The Shared Struggles of Bedouins and Native Americans

Whether in the Middle East or North Dakota, tribal societies struggle to navigate long-held traditions with occupation and displacement

September 3, 2021

The area between the ancient cities of Jerusalem and Jericho is at once unremarkable yet beautiful — a space made up of modest yet wide sloping valleys that transition in color slowly and unevenly from green to the many shades of brown and tan that make up the desert landscape. Heading east toward Jericho, one gets the impression that this is where the fertile valleys and merchant cities of the Levant finally meet the vast expanse of the great deserts of the Arabian Peninsula.

Today we no longer think of these geographic markers of space but instead of the zone between Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In order to cross the Jordan Valley, we have to travel through the science-fiction-sounding “Area C,” a highly militarized section of the occupied West Bank where Israeli settlements exist directly alongside various small gatherings of Palestinian Bedouins — their makeshift dwellings dotting the empty landscape along the modern highways built exclusively for Israeli settlers.

Since 2014, as part of our multimedia research project, The Native and the Refugee, we have produced a dozen films on the ongoing settler colonialism in North America and the Middle East. The Native and the Refugee juxtaposes the Palestinian movement with indigenous struggles in the United States by focusing specifically on the native reservation and Palestinian refugee camp as spaces of exception. What are the worldviews, histories and ways of life of these communities, who persevere in their demands for dignity and self-determination?

From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota to the Jericho Governorate in the West Bank — from Washington to Jerusalem — the political questions of our time revolve around indigeneity, refugeehood and sovereignty. The continued processes of state formation in the U.S. and Israel both mirror and reinforce each other, and this is nowhere better seen than in the reservations and refugee camps left in their wake.

The struggles that take place within and around many American Indian reservations represent an attempt to articulate both an alternative mode of governance and relationship to the land. When the people of Standing Rock protested the passage of the Dakota Access Pipeline under the part of the Missouri River that abuts their reservation, the struggle that emerged resonated within a longer horizon of sovereignty beyond the reservation itself.

Few, if any, communities have been as fundamentally affected by the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the nation-states of the modern Middle East as the nomadic Bedouins. This includes not just Bedouins who reside in what is today Israel, but even more so the Bedouins of the occupied territories, especially the West Bank. In every area around the Arabian Peninsula there are liminal spaces between geographic regions wherein lines were drawn to divide countries — the desert region that separates the Levant from Mesopotamia contains the border between Iraq and Syria; the Sinai Peninsula contains a border separating Egypt from the Levant; and then there are the currently contested sites in the valleys between Jerusalem and the border town of Jericho.

It is into and within these liminal spaces that the Bedouin exists, challenging our geographies and the political edifices of the state. Just as the displacement of Arabs from Israel — and their subsequent refugee status while living just hours from their original village— reveals something fundamentally illusory or artificial about these modern nation-states, so too, it is with the Bedouin whose way of life is in fundamental contradiction to the borders of the modern Middle East and the nations they demarcate.

As we write, there are currently around 6 million people in Lebanon. Approximately 1 million are Syrian refugees, 450,000 are Palestinian refugees, 100,000 are Kurds, and at least another 100,000 are Bedouins. More Lebanese people live in Brazil than in Lebanon. The prejudices and political contradictions of the modern nation-state exist wherever such a form is found: ethnic and religious minorities contending for status and survival alongside refugees, indigenous populations and elites of all stripes.

It was during the Nakba of 1948 that Israel occupied the Negev Desert and forced the displacement of the native Bedouin population into many of the surrounding countries. People who had once migrated only with the demands of nature were now forcibly moved again and again by the occupying Israeli authorities, from 1948 through 1967, up until the present day. The Bedouins of Palestine transitioned painfully from the free migrations of nomadism to the forced migrations of refugeehood. Today, 85% of the Bedouins in the occupied West Bank are refugees from what is now Israel, though most have refused to move into refugee camps in order to try to maintain their traditional lifestyle.

The Bedouins, through their various displacements, have continually faced harsh decisions as both a people and as individual tribes. Given the choice between a partially compromised nomadism that allows for subsistence living and an abandoned way of life that will likely lead to precarity and poverty, the Bedouins have largely chosen the former, grasping at whatever strands of their traditional way of life remain possible. But even here they find themselves under threat. Israel’s current plan is to round up all of the Bedouin tribes from all of their gatherings in the occupied West Bank, allot each family a mere 0.1 acres of land and cram the majority of them into what would effectively be a giant Bedouin reservation, in an area called al-Nuweima on the outskirts of Jericho.

The Bedouins harbor no illusions about what this forced relocation would mean. As one Bedouin leader told us, “We will not be able to raise sheep or practice our traditional lifestyle and will be forced into becoming day laborers. For us, this is out of the question.” The Israeli plan to place all West Bank Bedouins in a giant reservation on the borders of Jericho is part and parcel of the forced evictions in East Jerusalem. The majority of these Bedouin gatherings are located in the stretch of land between Jerusalem and Jericho, precisely the area that the Israelis would like to turn into the greater suburbs of a united Jewish Jerusalem, free of Palestinians.

