Ghosts Of 9/11: Muslim Nationality Movements or Pan-Islamic Jihad?

By Wajahat Ahmad

29 July, 2008

"O mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other" (The Holy Quran (49:13)

Post 9/11, significant sections of Western media have tended to misrepresent Muslims as a monolithic nation, a supposedly unified Global community of believers- sharing a national consciousness that subsumes their diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic, national, racial, or territorial identities under an all encompassing identity of the "Ummah".

The disparate Muslim nationality movements of Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya are being clubbed with fringe pan-Islamic militant movements like Al-Qaeda and seen as part of a putatively wider 'Global Islamic Jihad' against the West. These nationality movements are either the legacy of British colonialism—when arbitrary boundary creation of post colonial States failed to take into account national aspirations of peoples like Kashmiris in South Asia and Palestinians in the Middle East— or as a result of imperial expansion of States like Russia which forcibly included many nationalities in her expanding frontiers.

The international discourse on 'war against terror' has tended to conflate the political violence in regions like Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya with Islamic militancy as exemplified by Al-Qaeda. The idea of 'war against terror' trumpeted by George Bush Inc., given currency by some conservative and influential sections of the western media, has tried to link the distinct nationalist struggles of different Muslim ethnic groups to an emerging wave of 'Islamic fundamentalism' or 'Islamic terrorism'.

Writing in Times Online, British Conservative MP, Michael Gove, in an article, dated May 2, 2007 and titled, The real darkness at the Heart of Islamist terror, averred, "And when it comes to foreign policy, when we choose not to intervene, when we decide that we shan't get involved, whether in Bosnia, Chechnya or Kashmir, we are not respected for our modesty and restraint on the world stage. We are damned again, for not acting in accordance with Islamist ambitions."

The discourse has been reinforced and used by States like Russia, India and Israel to delegetimize the nationalist movements of Chechens, Kashmiris and Palestinians respectively and also to ward off any possible international opprobrium in response to their repressive policies in these occupied regions.

The goals of pan-Islamist movements like Al-Qaeda and those of Muslim nationalists in Palestine, Chechnya or Kashmir are widely divergent. The nationalist leadership—both insurgent and non-violent— of these regions has repeatedly distanced themselves from the ideas of Al-Qaeda and affirmed that their struggles are essentially aimed at achieving Statehood for their Stateless nations and not for the realization of any pan-Islamic idea.
The Palestinian struggle is avowedly nationalist in character, seeking a homeland for Palestinians, denied to them by an expansionist Israeli State. It is largely a struggle between two national identities-Israelis and Palestinians-which claim the same territory. Though Al-Qaeda leaders like, bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahri etc. have made many rhetorical pronouncements that harp on the theme of 'liberating Muslim homelands' like Palestine, the Palestinian leadership including that of Hamas -an organization with strong Islamic moorings- have firmly dissociated themselves from these rhetorical declarations of the so called Pan-Islamic 'Jihad'.

Even the Arab States- locked in fratricidal conflicts with one another- have refused to sacrifice their national interests at the altar of the Palestinian struggle. Not surprisingly most Arab States pay only lip service to the Palestinian struggle. One of the largest Arab States, Egypt, prioritizing her national interest over Arab Muslim concerns regarding the Palestinian Question, has since her defeat in the 1973 War, bought a long peace with Israel and refused to be the frontline State for the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Another Arab Muslim nation, Jordan enjoys friendly ties with Israel. Not surprisingly, Jordan played a key role in crushing the Palestinian militants during the Black September episode of 1970, when she enjoying active support from Pakistani and Iraqi military, launched a military offensive –led by the late Pakistani military General Zia-ul-Haq, who at that time was a Brigadier and head of the Pakistani training mission in Jordan-against Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan, forcing them to flee to other Arab countries.

After 9/11 Israel has used the 'war against terror' discourse as a shield to increase and legitimize its military repression in Palestine and label the Palestinian resistance as 'mindless terrorism' to delegitimize it. The recent Palestinian Intifada is a completely indigenous uprising which has not seen any participation of the warriors of the supposedly ubiquitous 'Islamist International' of Al-Qaeda & Co. One of the new avatars of the Palestinian political struggle, the Hamas, may employ Islamic imagery in Palestinian political mobilization or swear by an Islamic code of conduct, yet its aims are firmly restricted to achieving Palestinian statehood. Islam remains an important marker of Palestinian ethno-national identity but the contours of the 'Palestinian Jihad' are circumscribed by a territorial nationalism, which is far removed from any global Jihadi agenda.

Similar are the cases of Chechnya and Kashmir. The Chechens like many other nationalities in North Caucasus were subjugated by a bloody Czarist imperial expansion carried out by Russian Rumanovs, which succeeded only after overcoming a long and fierce Chechen resistance from 1816 to 1856. In 1944 the Chechens were deported enmass to Central Asia by Stalin's regime in the name of Russian 'national interest'.

