| Birth: | 1609 in MARTAIZE, VIENNE, FRANCE |
| Death: | 1686 in PORT ROYAL, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA |
| Sex: | M |
| Father: | Simon Bourgeois b. 1583 in MARTAIZE, L, FRANCE |
| Mother: | |
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| Antoinette Landry (Wife) b. 1620 in LA CHAUSSE, L, FRANCE
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| Marriage: | 1636 in PORT ROYAL, ACADIA, CANADA |
| Children: | |
 Marie Jeanne Bourgeois b. 1659 in PORT ROYAL, ACADIA, CANADA
- Jean I Bourgeois b. 1646 in PORT ROYAL, ACADIA, CANADA
- Francois Bourgeois b. 1644 in PORT ROYAL, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA
- Bernard Bourgeois b. 1649
- Marie Bourgeois b. About 1645 in PORT ROYAL, ACADIA, CANADA
- Abraham Bourgeois b. 1662 in PORT ROYAL, ACADIA, CANADA
- Marguerite Bourgeois b. 1667
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Individual:
The Theatre of Good and Evil
Pakistan's Vise
By Vijay Prashad
18 September 2001.
Pervez Musharraf, Chief Executive of Pakistan, is in a quandary. In October
1999 he overthrew the venal and corrupt regime of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
to bring the military back into power after a brief hiatus of bourgeois
democracy. But since the constitutional coup of 1954, Pakistan has stumbled
with a bourgeoisie keener to aggrandize itself by any means rather than build
the productive capacity of the nation toward, perhaps, a future divestment of
riches to the people - what we generally call "development." Musharraf's act
in 1999, then, was not so much a return to dictatorship as perhaps an attempt
by a secular, almost Kemalist, wing of the Pakistani military to stave off
both the corruptions of the landlord-bourgeois regime and the howls of the
theocratic fascists. Political critic Aijaz Ahmad describes Musharraf as a man
"of the more liberal, secular wing: officers of the old stamp. But it may be
too late for such as them. There are others, of a different persuasion,
waiting in the wings to overwhelm them."
Indeed, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the unfolding of the crisis in
Afghanistan will provide those men in the wings with an opportunity. President
G. W. Bush offered the Pakistani government the first ultimatum on the road to
war: provide military access to your airspace and your soil or else you will
be treated as a state that harbors terrorists. The punishment for that will be
swift. Musharraf deliberated, and then conceded.
The second ultimatum was to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Give up bin Laden, or
else we will shift rubble from one valley of your emirate to another. The
conduit for this was a high-level Pakistani team, people from the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) that was created, as it happens, during the
Afghan wars of the 1980s to harness intelligence from all agencies, but to
work in coordination with (but really under the control of) the CIA. General
Mahood Ahmed, head of the ISI, sat with the Taliban at Kandhahar and intimated
that if bin Laden is not given up, the bombardment will surely begin. The
Taliban is clear that it will not act unless the Organization of Muslim States
makes a formal demand, and if it is shown certain evidence of a link between
the WTC and bin Laden.
In Pakistan, foreign minister Abdul Sattar hopes for a miracle.
At least Bush had the decency to ask for bin Laden. Clinton's administration
rained hellfire on Afghanistan on 20 August 1998 without permission from
anyone.
Meanwhile the media has begun talking, inevitably, about the madrassas, those
institutions of learning set up in Pakistan to impart theological education.
It is here, we are told, that the hard-core Islamicists are being produced,
people such as the Taliban, but also those who are self-proclaimed jehadis in
Kashmir, Chechnya and elsewhere. The madrassas, in the eyes of the media and
of US-Europe, becomes one of the manifestations of evil incarnate, of Islam as
the highest form of contemporary fanaticism and primitivism.
But only last year, an influential US policy analyst and former State
Department man, Stephen P. Cohen wrote this in the Wall Street Journal (Asian
Edition, 23 October 2000): "some madrassas, or religious schools, are
excellent." Admittedly he said that "others are hotbeds for jihadist and
radical Islamic movements," but these are only about twelve percent of the
total. These, he said, "need to be upgraded to offer their students a modern
education."