In 2014, Israel first announced this proposal to relocate and resettle 12,500 Bedouins living in Area C, and it was that same year that we started work on The Native and the Refugee, researching and listening to the experiences of Palestinian refugees and American Indians. We traveled from Beirut’s Burj Barajneh to New York’s Akwesasne, Amman’s Wihdat to Arizona’s Navajo Nation, Bethlehem’s Dheisheh to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge, documenting their movements for self-determination.

The al-Nuweima plan recalls an important chapter in the history of the American Indian reservation. In the Dawes Act of 1887, the U.S. government forced a system of private property onto what was previously communal land tenure, dividing native territory into parcels to be owned by each family and putting the remainder out onto the open market. Allotting land to each individual family not only resulted in the loss of overall native territory but also worked to eradicate their tribal system of governance and social structure, imposing an external form of life based on a static familial privatization of the land.

Then as now, it was done for the benefit of the settlers, either to occupy and privatize formerly held native land, to extract its natural resources or to build infrastructure for the profit of the urban dwellers. By uprooting a traditional economy and trading in communal autonomy for a division of spoils, it reduced a proud and self-sufficient people to dependence on the setter-colonial economy, which caused their displacement in the first place.

The Bedouins of the Jordan Valley are well aware that the al-Nuweima plan would yield similar results, undoubtedly collapsing their tribal structure, forcing them into an impoverished urban environment and leaving them with no other option than to work as individual day laborers for the Israeli settlers. Because of the purposeful eradication of the Palestinian economy in recent decades, the end of the Bedouin’s subsistence economy would mean their forcible integration into Israel’s colonial one.

This spatial colonization is at the heart of Israeli ethnic cleansing efforts against the Bedouin people. In Area C, the very infrastructure of the Israeli settlements is often deadly for the Bedouins. We saw a highway, exclusively serving settlers, erected near the gathering of Khan al-Ahmar, forcing the children of this community to walk across it on the way to school, heedlessly causing numerous deaths and countless injuries. This occurs alongside other forms of stark infrastructural inequality, where the newest illegal Israeli settlements are furnished with electricity and running water while Bedouin gatherings, there for decades, are systematically denied both. Meanwhile, if the sheep of the Bedouins stray onto territory designated for Israeli military or settler use, the animals are confiscated and impounded, either to be returned in exchange for a heavy fine or not at all.

We observed what the Bedouins themselves call “psychological warfare,” waged by settlers and the military in an effort to break their collective spirit and force them off the land. This includes forced demolitions of Bedouin gatherings, the spraying of sewage water onto their structures and land, and the specific targeting of women as a form of gendered violence used to humiliate the members of the gathering. Such was the case, for example, with the daughter of the chief of Khan al-Ahmar, who told of us of being brutally beaten by the Israeli military.

All of the above tactics find resonance in the history of the U.S., where the same methods of forced displacement of an indigenous population were used by both the government and settlers. We heard stories shockingly similar to those of the Bedouins when we visited Diné (Navajo) families currently living on the Black Mesa in the Southwest of the U.S. Much like the Bedouin, the Diné find themselves in a position of estrangement from both the U.S. government and from the Hopi reservation’s tribal government, which now controls much of their traditional territory. Black Mesa has historically been inhabited by both Hopi and Diné people.

But in order to conclude an agreement concerning mineral extraction, the U.S. government passed the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974, dividing 1.8 million acres of formerly shared land, leading to the forced relocation of more than 10,000 Diné people. Those families that “illegally” remain maintain their traditional economy and continue to live autonomously from the machinery of U.S. financial governance and because of this they face constant threats, harassment and violence from both the Hopi police and U.S. federal officers.

The Bedouins of the occupied territories find themselves in a singularly difficult position as they are denied recognition as a displaced Indigenous or minority group, both by Israel as well as by the Palestinian National Authority. This is to say that they are not recognized politically as Bedouins, as a distinct group within Palestinian society, making it difficult for them to demand the rights that should be afforded to them as both refugees as well as an indigenous people.

Much like native peoples in the U.S. have had to successfully balance their specific tribal identities within a larger pan-native identity so, too, the Bedouins must negotiate between their identity as individual tribes, their larger identity as Bedouins and finally their national identity as Palestinians. As with indigenous movements around the world, the foundation of this identity remains the Bedouin’s day-by-day articulation of their own worldview as a people, rooted in their particular symbiotic relationship to the land, their own systems of tribal governance and their own inherently communal way of life. Its lessons and examples then become not only a form of political resistance but also an ethical model in helping humanity confront the depths of the problems we face — from the downsides and dangers of nationalism on the one hand to unrestrained industrial development on the other.

Indeed, as with American Indians’ continued resilience and survival, the Bedouin communities’ very existence poses a particular and direct challenge to the occupation. It is not just that they inhabit the land that Israel wants in order to expand its settlements, but it is also because their way of life, society, means of subsistence, and relationship to the land and each other are in conflict with the developmentalist, corporatist model that Israel would like to export to the region, and forcibly sublimate the Bedouins into. However, as the chief of a Bedouin gathering near Jericho told us, “We will not leave, we will not leave no matter the cost.”

