries and government officials. Indigenous communities are necessarily close-knit, and we live in the histories of our people despite every effort at the eradication of our knowledges, cultures, languages – and of our lives.

Published in 2015, the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) estimated that 4,100 named and unnamed students died in Canada’s residential schools. To keep costs low, the report said, many were probably buried in untended and unmarked graves at school cemeteries, rather than sending the students’ bodies back to their home communities. Often, parents were not notified at all, or the children were said to have died from sickness – an excuse commonly used to justify intentional genocides of Indigenous nations, predicated on our supposed biological inferiority.

My reserve community is Thunderchild First Nation, Saskatchewan, in the middle of the beautiful northern prairies. The institution intended for children from Thunderchild was called St Henri, built in 1901 by the Roman Catholic church. The creation of these residential schooling institutions was a direct result of Canadian policy aiming to remove Indigenous people from our lands and assimilate us into Canadian society. Neither the church nor the state is innocent in the continued genocide of our people.

On 27 May 2021, the graves of at least 215 Native children were officially uncovered at the former Kamloops Indian residential school on Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation, in the city of Kamloops, British Columbia. Less than a month later, 751 unmarked graves were located at Marieval Indian residential school on Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan. Six days later, 182 unmarked graves were located at the site of St Eugene’s mission school in Cranbrook, BC. As the days pass, more communities are unearthing such tragedies.

The outcome of this long-awaited reckoning involves multiple Native nations across the land delving into their own soils, pursuing the stories we’ve all heard from our elders and knowledge-keepers.

Many of us understand everyday Canadian schools themselves to be violent institutions of assimilation and colonization. In my predominantly Indigenous urban elementary school in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I grew up singing O Canada and God Save the Queen at assemblies. In the lunchroom, Johnny Appleseed, a biblical song about a Christian god’s benevolence, was to be recited before we were allowed to eat our school-provided meals. Still, the terms “residential school” – and the US equivalent, “boarding school” – are deeply inadequate. These “residential schools”, “day schools”, and “boarding schools” were prisons. These were forced labour camps.

I recall hearing of Cree people, including small children, forced to work on sugar beet farms in brutal summer heat. This was a common practice from the 1940s to at least the 1980s: farmers lured dispossessed and hungry Indigenous people into seasonal labor with false promises, then forced the workers to labor 12-14 hour days with little or no pay. They slept in trucks, tents or empty grain bins. If they ventured into nearby towns, they were chased away with bats. If they tried to leave, their children might be taken away.

Some of the stories we are told about residential schooling prisons involve Native children digging graves for other children. Rarely did our ancestors receive proper burials or grave markers. The soils of these lands have always known our hands, as gardeners, as workers; these lands hold our bodies and the bodies of our ancestors. The soil that lies underneath so-called Canada has been hell and it has been refuge.

One thing is clear: Native children’s lives are never “lost”; they are deliberately and violently stolen. Similarly, the lands of Indigenous people – from Canada to the US and beyond – are never “lost”; they have been and continue to be forcibly colonized. The words we use matter for Native life because these words define the past, the present, and the possible. Reckoning with the gentle language Canadians have been taught to use to describe the violence of empire is one part of the process of undoing colonization.

In our communities, the accounting of Indigenous death feels relentless. We hear and see and feel the growing toll of graves uncovered: ever-higher numbers recited seemingly hundreds of times daily on nearly every Canadian news network. Endless repetitions of the phone numbers of Residential Schooling Crisis lines to connect the grieving with mental health counselors. None of it is enough.

I refuse to play the numbers game. Our grief and our lives are not reducible to numbers or statistics. As the Twitter user @awahihte put it, “Kamloops is not a unit of measurement.” And to whose gaze are we appealing when we repeat these numbers over and over and over, hoping to evoke empathy from a settler state that cannot feel? Meanwhile, as Indigenous people, we are struck in the heart by those numbers, every single time. There is simply no calculus that can account for the lives of each child stolen by colonialism’s violence – all the moments of joy, curiosity, play and learning that make childhood such a wondrous time; these things are immeasurable and immaterial. The lived experience of Indigenous childhood is irreducible to any European notion of property, and this is precisely why it is a threat to the colonial order.

And what can the Catholic church and the Canadian state do to repair the irreparable? The colonial institution of Canada will not reform itself, and it will certainly not end itself. Yet there is one variable often left out of this calculation: our continued resistance. I think not only about the young ones who were stolen, but the childhoods that have been reclaimed by Indigenous resurgence and the all-encompassing love of our parents and communities. Indeed, our people are still stolen and killed. Indeed, our knowledges are suppressed, and our lands are colonized. In spite of this, what allows me to wake up in the morning and feel hope is all that we managed to save – all that which they could not take. Our languages and ceremonies were preserved and practised undercover, hidden from the Indian agents patrolling our reserves. And parents camped in tipis outside those prisons, waiting to see their children. They never gave up. Nor will we.

The institution for children at my reserve, Thunderchild First Nation, in the middle of the beautiful northern prairies, was burned down in 1948 by a fire set in the middle of the night. The fire was rumoured to have been started by the children held in captivity at St Henri. The institution was never rebuilt.

Since time immemorial, many Indigenous peoples around the world have used fire to rejuvenate the land and restore order to the natural world. The lesson is that sometimes, things must burn for the soil to heal and become healthy once more. As monuments and statues to colonial figures are toppled, and as Black and Indigenous communities continue to resist and heal, another world is becoming possible. In the next world that we are building on these lands our ancestors knew so well, no child will have their formative years violently stolen away by colonialism. They will be free. We will be free.

• Erica Violet Lee is nêhiyaw from Saskatoon and a member of Thunderchild First Nation. She is a poet, scholar and community organizer