And why shouldn't Cohen, who is in the news again as an expert on fanaticism
and South Asia, write like this? After all, then presidential candidate G. W.
Bush (and vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman) went on and on about
faith based education, about vouchers and school choice. In a sense Pakistan
could have shown the US the way since it has already destroyed its secular
public institutions in favor of the choice of theocratic fascism. And with the
recent fulminations from televangelist Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (about
how gays and lesbians, civil libertarians and other such symbols of
promiscuousness have forced God to turn his back on the US, and send 9/11 as a
wake-up call), we can be sure that faith-based schools and charity promise to
Talibanize all of us.
And again, like so much else, the destruction of Pakistani education is not
just the fault of a corrupt and unprincipled bourgeoisie. It bears within it
at least two other forces. The first agent of change in Pakistan has been the
visible hand of the International Monetary Fund. Pakistan is cotton country,
with two thirds of its exports tied to this sector, but most of it is
low-value added unprocessed cotton or low-count yarn that is sent off to the
advanced industrial states for a 19th century style turn around - export cheap
raw materials, import expensive finished products. In 1993, Pakistan,
abandoned by a general global decline in the profit margins from cotton,
turned to the IMF for aid and initiated the Structural Adjustment Policy (SAP)
that has now become legendary around the world. A month before the coup of
1999, Nawaz Sharif's finance minister Ishaq Dar told the press that "the
government has done everything possible. We have provided the conducive
environment" for foreign investors. Aggressive acts of neoliberalism became
the hallmark of the regime. "Distortions," such as public institutions, came
under attack from the IMF and Pakistan's already weak education sector came
under fiscal pressure. A weak educational infrastructure moved much of the
lower middle class toward private education in the low to moderate cost
madrassas. The IMF, then, helped move many of Pakistan's youth to religion.
A second agent of the madness is the Cold War, and Pakistan's efforts to gain
international strength by linkages with Europe-US. On 24 February 1955, only a
few months since President Ghulam Mohammed disbanded the constitutional
government (28 October 1954), Pakistan joined those other votaries of the
"free world" in the Baghdad Pact: places such as the Kingdom of Iraq, the
United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Iran and the Republic of Turkey. Five years
later, Pakistan tied its hands to the United States in the Central Treaty
Organization (CENTO), a US-run alliance of states in west Asia. But for
several decades the US did not provide the kind of support expected by
Pakistan, so much so that at a CENTRO conference on 30 April 1963, then
foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto attacked the United States' aid policies
to India as opposed to its indifference toward Pakistan.
It was only with the Iranian revolution and the establishment of the
Ayatollahs to power, as well as with the Soviet entry into Afghanistan, both
in 1979, that Pakistan became important to the United States. All those years
of waiting paid off for the bourgeoisie, because for a brief instant, during
the 1980s, the US seemed to be in the country to stay. Giddy with expectation,
the Pakistani elite welcomed the transformation of the society, created the
ISI for the CIA's use in Afghanistan, and then pushed ahead all manner of
neoliberal cruelties on an already impoverished nation. Certainly the per
capita income increased during these years, but class inequality widened
beyond imagination. Even those at the World Bank who collect these statistics
became horrified.
By the time Afghanistan crumbled into the hands of the Taliban in 1996,
Pakistan had already been abandoned by the US, like a tired warhorse sent off
to pasture without so much as a bag of oats. Congress stopped the sale of F-16
aircraft even after Pakistani hard currency had changed hands; sanctions for
this or that plagued the US-Pakistan relationship, as the US tried to
disentangle from its ally and reach out to the emergent market of one billion
Indians. In 1995, slow GDP growth and high inflation forced the Pakistani
government to curtail the IMF programs, thereby losing loans and other revenue
supports. The government turned on its people again, this time with a
devaluation of the rupee by seven percent (this over and above a three percent
gradual depreciation), a seven percent increase in oil prices and the
imposition of a five to ten percent regulatory duty on imports, as well as a
tighter monetary policy. The macro indicators smiled, and so did the IMF, but
the mass of the population entered an economic sinkhole.