All stills are from the The Native and the Refugee / Vanessa Teran and Mitra Azar

Malek RasamnyMalek Rasamny is a researcher and filmmaker

Vanessa TeranVanessa Teran is a multimedia artist

Matt PetersonMatt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine

Taliban find dozens of ballistic missiles in Panjshir Valley

By Dylan Malyasov
Sep 15, 2021



Taliban members found dozens of short-range ballistic missiles and warheads stored in Panjshir Valley.

Taliban militants had taken the last holdout – Panjshir Valley in the east of Afghanistan – and released a video showing the depot of Soviet-made 9K72 Elbrus (NATO reporting name Scud B) tactical ballistic missiles and 9K52 Luna-M (NATO reporting name FROG-7) short-range artillery rockets.

A dozen missiles and artillery rockets along with warheads in separate containers were found in Panjshir Valley after the regime overcame the resistance of the remaining government forces.

Based on this video, the missile weapon have been stored in the open air for a long time and are in a deplorable state.

According to open sources, several hundred missile systems were gifted to the Afghan government in the 1980s from the friendly Soviet communist regime as military aid.

9K72 Elbrus is a tactical ballistic missile with a range of 300 km with a circular error probable (CEP) between 450-900 meters. It was designed to engage important enemy targets such as airfields, command posts, large concentrations of troops and vehicles, air defense batteries, supply depots and so on.

9K52 Luna-M is a Soviet short-range artillery rocket system that fires unguided and spin-stabilized 9M21 rockets. It was originally developed in the 1960s to provide divisional artillery support using tactical nuclear weapons but gradually modified for conventional use.

About this Author
Dylan Malyasov
U.S. defense journalist and commentator. Aviation photographer. Dylan leads Defence Blog's coverage of global military news, focusing on engineering and technology across the U.S. defense industry.

NEWSARMYVIDEO

The Drone Unit that Helped the Taliban Win the War

The work of a drone unit, reported in detail here for the first time, shows how the Taliban were able to win the war against the U.S.-backed forces in Afghanistan

Fazelminallah QazizaiFazelminallah Qazizai is an Afghan journalist and co-author with Chris Sands of “Night Letters: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Afghan Islamists who Changed the World”

September 15, 2021

Two civilian contractors prepare a US Army 14′ Shadow surveillance drone before it’s launched at Forward Operating Base Shank May 8, 2013 in Logar Province, Afghanistan / Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

As the U.S. began its final drawdown of troops from Afghanistan in the spring, the Taliban’s drone unit moved into position for its most important mission yet. A team of 12 engineers-turned-assassins, it was tasked with firing what would turn out to be one of the decisive shots in the closing stages of the war.

The target was a regional-level official in the north of the country named Piram Qul. Like so many of Afghanistan’s now deposed ruling elite, Piram Qul was a beguiling mixture of the charismatic and corrupt, a veteran of the mujahedeen’s struggle against the Soviets in the 1980s who had come to regard his youthful principles as an impediment to power. He was an ethnic Uzbek warlord who was part of many anti-Taliban Afghan factions, including Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Jamiati-i-Islami. In the years since the U.S.-led invasion, he had served as a member of Parliament and presided over local militias accused of a range of human rights abuses, including kidnapping and murder. What mattered to the Taliban, though, was the stranglehold he had on Takhar, a province on Afghanistan’s border with Tajikistan — an area traditionally hard for them to influence. Piram Qul was one of the last dominoes that needed to fall if the insurgents were to sweep across the north and trigger a decisive advance on Kabul. Their plan to assassinate him was motivated by necessity, not vengeance.

On the morning of May 2, Piram Qul was meeting villagers in the district of Rustaq in Takhar, accompanied by his usual retinue of bodyguards. Far above, a Taliban drone filmed him using a camera connected to the internet via a satellite signal. The hit squad’s leader was stationed at an undisclosed location nearby, where he controlled the drone and monitored the camera’s video feed using a laptop computer. He knew the drone was unlikely to be spotted. Its body and wings were painted custom blue to blend into the sky, so were the mortar rounds attached to its homemade weapons rack. The drone had cost the Taliban tens of thousands of dollars to buy, and it was quieter than cheaper and easily available commercial models. Nevertheless, the lead assassin needed to hold his nerve and remember everything he had practiced. This was not the first attack his team had carried out, nor would it be the last. But for tactical and psychological reasons it was essential he got it right. Kill Piram Qul, and the Taliban would be a step closer to sweeping through the north in a matter of weeks. Miss, and Piram Qul might encourage local security forces to regroup, stalling the Taliban’s advance and leaving the drone team embarrassed and exposed.

Around 11 a.m., the unit leader uttered a prayer and keyed the launch code into his computer. Seconds later the mission was over. Piram Qul was dead before he even realized he was under attack. The war could now be won.

Soon afterward, before any of Afghanistan’s cities had fallen to the Taliban, a member of the drone unit spoke to me on condition of anonymity about the assassination. The first of two members who agreed to be interviewed for this article also hinted at the extraordinary events that were about to unfold across the country. “We are one of the main forces that has demoralized the enemy and is causing them to flee,” he said.