The recent Chechen national liberation movement (1994 to 1996, which still drags on), started and lead by Chechen progressive nationalist leaders like Dzokhar Dudayev and Aslan Maskhadov, needs to be seen in the context of a long history of Russian imperial expansion in the Caucasus and the resistance of various mountain peoples to it. Even though the latter breed of Chechen guerrilla commanders like Shamil Basayev, Salman Rudayev etc. ,have made an increasing use of Islamic symbols and imagery-Islam being an important marker of identity of Muslim nationalities- in their fight against Russia, but their primary goal has been the realization of an Independent State for Chechens. The Russian contention that Chechnya is an extension of the larger militant - Islamist network has not attracted many buyers but Russia has definitely taken advantage of the post 9/11 international scenario -which has seen a drastic decline of international community's tolerance for violent ethno-nationalist movements across the Globe- to subjugate the Chechens through the use of harsh military means.
Kashmir existed as an independent kingdom until 1947 when the nation-states of India and Pakistan were created in August 1947 by a division of 'British India'. India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir in late 1947, which left Kashmir divided and under the control of the two countries. In both parts of Kashmir a historic movement for self-determination has been going on since the 1950s. The U.N resolutions on Kashmir -determined by the State centric positions of India and Pakistan -rendered only two possible political choices for Kashmiris viz. accession with India or accession with Pakistan. Contrary to Kashmiri popular aspirations - espoused by Plebiscite Front of "Pakistan-administered-Kashmir" and the one led by Afzal Beigh in Indian-administered-Kashmir -, which sought an independent nation-state, the option of an Independent Kashmir was not included in the U.N resolutions. Internationally Kashmir continued and still continues to be largely viewed as a territorial-ideological dispute between India and Pakistan. Kashmiri nationalism got a partial international recognition only after the Kashmiri mass uprising of 90s.

Pakistani militants' presence in Kashmir has been more a result of Pakistani State's historic involvement in Kashmir Conflict, than merely a result of any ambitious Islamist agenda pursued by the Pakistani militants. The marginalization of Kashmiri Muslim nationalists in the Kashmiri liberation movement was largely due to Pakistan's bear hug than due to any mass appeal in Kashmir to the Pakistani theory of 'shah-rag' misrepresented by groups like "Jamaat-i-Islami Kashmir" as a religious imperative for Kashmiri Muslims.
Riding the wave of the 'war on terror', India like the United States passed draconian anti terror ordinances in the quick aftermath of 9/11. India tried to portray the Dec 13, 2001 attack on her parliament as her version of 9/11 and observed a day 'against world terrorism'. India tried to lump the insurgency in Kashmir with the Al-Qaeda International. Kashmiri separatist leadership denied it as a gross distortion of the historic Kashmiri struggle of self-determination. Syed Salahuddin, commander of largest Kashmiri insurgent group, Hizbul Mujahidin and chairman of the United Jehad Council, repeatedly distanced the armed struggle in Kashmir from the so called pan-Islamic 'Jihad' of Al-Qaeda. Kashmiri separatist leaders like Yaseen Malik of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) have also publicly stated that 'Al-Qaeda is unwelcome in Kashmir'.

In the backdrop of increasing Islamphobia post 9/11, significant sections of Western media have tended to misrepresent Muslim nationality movements as extensions of global Islamist projects. On the contrary these movements have been waged by Stateless nations struggling for creation of nation-states of their own. For the peoples of Chechnya, Kashmir and Palestine the grand ideologies of many Internationalist isms are either irrelevant or at most secondary to their sentiments of nationalism.

Please Do no harm

NGOs can perform better in Kashmir only if they take into account social, economic and cultural components of Kashmir, writes Suhail Masoodi

Some time back I attended a seminar organized by "KOSHISH" a local NGO on community care or institutional care for orphans. As a student of this sector I was expecting to learn new things on this important topic from the esteemed speakers, but alas that didn't happen.