No wonder, then, that US-style capitalism seems so remote and unreasonable,
because while the dollar elite make good in the cities, the rupee masses seem
to run up against the walls of the local madrassa. In 1995, the year of the
downfall, UNESCO reported that almost two thirds of the adults in Pakistan are
illiterate, and of women, the number rises to three quarters. The
working-class and peasantry do not have access to any education, and the
vibrant free press in Pakistan (it has been so since 1987, although there are
always attempts to curtail it) has produced excellent work on the
disenfranchisement of this vast section of humanity. The dollar elite holds a
monopoly to the finest schools and colleges, and many of them find their way
to colleges in Europe-US since the profits of the bourgeois-landlord set-up
enable them to pay full freight. The lower middle class and whatever exists of
the middle class does not have access to either decent public education or to
the English-medium private schools. They go to the madrassas.
"As Pakistan's state-run educational system steadily collapsed," writes
Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, "these madrassas became the only avenue for
boys from poor families to receive the semblance of an education." By the late
1980s, the madrassas already numbered over thirty thousand (with about a third
of them registered with the government), and most of them existed even then
along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. These madrassas claim their lineage
from the 1860s when an Islamic seminary was formed in Deoband (northern
India), a lineage that is textually conservative and, in its current
incarnations as orthodox as Saudi Wahhabism. The Deobandis filled the
interstices of Pakistani society, notably in the sphere of education, and
their political agencies turned their attention more to armed rebellion than
to electoral politics. While the Jama'at-I-Islami, the political wing of the
Deobandis, drew a virtual blank in the otherwise boycotted elections of 1985,
the same formation mobilizes over two hundred thousand cadres to its annual
conventions (latterly close to half a million people come to its conferences).
The Lashkar-e-Toyeba, perhaps the most orthodox of the Right and one that only
draws three percent of its followers from the madrassas, calls upon four
hundred thousand to its annual conventions at its home base in Muridke. This
power translated into political capital in 1993 when Benazir Bhutto welcomed
Jama'at cadre into her government. Elections, therefore, are of no interest to
the Jama'at when it already controls the base of Pakistani society.
What seem to bother many people is that the terrorists of 9/11 were older and
better educated than one expects. But this should not be a surprise because
the madrassas attract the lower middle to middle class, mainly boys with poor
prospects of class advancement or even of class maintenance. The Jama'at and
the Tehrik Minhaj-ul-Quran draw from this class set, while the
Tanzeem-ul-Ikhwan, according to writer Arif Jamal, appeals to retired army
officers who retreat into the world of the middle class. Not only, therefore,
are key people in the army part of these formations, but many analysts make
the case that the rank and file and junior officers took their own education
in the madrassas alongside those who became professional jehadis and it is
this lot that will not take Musharraf's concessions to the US and against the
Taliban easily. The madrassas have close ties with the Taliban as well as the
rank and file of the Pakistani army, and any resentment against US-driven
globalization that one has, the other shares. This is Musharraf's quandary.
To put Kashmir on the agenda as a bargaining chip was perhaps a way to mollify
the rank and file, perhaps avert a certain coup if the US does bomb the
Taliban from Pakistan. One wonders if the US State Department has considered
the costs of this exercise. A coup in Pakistan, not tomorrow or the next day,
but soon; a Talibanist regime in Pakistan, and the Taliban, bombed, but like
Saddam, still in the saddle. Meanwhile in India, we are still stuck with a
coalition government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the mirror image of
the Jama'at. All these theocratic regimes have at least one thing in common:
they have slammed the brakes on the dialectics of history. Unwilling to see
the contradictions of social life in the modern world, most of them, like the
US president, tend to divide the world into Good and Evil, in stark moral
categories that fails to capture the mess of human life. If those whom you
disagree with are Evil, then nothing remains for you to do than to kill them.
Theocratic fascism of the Bush-Taliban-Hindutva variety wants to slam the
brakes on the dialectics of history. With nuclear weapons and macho,
downtrodden religiosity in the mix, the future looks mighty bleak. 9/11, then,
may be relegated to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand as compared to
what came next, the mustard gas trenches that wiped out a generation of
Europeans.
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