While images of the Taliban alongside vast stockpiles of abandoned U.S. and Afghan military equipment have featured heavily in Western media coverage of recent weeks, they do not tell the story of America’s defeat. Classic insurgent tactics and unconventional weapons won this war. The work of the drone unit, reported in detail here for the first time, shows how the Taliban were able to neutralize the technological and military superiority of the U.S. In the past few days, the drone unit has again been busy, carrying out reconnaissance in the province of Panjshir that allowed Taliban ground forces to rout remnants of the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance hiding there.

The two drone unit members interviewed for this article spoke to me in several meetings that took place in secret in Kabul. All the interviews were held before and during the nationwide offensive that led to the Taliban entering the capital on Aug. 15 and declaring victory. Both members asked for their identities to be concealed due to the nature of the work. At one meeting, the two members were among a number of insurgents who attended a dinner in the neighborhood of Khoshal Khan, where they were joined by their squad leader, or emir, for a traditional Afghan meal of rosh — a dish of boiled and dried lamb, mixed with herbs and spices, and served with potatoes. The leader opted not to be interviewed, and his colleagues declined to reveal his name.

That drones should end up becoming one of the insurgents’ most potent weapons is a fitting twist to a war that confounded U.S. expectations from the start.

That drones should end up becoming one of the insurgents’ most potent weapons is a fitting twist to a war that confounded U.S. expectations from the start. Though drones have been used for surveillance purposes far longer, armed drones did not become operational until the late 1990s. In the last two decades the technology has become synonymous with the so-called global war on terror. The CIA used drones prior to 9/11 to track the movements of Osama bin Laden under the old Taliban regime. Then, during the 2001 invasion and its aftermath, it carried out its first drone strikes inside Afghanistan. Later, it began to use drones across the border in Pakistan, targeting insurgent hideouts in areas otherwise beyond the reach of U.S. forces. At least 51 CIA drone strikes occurred in Pakistan under the Bush administration, according to the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. This number increased significantly once Barack Obama entered the White House. From early 2009 to early 2017, the bureau estimates that more than 370 drone strikes occurred in the border areas of Pakistan. The strikes decapitated the leadership of the Pakistani Taliban and killed many militants, though they also killed hundreds of civilians.

Many states watching these developments saw the potential of drones and started developing their own. But soon enough, drone technology had also started finding its way into the hands of insurgents and militias across the Middle East. In 2006 Hezbollah used armed drones against Israel, albeit with limited efficacy. Other nonstate groups tried their luck as unrest spread across the region in the wake of the Arab Spring, with Yemeni Houthi fighters using drones to attack oil refineries in Saudi Arabia in 2019. But it was the use of drones by the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria that captured the Taliban’s imagination. Footage of the attacks was featured in the Islamic State’s slick propaganda and found its way to Afghanistan, where it was eventually seen by the future emir of the Taliban’s drone unit.

The architect of Piram Qul’s assassination was at something of a personal and professional crossroads when he began to study the Islamic State films in detail around two years ago. He had made his reputation within the Taliban as an instructor at a training camp for suicide bombers, only to find that the nature of the war was now changing. U.S. military operations were winding down, and the Taliban leadership knew that continuing to launch suicide attacks against Afghan forces risked angering the population. A more precise method of killing was needed, particularly in the north of the country where the insurgents had less support. To the man who would become the unit’s emir, drones seemed like the perfect answer. After talking through the idea with senior intelligence operatives, he started to assemble his team.

The emir is tall, with an athletic build, long hair and flecks of gray in his beard. While he spent some of his youth studying in madrassas, he reportedly excelled as a student in Kabul University’s faculty of engineering during the U.S. occupation. He carries an Italian 9mm pistol and a knife with a handle made from goat horn — a piece of artisanship distinctive to the Afghan province of Parwan. But he is also rarely seen without his laptop and two smartphones — a Huawei and a Samsung Galaxy S20. The squad leader’s team of 11 men is made in his image. Like him, several of them are from Wardak, southwest of Kabul. They are well educated, and a number of them worked for Western NGOs before joining the drone team.

“We don’t work for money, we work for our theology and ideology,” said the second unit member.

Its job was to harass and assassinate Afghan government officials in the north.

When the drone team was established sometime around 2019, its remit was clear. While other sections of the Taliban were free to use basic civilian drones for surveillance, and the Haqqani network was allowed to carry out the occasional uncoordinated drone attack in the south and east of the country using equipment it acquired independently, the hit squad was the only drone unit with official operational approval from the Taliban’s leadership. Its job was to harass and assassinate Afghan government officials in the north. In doing so, it was to report solely to senior members of the Taliban’s intelligence apparatus. No one else in the insurgency was to be given detailed information about the unit’s operations, including shadow governors and high-level military commanders. The unit would be headquartered in the northern province of Kunduz.

Although other sections within the Taliban were able to rely on Pakistan or Iran to assist with weapons supplies when necessary, the drone unit members made no mention in my interviews of receiving help from either state. Instead, they claim to have turned to a private Afghan front company that imported agricultural chemicals and farming equipment from China. The unit asked the company to find a drone that was quiet and light but strong enough to withstand adverse weather conditions and fly at relatively high altitudes. When the company identified the right drone, it cost the Taliban approximately $60,000. They purchased it in China and smuggled the parts into Afghanistan via Pakistan.

