Mustafa Malik

Category: Pakistan

Ehtiopia’s nationalist journey

Ethiopia’s liberal Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been assured a second term in office as his ruling Prosperity Party has won the federal parliamentary election by a landslide, capturing 410 of 436 seats.

Elections to about a fifth of the seats have been delayed because of Covid-19, logistical problems and, in the case of Tigray province, a secessionist movement. 

Ethiopia has become a political laboratory in which Abiy is testing a high-stakes hypothesis. It’s that several dozen ethnic communities – a half-dozen of whom deeply estranged from one another – can be molded into a unified democratic nation. The Tigrayans under the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) have posed the most potent of the challenges to his mission.

The TPLF had dominated the federal government for 27 years even though Tigrayans make up only 6 percent of the Ethiopian population. Traditionally militarist, they dominated the Ethiopian federal bureaucracy since an uprising overthrew the Communist Dreg regime in 1991. The TPLF then led the formation of a coalition of ethno-nationalist parties named Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Through the EPRDF, the Tigrayan party institutionalized its principle of ethnic communities’ rights to self-determination and even secession. The 1994 federal constitution underpinned that centrifugal framework.

But despite Ethiopia’s loosely federal constitutional structure, the TPLF maintained an iron grip on the federal government and unleashed a reign of terror, muzzling and persecuting critical voices. Human Rights Watch termed their wanton persecution as “crimes against humanity on unimaginable scale.” During 2016-2018 the long-festering protests against the TPLF repression under the cover of EPRDF, exacerbated. Led initially by the activists from Omoria, the largest enhno-nationalist region in the coalition, and Amhara, the second-largest, the protests overwhelmed the government. In February 2018 Hailemariam Desalegn, Ethiopia’s beleaguered prime minister, resigned hoping to facilitate an end to the “unrest and political crisis.”

Several parties in the EPRDF coalition – especially the Omoro Democratic Party and Amhara Democratic Party – succeeded in picking the young, visionary Abiy Ahmed from Omoria as Hailemariam’s successor. Once in prime minister’s office, the reformist Abiy released thousands of political prisoners; lifted restrictions on the independent media; scrapped the anti-terrorism law, which was being used as a tool of oppression; ended the state of emergency, under which the TPLF was carrying on the witch-hunt of opposition activists; and invited the country’s once-banned opposition groups back into the country from exile. Among the leading political activists against whom Abiy dropped charges of anti-state activities were Jawar Mohammed, who has since turned into his fierce political rival; and Andargachew Tsege, who had been on the death row 24 hours before the prime minister met him in his office. Abiy stunned his country and the world by ending the decades-long war with Eritrea, which earned him the 2019 Nobel Prize for Peace.

Ethiopia is made up of 10 semi-autonomous federal states, organized along ethnic lines, and ethnic violence has soared in recent years. To pursue his liberal, nationalist agenda, Abiy led the formation of a new party, the Prosperity Party. Four of the EPRDF’s five political parties joined the Prosperity Party. The fifth, the TPLF, grumbling over its loss of three decades of domination of the Ethiopian government and politics, refused to join and began to organize Tigrayan activists into violence and rebellion.

The TPLF insurgency came to a head in November 2020 when armed Tigrayans attacked a federal military base in Tigray. The Abiy government dispatched a federal military force to subdue the rebellion, which was defeated by TPLF rebels. Apart from the Tigrayans, other ethnic groups are also carrying on violence and repression against rival ethnic groups. Amhara authorities annexed a vast part of western Tigray, forcing hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans to seek refuge elsewhere in the country and in nearly Sudan. Clashes between the Afar and Somali ethnic groups have cost many innocent lives. Benishagul-Gumuz is home to a host of ethnic groups including the Gumuz, Berta, Shinasha, Mao, Kimo, and Fadashi. Conflicts among them have caused continual blood-letting. And so on and on.

Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest nations, replete with a proud history and many cultures. In early youth I was fascinated by the legend of the Ethiopia’s Queen of Sheva. Narrated differently in the Quran and the Old and New Testaments, the saga of the queen is highlighted by her visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem and returning home after conceiving his son. The Ethiopian dynasty of Menilek I, who Ethiopian believe was Solomon’s son by Sheba, lasted until 1974 when the last monarch of the Solomonic dynasty, Emperor Haile Selassie, was overthrown in a pro-Communist military putsch.