Next, the unit’s engineers set to work modifying the drone. The chemical tanks and hoses for carrying and spraying fertilizer and pesticides were removed and replaced with a makeshift plastic missile rack capable of holding four mortar rounds that could be fired via a computer-activated spring mechanism. The Talibs changed the fuses on their usual mortars for more powerful versions containing RDX, a type of explosive popularized by U.S., British and German forces during World War II. While the drone came colored black, unit members repainted it blue to camouflage it against the sky. They also painted the RDX mortars blue. The drone was set up to be controlled in flight using a combination of laptop computers and smartphones that were connected to the internet via a portable satellite terminal.

After several trial-run attacks on checkpoints of the Afghan security forces, the Taliban’s first major operation with the new drone came in the northern city of Kunduz on Nov. 1, 2020. At least four bodyguards of the provincial governor were killed in the strike, which occurred while the guards were playing volleyball in the governor’s compound. The second drone unit member interviewed for this article said another potential operation in Kunduz, this time against U.S. troops, was called off after U.S. service members spotted the drone and relayed a complaint to the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, noting that it would violate the terms of the nationwide withdrawal agreement the Trump administration struck with the Taliban in February 2020. Taliban leaders ordered a halt to the operation — a rare example of them interfering in the drone team’s work. That same month, the head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security told Parliament in Kabul that he wanted to stop the import of commercially available camera drones. It was too late.

Unit members continued to scout for potential targets even as images of crude insurgent drones used by other Taliban fighters began to spread across social media. The pictures belied the professionalism of their work. They traveled across the country in a silver Toyota Corolla Fielder station wagon driven by a trusted colleague hired from outside the team or used motorbikes to move quickly and easily through villages and backroads. The unit also bought and weaponized a second drone. Meanwhile, two more official Taliban drone units modeled on their efforts were established for the south and east of the country.

As the Taliban edged closer to victory, the northern team stepped up its operations. When Piram Qul’s name was added to the unit’s hit list, it was only a matter of time before he was killed. His assassination on May 2 this year went exactly as planned. Local media reported that the drone strike had been triggered by a call to Piram Qul’s mobile phone, ensuring its aim was precise. Not everyone in the drone unit was happy with the result, however. In the days that followed, the team learned that Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president, had been due to visit Takhar in early May, only for his trip to be canceled over security concerns in the wake of Piram Qul’s death. Some members rued the fact they had missed a chance to assassinate the president.

“The drone’s targeting system is very exact,” said the second unit member. “If your hat has four stars on it and the operator targets a specific one of those stars, he can hit it.”

The unit did not dwell on its missed opportunity. With Piram Qul dead, members turned their attention to an even more powerful political figure in northern Afghanistan, Atta Muhammad Noor, better known as Ustad Atta. Another ethnic Tajik veteran of the mujahedeen’s fight against the Soviets, Ustad Atta had spent much of the U.S. occupation as governor of Balkh province and the de facto ruler of the city of Mazar-e-Sharif. To his supporters, he was an ardent opponent of the Taliban whose sharp suits and opulent lifestyle were evidence of his progressive politics. But the man Afghans call Ustad Atta was notorious locally for inflaming ethnic tensions and cracking down on anyone who challenged his authority. He had used his power to amass an enormous personal fortune, cultivating lucrative patronage networks linked to Afghanistan’s cross-border trade with central Asia. Although he was no longer governor, his continuing influence meant the Taliban could not hope to control the north if he remained a key figure on the political scene.

On July 1, Ustad Atta was hosting a meeting with other warlords and politicians at his house in Mazar-e-Sharif when a Taliban drone fired one of its mortars into the yard outside. Ustad Atta escaped unhurt, but a number of people were injured and several vehicles damaged. In an interview soon afterward, the drone squad members predicted that Ustad Atta would no longer try to resist the advance of the Taliban’s ground forces, with one of them mocking him as an aspiring Bollywood movie star who was only interested in fame and fortune. Atta was clearly spooked. Six weeks later, on Aug. 14, the Taliban took control of Mazar-e-Sharif. On Aug. 15, Kabul fell. Ustad Atta and Ghani were nowhere to be seen.

The British journalist and author Chris Sands contributed to this story from London.

 

Decriminalisation will lead to suicide prevention. It's high time Pakistan repealed Section 325, a British Raj remnant

The first step towards destigmatising suicide is to make it a human rights issue, not a criminal offence.

Rabeea SaleemPublished 04 Sep, 2021 04:22pm

As World Suicide Prevention Day approaches on September 10, it is high time for Pakistan to repeal Section 325 of the Pakistan Penal Code, a legacy of the British Raj.

According to WHO estimates, there are around 130,000 to 270,000 cases of attempted suicide in Pakistan each year. Suicide is a criminal offence under the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) 325 which states “Whoever attempts to commit suicide and does any act towards the commission of such offence, shall be punished with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, (or with fine, or with both)”. Ironically, Pakistan continues to follow this law which is a legacy of the British Raj, even though Britain itself decriminalised suicide way back in 1961.

Factors behind suicide

Between 2016 to 2020, 767 suicides were recorded in Sindh, as per a five-year research conducted by the Sindh Mental Health Authority (SMHA). The highest number of cases occurred in Tharparkar (79). An alarming 60 per cent of the victims were teenagers. In June 2021, the SMHA carried out what it called a “psychiatric autopsy” of the Thar region to determine the “reasons behind suicides”, according to a statement by the authority’s chairman, Dr Karim Khawaja. The findings suggest that the majority of cases involved lower income groups and people suffering from untreated mental illness and poverty.

On May 9, 2021, three people killed themselves in Chitral within a period of 24 hours. Two girls, who were cousins, ended their lives by jumping in the Chitral River. Meanwhile, in a separate incident, a man took his life by stabbing himself with a knife repeatedly in the Sno Ghar village. The notoriously high rates of suicide in Chitral have been linked to poverty, lack of job opportunities and forced marriages. These findings also raise the ethical dilemma that if someone attempts suicide due to socioeconomic reasons, should the state be held responsible?

While suicide is generally attributed to mental health issues, in lower income countries like Pakistan, suicide rates also reflect broader economic and sociocultural realities. Public health interventions to reduce suicide should incorporate these components in addition to mental illness as a potential target for intervention.

Victims, not criminals

In May 2021, the Punjab Police tweeted a warning that anyone who survived suicide would be liable to one year imprisonment. This tone-deaf post was met with massive backlash on social media over the insensitivity in dealing with what essentially is a public health issue.

Suicide remains illegal in at least 25 countries worldwide and attempted suicide is punishable under religious law in a further 10. The World Health Organisation's Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan (2021-2030) has decriminalising suicide as an important target, seeking to end criminalisation, reduce stigma and ensure that there are sufficient services available for those that need them.

Criminalisation of suicide also deters sufferers from seeking adequate help.

“Suicide is an indicator of mental distress, not criminal behaviour. In many cases, the act signifies the extremity of depression. The role of the state should be to help treat such people, not punish them,” said former Senator Dr Karim Ahmed Khawaja.

In 2017, Senator Khawaja moved an amendment bill seeking to replace the colonial penal law by decriminalising attempted suicide. But despite its unanimous adoption by the Senate and the Council of Islamic Ideology, the bill was not passed by the National Assembly, and eventually lapsed at the end of the last government’s tenure.

In recent years, suicide legislation has been successfully repealed or superseded by new legislation in the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and India. In most cases, this has taken a combination of of civil society pressure, government and legislative changes, and in some cases support from the countries' religious leadership.

I spoke to Dr Murad Moosa Khan, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Aga Khan University, and former President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP).

“An important reason to destigmatise suicide is that people are already hesitant to seek help when it comes to mental health; criminalising suicide adds another layer of stigma, that they have done something wrong,” Moosa said.

According to the existing law, every suicide case should be received by the city’s government hospitals that are officially designated as 'medico-legal centers' (MLCs). “In Karachi, there are at least three designated MLCs — the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), Civil Hospital Karachi (CHK) and Abbasi Shaheed Hospital (ASH)," he explained. However, people are reluctant to go there for fear of legal repercussions.

He reported that since it is very rare for people to be prosecuted under this law, the practical risk is minimal, but the greater risk is of exploitation by medico-legal authorities and officers who may blackmail victims and their families in order to extort money from them.

Currently, people who attempt suicide end up either in a public sector, private sector or a charitable health facility. “If the attempt is a serious one, for instance use of a firearm or ingestion of a toxic poison, those cases are sent to an MLC hospital, as other hospitals do not want to get involved in police investigations in case of death of the individual.”

Cases that are less severe are not reported and treated at non-MLC hospitals. They are usually written off as food poisoning, another medical condition or accidental poisoning.

Dr Moosa further stated that almost all private and charitable hospitals are carrying out this practice in Pakistan. “Due to these practices, we do not know the true extent of attempted suicides in the country.”

What steps can be taken to repeal the law?

“To advocate for decriminalisation, many sectors have to come together, including mental health and public health professionals, human rights organisations, legal professionals, educational institutions and the civil society. International organisations such as the WHO, United for Global Mental Health (UGMH) and IASP have been actively involved in raising awareness about the need for suicide decriminalisation," Dr Murad shared.

Dr Uroosa Talib, Consultant Psychiatrist and Chief Medical Officer at Karwan-i-Hayat, one of Pakistan's largest psychiatric rehabilitation centres, said that a lot of people do not report suicide cases and since most of such cases need medical attention first so they are taken to tertiary-care setups.

“People hide facts about suicide to avoid legal implications. Additionally, patients and families go through the traumatising experience of dealing with our police. So they opt to stay quiet or conceal facts. Ironically, this way they deprive the person who attempted suicide of proper care. They are not given a chance at be seen by a psychiatrist to rule out any underlying mental health condition,” says Dr Talib.

Decriminalise suicide to destigmatise seeking mental health services

Decriminalising suicide is the first step towards eradicating the stigma associated with seeking mental health services. The second would be to develop the mental health services sector to cater to the needs of the population. This would entail psychoeducational training of personnel — police, medico-legal officers, emergency room doctors and staff, lawyers and religious leaders.