Apart from my intellectual interest in Ethiopian affairs, I have been intensely curious about the Nobel-laureate Abiy’s mission to remold the interminably feuding Ethiopian ethnic groups into a unified, democratic nation “where every Ethiopian,” he said, “moves around relaxed, works and prospers.” Abiy’s vision of Ethiopia reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding fathers, respectably, of independent India and Pakistan. Oxford-educated barristers. They set up their multi-ethnic, multinational states as Westminster-style liberal democracies. Pakistan fell apart when Bengalee ethno-nationalists seceded from the old Pakistan, complaining of relentless political and economic repression by Punjabi ethnic elites. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India has eclipsed Gandhi’s secularist political model. Hindus, however, make up 82 percent of the Indian population, and Hinduization has overlapped ethnic fissiparousness in the Hindu heartland of the Indian plains. Secessionist movements fester in several outlying non-Hindu regions, especially in the Muslim-majority Kashmir.

My question about Ethiopia: Can Abiy really tame Ethnic fissures and recast the country into a nation whose “sovereignty is respected and feared, and whose territorial integrity is preserved,” as he has promised?

I see the idealist Ethiopian prime minister pursuing at best a long-term project. Today’s stable Western democracies such as Britain, the United States, France and Germany evolved through ethnic and religious conflicts and mayhem over centuries. Many post-colonial states were haphazardly created overnight as “nation-states” by cobbling together disparate ethnic and religious communities and are expected to function as unified nations. Examples include Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Democracy and elections often challenge their state structures, instead of integration them.

In 1970 Pakistan gave its feuding ethnic communities their first national elections, which allowed long-estranged ethnic Bengalees in the eastern province the opportunity to vote for secession and create independent Bangladesh. In multi-ethnic Iraq, America’s pie-in-the-sky neoconservatives prescribed elections, hoping to set up a Western-style secular democracy. The Iraqi Kurds used their votes to create all but independent Kurdistan. Shiite and Sunni Arab Iraqis are being governed, under the democratic system, by their religious (Shari’a) laws. In Lebanon, 78 years of democracy and elections have failed to integrate its half-dozen confessional communities into an integrated nation. Abiy thinks his electoral mandate would enable him to remake the multi-ethnic Ethiopian chimera into an integrated, liberal democratic nation.

Abiy’s mission is noble, but I think the best course for him to pursue it would be to open painstaking dialogue and negotiations among Ethiopia’s feuding ethnic groups for a unique brand of nationhood and type of national integration that would best fit the country’s unique communal history and behavior patterns. Today Ethiopia seems unprepared to achieve the national cohesion of contemporary America or Britain. The patriotic and visionary prime minister and Ethiopian political elites should, I think, settle for the level of national integration that is feasible today. And they may, if they want, to work toward ushering in the like of the British or American model in the future, if that is possible, hopefully without civil wars.

  • Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator, lives in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

Pakistan could be in U.S. doghouse

PAKISTAN’S REFUSAL TO allow a CIA base in its territory has pissed off the Biden administration. The Americans also resent Pakistan’s close ties to China, their global adversary.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that, given Pakistani Muslims’ bitterness toward the United States, allowing Americans a base for hostile operations in Muslim Afghanistan would be “suicidal” for his administration.

Islamabad fears a downturn in its relations with Washington, which has almost always been the case after Pakistan failed to comply with a U.S. military or security demand. The worst case, some Pakistanis say, occurred when Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, decided to get rid of a U.S. military base in Pakistan to avoid antagonizing what used to be the Soviet Union.  These Pakistanis link Liaqat’s decision to his assassination in 1951, referred to in declassified U.S. documents. Others, who included former Pakistani prime minister and my mentor Nurul Amin, accused the United States of orchestrating disruptions of Pakistan’s democratic process through its military and bureaucratic elements.

Amin told me in 1969 that the United States had got Pakistan’s second prime minister, Khwaja Nazimuddin, fired by the bureaucrat-turned Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad.  Nazimuddin, Amin’s close friend, had refused to join the U.S.-sponsored Baghdad Pact unless the pact had a clause stipulating that America would defend Pakistan against “external threats” (India).  My mentor said Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan, then commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army, had carried the Pentagon’s instruction to Ghulam Mohammad and was sipping tea in Mohammad’s portico when the governor-general fired the prime minister. The governor-general, a titular head of state, didn’t have the constitutional authority to dismiss the prime minister and would not let Nazimuddin convene the parliament (Constituent Assembly) to demonstrate the support of a parliamentary majority behind him. But Gen. Ayub and the military brass signaled to the deposed prime minister that they supported the governor-general’s action.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto wrote in her autobiography that the United States was behind the overthrow and execution of her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, because Z.A. Bhutto had defied Henry Kissinger’s brutal pressure to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear program.