Detractors of this campaign are of the opinion that decriminalising suicide will result in a spike in suicide rates. Empirical evidence suggests otherwise. The WHO 2014 report reveals that suicide rates tend to decline following decriminalisation.

In fact, decriminalisation can actually lead to suicide prevention. This is because once the act is no longer considered criminal behaviour, there are less obstacles in reporting cases of attempted suicides. As a result, the data moves towards accuracy and correction and can thus facilitate in helping those who may be at risk.

When decriminalised, suicide will be considered a public health issue rather than a criminal act. The reduced stigma will also encourage psychologically vulnerable people to seek help and vulnerable at-risk individuals will be better able to obtain the care they need.

To help those who are campaigning for the decriminalisation of suicide in their countries, the UGMH, working with the Thomson Reuters Foundation and IASP, is working on a report that looks at suicide laws in various countries to produce accurate information on what legislative changes are needed. The report also looks at trends across countries, examples of where laws have successfully changed, and the role the international community can play in helping encourage reform. Local organisations such as the Pakistan Mental Health Coalition, Karwan-i-Hayat, House of Pebbles and PILL are also engaged in organising events to advocate for suicide prevention.

It is important to remember that decriminalisation does not imply legalising suicide. The aim is not to encourage suicide but to discourage prosecution of those who have attempted it. They may or may not have a psychiatric illness but they are certainly undergoing severe distress. The threat of prosecution only exacerbates their suffering. Decriminalisation will be a major stepping stone in the prevention of suicide and providing access to mental health services to those who are in need.

 

Predatory corporatisation of the media and why strengthening the institution of the editor is vital

We need to seriously think about the restoration, protection and preservation of the institution of "the editor".

Mahfuz Anam Published 31 Aug, 2021 

We journalists have some experience of fighting governmental repression of the media. But how do we, or better still, how should we, handle owners' oppression of their own media, meaning owners dictating what is to be published and what not, to forcing the editor to oblige, or ignoring the editor altogether if he refuses? The stories that circulate are horrendous of editors being made mere rubber stamps and the whole newsroom remaining silent as people from the owner's office force journalists to publish false, motivated and scandalous stories against their business rivals or perceived antagonists.

While discussing why a certain business house was bringing out a new newspaper, a fellow editor said that because they were going for a new several thousand crore investment and they needed a media, especially a newspaper, to protect them. This was especially so because the existing leader in that sector, who owned several media outlets, was preventing the former's entry by publishing false and derogatory reports about them.

One can easily imagine what role the new newspaper will play. The underlying meaning of the story is that, as our business houses increase in number, they are investing resource and power, into newspapers (read media in general) that can serve as a part of their arsenal for business growth, fighting rivals and frightening others from exposing their malpractices.

So professional journalism be damned, and along with it, the ideals of freedom, democracy, truth, people's rights, public interest, collective good, unearthing corruption, fighting for justice, equality, fairness, building a just society, etc. The vital role of the media in holding power to account vanishes as does the notion of accountability and transparency.

The threat to a free press comes from many quarters — the government, the advertisers, the owners and even the failure of journalists to maintain their own ethical standards.

The threat from the government emanates both from the regulatory framework that it creates through enactment of various repressive laws and also in the manner in which such laws are put into practice, which reflects the government's overall attitude towards the free press. The Digital Security Act (DSA) in Bangladesh is just the latest and the most virulent example of it.

Most laws in Bangladesh relating directly or indirectly to the media are mostly directed either to repressing or controlling the media. There are no laws in our statute books (and I would love to be proved wrong), except for the Right to Information Act (RTI), that either protects the journalist, the newspapers, or the media in general, or proactively help its cause by protecting sources, and whistle-blowers, and preventing police harassment or arbitrary arrests or questioning of media professionals.

The threat from advertising has always been there. A corporation may be looting the country dry but any hint of an exposé would automatically delist a newspaper from receiving their advertisement. This practice is not new, however; its intensity has risen to an unbearable level. One can ask how we can expect a business house to give ads if we are writing against them, forgetting that we are, in fact, not writing against them but against their unethical and unlawful practice, which must be exposed for the betterment of the society and for the environment.

The relationship between the media and its advertisers must in no way be allowed to impinge on the freedom of journalists to report freely and ethically. It is a complex issue and has become more so due to Covid-19 which has drastically affected the media's, especially the newspapers' business model.

However, our main focus today is on the issue of corporate control of the media, not in general, but the ones they own. We want to confine our discussion only to newspapers about which I happen to know a little. At first it may appear to be an oxymoron, a contradiction in itself. If someone owns something it is only natural that they will control it. Yes, in many cases, but not in all. A person may own a hospital but can he run it on his whims just because he has invested in it? It must be the doctors who run the hospital. Businessmen may own airlines, but are their planes run as they wish without professionals? This is also true in case of the media. Many people may invest in the newspaper industry, but it must be the professional journalists who run it.

This brings us to the bigger question on what is the role of a newspaper in general. Is it only to serve the interests of the owners? As someone said, "Freedom of the press is the freedom of the owners of the press". Is that really true? Then what happens to the interests of the society in general, of the people, of principles, of ideals, of a nation's interests? What happens to the fundamental principle of freedom of speech, people's right to know, of holding power accountable?