President Biden’s announcement that all U.S. troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 has been followed by a dramatic Taliban offensive against the forces of the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, an American protégé. The George W. Bush administration had invaded and occupied Afghanistan 20 years ago in response to Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which the United States had dislodged from power in Iraq and Syria, have also increased their activities in in Afghanistan.  Intelligence officials have told Biden that even though the United States and its allies have “diminished” the militant forces in Afghanistan, they could threaten the U.S. homeland again in about two years.  The Biden administration is looking desperately for CIA bases to keep them in check.

Pakistan’s rejection of the CIA base proposal follows a long and devastating “war on terror” in that country, sponsored by Washington. Mostly Muslim Pakistanis have always opposed their country being dragged into a U.S. war against Muslim forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Still, Pakistan had to agree to participate in that war after Richard Armitage, then U.S. deputy secretary of state, threatened the head of Pakistan’s intelligence services that America would “bomb [Pakistan] back to the Stone Age” if it did not join the U.S. fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. More than 70,000 Pakistanis perished in that war, which was ratcheted up by President Barack Obama (after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize!), infuriating further Pakistanis of all political stripes.

Most Pakistanis, too, feel bitter about U.S. support for each of their four military dictators and America’s hostility to the democratic governments who failed to fulfill U.S. demands. Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Pakistani prime minister, had angered the Harry Truman administration, not only by asking America to pull out its base outside the Pakistani city of Peshawar. Liaqat was friends with then Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and had turned down an American plea to pressure Mosaddeq to drop his plans to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (predecessor of the BP). In 1953, four months after the Pakistani Prime Minister Nazimuddin had been overthrown, the CIA station chief in Tehran, Kermit Roosevelt, and the U.S. ambassador there, Loy Henderson, openly incited and bribed Iranian army officers and bureaucrats into staging a military coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, whom the Eisenhower administration replaced with the tyrannical dictator Mohammad Riza Pahlavi.

The United States has often had direct links to Pakistani army generals independently of the country’s civilian authorities, but Imran Khan doesn’t seem to be in the danger of being overthrown by a U.S.-sponsored military coup. Khan has been coopted by the Pakistani army generals and is running the country, especially its foreign relations, at the generals’ behest. The Pakistani decision not to have a CIA base was basically made by those generals, who know that a U.S. base could trigger civil unrest in the country.

The Pakistani economy is in shambles, and Islamabad fears that the Americans could deny it the needed economic support and punish it diplomatically and otherwise for rejecting their base request and also for maintaining Pakistan’s historically close relations with China. The Biden administration apparently believes that having had Pakistan’s giant neighbor, India, in its corner in an anti-Chinese alliance (Japan and Australia being the other partners), it can afford to sideline Pakistan. Washington seems indifferent to the possibility of Pakistan joining a growing number of unfriendly Asian countries including China, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

~ Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for the late Nurul Amin, Pakistani prime minister and vice president.

  • Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for Nurul Amin, a former Pakistani prime minister and vice president.  He hosts the blog ‘Muslims and Liberals.’

A crusader for the oppressed

By Mustafa Malik

THE 14TH ANNIVERSARY OF Mahmud Ali’s passing fills my mind with memories of the man I had come to know as a human incarnation of Pakistan. Among those memories was his forecast that Bangladesh would establish good relations with Pakistan “sooner than you think.” The last time he repeated this prognosis to me was in June 2000, when he was visiting with me and my family in Washington. I remembered his prediction just yesterday as I ran into the headline “Hasina calls for strengthening ties with Pakistan” in the online edition of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. Sheikh Hasina Wajed is the prime minister of Bangladesh.

Mr. Ali was the first of my two political mentors, the other being Nurul Amin, once chief minister of East Pakistan who became Pakistan’s last Bengalee prime minister. In 1970-71 both statesmen opposed the breakup of old Pakistan, which they had struggled onerously to help create, and they lived the rest of their lives in self-imposed exile in what was left of Pakistan after Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, had become independent. Years of repression and economic discrimination by West Pakistan-based military and political elites, culminating in a brutal military crackdown, led to Bangladesh’s secession from Pakistan. The two countries have since been estranged politically, diplomatically and economically. 