If the media's role is far bigger than the corporate interest of the owners — and by definition it must be bigger, encompassing the interest of the nation as a whole — then, it must be allowed to function with full freedom with professional journalists at its helm. Some experiences from the rest of the world may help to prove this point.

As the need for higher investment in newspapers grew over time, especially due to technological sophistication of the printing press requiring more capital, individual ownership became difficult and investment from the financial and corporate world began to enter this sector. If we look at the newspapers of any industrialised country, they atrract investment from banks, insurance companies, corporations, mutual and investment funds, services industry, etc. Why do these diverse groups invest in newspapers? Simply because newspapers were good investments and investors saw it as a sector with a good ROI (return on investment).

Here is the interesting twist. Investment came to newspapers because of its good ROI, and it was so because newspapers continued to serve public interest — not the interest of the diverse interest groups that owned the sector— and thereby grew their business and thus gave attractive dividends to the investors.

The rising corporate investment in the media in Bangladesh is nothing new or unprecedented. It was, to some extent, inevitable. What is, however, unprecedented and not inevitable, is the predatory nature of the corporate control and the total destruction of the ethical foundation of the newspapers. This is destroying media credibility — the life blood of a media's acceptability.

If an investor wants to make profit out of his investment in the newspaper, which is not an unnatural or unjustified expectation, then the only way to do so is to allow the media to function in the way that media is supposed to — serve public interest. Through ethical journalism and upholding the common good and promoting freedom of speech and accountability, a newspaper gains credibility, which leads to greater readership, which attracts advertisers, which brings in increased revenue, and which then leads to attractive remuneration and good working conditions for the journalists as well as dividends for the investors. This is the business model of a free and independent media, and there is none other.

However, when investors break the above cycle and use their newspapers to protect and serve their own vested interest — as against that of the public — then serious problems arise which we are now facing in Bangladesh.

We repeat, corporate interest in newspapers is neither new nor unique to Bangladesh. However, there is a big difference. What exists in countries with matured newspapers is the institution of the editor. It is well-established, highly-regarded and enjoys huge public credibility. (Both the western newspapers and their editors had suffered a huge loss of credibility in supporting the Iraq invasion. However, many of them realised their mistake and have done impressive exposés on the whole sordid affair, helping to restore some of their lost credibility).

We need to seriously think about the restoration, protection and preservation of the institution of "the editor". We have great examples in Tofazzal Hossain Manik Mia, Zahur Hossain Chowdhury and Abdus Salam from the Pakistan period, and Maulana Akram Khan, Abul Kalam Shamsuddin and Abul Mansur Ahmad from the pre-1947 period to inspire us to rebuild the institution of the "editor" in Bangladeshi media today.

The editor is that pivotal person who protects the freedom of the media from attacks from all sides — government, agencies, large corporations, powerful political leaders and from the interference of the owner — and through his courageous, ethical and honest leadership and non-partisan stance, inspires his fellow journalists to reach the highest standards of objective journalism. This is pivotal for the survival of the free and independent media in Bangladesh.

Admittedly, many of us have failed in this task. We have ourselves destroyed this institution by becoming a PR person for the owner. Many of us have used our position to curry favour with the rich and the powerful, peddled influence for personal gains, misused our positions to harm others and twisted facts to be on the right political side, even while knowing that the truth lay elsewhere.

On a different level, many of us did not pay enough attention to our own newspapers as to what were being published, how well-researched they were, what was the quality and reliability of the sources used and whether sufficient due diligence was done before a corporate or personal reputation was questioned.

All this brought down both the prestige of the institution of the editor and the credibility of the newspaper that he led.

This must change for the good of journalism and for the good of the country, which is on the verge of attaining lower-middle-income country status on the global stage.

The emergence of the social media, the tsunami of news portals with an endless flow of unedited, unverified, unsourced news and the deliberate promotion of "alternative facts" by governments and powerful business lobbies have perhaps made the role of the editor the most crucial for the restoration of public faith in journalism. As someone said, "if you do not read the news, you are uninformed, but if you read the news you are misinformed". This is something that must worry us journalists if we want to save our profession.

As of today, a total of 1,200 dailies are published from Dhaka city. (We should be holding the world record in this). Country-wide, the figure is 3,222. On the face of it, newspapers should be among the most flourishing of industries in the country. What is their business model? Who are their readers and advertisers? Those of us who have been in this field for a while and know well how the market has shrunk wonder as to the sustainability of all these publications. Unless, of course, they will all sing the praise of their corporate owners, fight for their business interest, publish fake news about their rivals and ride on the subsidy of the owners—and all the while professional journalism will fall by the way side.

In one sense, we can rejoice in the words of Mao Zedong: "Let a thousand flowers bloom". But on the other, we are fully aware how media credibility can be destroyed in the wrong hands and how harmful the media can be in the age of unedited, badly edited and totally fake news.

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This article originally appeared on The Daily Star and has been reproduced with permission.

MIRANDA 50 YEARS BEFORE QANON

 

 

1971