Mr. Ali (like me) was born in the British Indian province of Assam. In 1946, as the general secretary of the All-India Muslim League in Assam, the young leader helped split the old Hindu-majority Assam province through a referendum so our native Muslim-majority part of it could join the Muslim homeland of Pakistan.

Born into an aristocratic family, he cut his political teeth in the Pakistan movement and breathed his last during a speech in Lahore, having barely finished a sentence calling for the realization of one of Pakistan’s unfulfilled causes: the liberation of Indian-occupied part of the Jammu and Kashmir state.

Besides being one of Pakistan’s architects, Mr. Ali will be remembered as a top leader in its struggle to wrest democracy back from the clutches of military dictatorships. He was one of nine leading Pakistani statesmen who in 1962 issued the first clarion call to then military dictator General Mohammad Ayub Khan to restore democracy, which Ayub and a group of other army generals had usurped through a coup d’état.

It was Mr. Ali’s battle for “the emancipation of the peasants and workers,” as he termed it, which lured me to him at age 17.  The 38-year-old revenue minister of East Pakistan was presiding over a public meeting in his native Sunamganj district, in a field covered with the stubble of a newly harvested rice crop. The crowd of peasants, fishermen and a smattering of students greeted other speeches with mild applause. But when Mr. Ali began denouncing, passionately, the “exploitation” of impoverished people by zeminders (owners of large landed estates), money lenders and industrialists, they went wild with the slogans: “Mahmud Ali Zindabad” (long live Mahmud Ali), “Pakistan Zindabad,” and “Krishok-Mazdur ek ho” (Peasants and workers, unite).

I had just finished my matriculation (high school graduation) exam and was attending the meeting as a campaign activist for a progressive candidate for election to the East Pakistan legislature, supported by Mr. Ali, and was deeply impressed by his speech. The meeting over, I met him at a nearby dak bungalow and embarked on my lifelong association with him.

I had opportunities to come in contact with most of Pakistan’s major politicians and interview many of them for my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital. Except for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh, Mahmud Ali was the most politically courageous and ideologically committed statesman I have known in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Mr. Ali’s relationship with Sheikh Mujib alternated between close friendship and bitter ideological and political rivalry.

Bangladesh-Pakistan ties

Among the last of Mr. Ali’s political projects was the one to promote solidarity among Muslim communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir and other parts of the Indian subcontinent through his movement Tehreek-i-Takmil-i-Pakistan. He remained optimistic about this goal to the last days of his life.

During our discursive discussions, he recalled that “the enthusiasm that Muslims in Bengal and Assam” had demonstrated for the creation of Pakistan, they had never before shown for “any other movement of causes.” That was mostly because, he said, they saw Pakistan as a “promise of liberation from Hindu zeminders and money lenders. And from caste-Hindu oppression.” Lower-caste Hindus, he went on, also shared with Muslims that aspirations for “freedom from the oppression and suppression” and in the 1937 and 1946 elections in Bengal, many of them voted for Muslim candidates. Eventually, he predicted, Muslim communities in the subcontinent would revive some kind of “solidarity as they showed during the Pakistan movement.” Bangladesh and Pakistan would, he added, establish “good relations sooner than you think.”

The last time he shared this optimism with me was, as I mentioned, in our very last meetings during June 22-24, 2000.  A federal minister in the Pakistan government, Mr. Ali was on an official visit to Washington. He was staying in Omni Sheraton Hotel in Washington but was kind enough to visit with me and my family for dinner on two of those evenings.

All his life, my mentor was a staunchly secular, progressive man, whose struggle for workers and peasants earned him the “Communist” label from his conservative political opponents. Among them was one of my uncles who warned me against associating with him because “Communists don’t believe in Allah or Islam.” In reality, Mr. Ali had plunged into the Pakistan movement because he saw it as a struggle to alleviate the suffering of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, who happened to be mostly repressed and impoverished, from exploitation of the landed and moneyed class, which happened to be mostly upper-caste Hindus.

In the course of his long political career Mr. Ali changed political parties and some of his political views. But he stuck with his two things that defined him. One was his trademark costume in social and political life, a sherwani and tight pajamas. The other was his advocacy of and deep empathy for the poor and oppressed.

  • Mustafa Malik is a writer in Washington. He hosts the blog Community.