While listening to many speakers on the topic I understood we have to do a lot of home work before we engage with it seriously. It has been rightly said "little knowledge is a dangerous thing". A superficial knowledge about things will not help us achieve the mission of helping orphans. One may be the jack of all trades but surely one cannot be the master of all. We can speak for hours and hours on a topic, but without any proper expertise one cannot do justice to it. In the American medical system there is a term called "Do no harm", which means if you do not have expertise on a particular subject, you can sometimes do harm unconsciously. We in Kashmir mostly do harm without having an understanding of the concerns which we seek to address. Here I am not going to talk about our medical system, but our NGO system, where we call ourselves, professional social workers, development experts, child rights experts, human rights experts or what not, without having any proper training in these fields.
In any intervention lack of proper expertise often leads to more harm than good. The manifest example of this kind could be found during 2005 earthquake, where we created begging culture in the earthquake affected areas by making people habitual of taking relief. I remember a day in the aftermath of the earthquake when I was coming down from Kamalkote Uri, a girl hardly 7 or 8 waved at me. I asked my driver to stop the car. No sooner had we stopped, she forwarded her hand for relief (relief melay ga). I was shocked to see a little girl turn to begging in the wake of relief efforts carried out by Kashmiri civil society. Later I was to encounter many a young beggar in the same area. A new and young breed of beggars had cropped up after the quake affected areas had been swarmed by troupes of NGOs to undertake relief operations.
Back to the earlier point of community care or institutional care, I heard speakers arguing whether we needed to support orphans in their respective homes or in orphanages. Most of the speaker supported community care and argued that they (orphans) should be kept in their homes where their needs could be taken care of.
I find myself in agreement with the same argument, but the question that arises is, do we have resources to support an orphan at his/her home? Is our society capable of catering to the needs of orphans?
Technically, if a child has lost only one of his or her parents, he or she is not an orphan. Only if he/she has lost both of his or her parents then only he/she is called an orphan. Since ours is a patriarchal society, the male being the head of the family, if some body lose his/her father he/she is called an orphan. If the same kid has lost his or her mother, he or she would not be considered an orphan. So to define it more clearly it is a matter of economics and social system. The classification may be seen to hinge more on economics than on any other criterion since most of the orphans come from poor family backgrounds and their mothers tend to be usually house wives and illiterate. So only financial assistance to these kids will not solve their problem. We need to take a family as unit and support the whole family rather than an orphan in the family. Because supporting only an orphan in a family will not help us reach our goal. Moreover, we need to build a community based system, where educated people from the adjacent localities will make regular visits to these families to check the progress of the kids. It has been observed those orphans who are being supported in their homes usually lack the literary culture as the families are not educated. So members of our society can fill this gap by making regular visits. Some people argue that there is more number of orphans in Chechnya, Palestine and many other conflict-hit areas than Kashmir. Why then orphanages were not created in these places? The answer is simple; the countries like Palestine, Chechnya etc are much ahead of us in literacy, economic development and community care. Their average literacy and average house hold income is much higher than ours. So they didn't have to negotiate huge problems regarding handling these kids. In Palestine or Chechnya, a mother is largely able to provide all sort of necessary assistance to a child, be it in terms of education or in any other critical realm but same couldn't hold true for mothers of Kashmiri orphans. As we have seen in our orphanages most of the kids are from very poor households. The ones who have better economic conditions live in their homes.
One of the biggest draw backs of our NGO system is: while making strategies for projects and programs we look at symptoms and not at the problems. We want quick fix solutions to every major problem. We are not able to develop goal and time bound strategies for our projects. We don't look at projects critically. Besides our own drawbacks, NGOs accept whatever project comes from their donor agencies, irrespective of whether the program can be fruitful at the ground level or not. Most of the times projects and strategies are formed in Delhi, Europe or the U.S; devised for their own local settings and implemented in toto in Kashmir. Usually organizations should have a bottom-up approach, but in Kashmir we tend to take a top-down approach. Projects should be formed and implemented at the grassroots level. It is the people on the ground who understand the needs and problems of the locals in a better way than somebody located thousands of miles away and largely unaware of the socio-economic dimensions of a far away region. Most of our NGOs fail to develop a sustainable program strategy, proper exit strategy, good planning, and clear cut field domain of work.
There is no transparency of funds in NGO sector in Kashmir. Hardly any NGO makes their monthly and yearly expenses public. No doubt NGO's are answerable to their donors, but they are answerable to the target group community as well. Target group here does not mean if an NGO is working in Uri, they are answerable to the people of Uri only, but they are answerable to the whole Kashmiri community. In spite of their drawbacks there are agencies like Vigilance, Crime Branch and other organizations to monitor the functioning of government departments, but we do not have any such independent organization to monitor the functioning of NGOs. Be it local, Indian or an international NGO. We need to build a system where functioning of all organizations can be checked to ensure transparency and accountability. We have seen surveys done by some Indian and international NGOs in Kashmir which are totally distorting. Things like Conflict and Peace-building are being sold to gain personal interests. For example, according to a survey done by an International NGO, 50% of youth in district Islamabad are drug addicts. What is the authenticity of the survey? On the basis of samples collected in few villages one cannot make sweeping generalizations about one of the most populous districts of the Valley. Surveys are being done to fetch more and more money from donors. Some believe there are one lakh orphans, some contend that there are fifty thousand orphans in Kashmir and some claim the number of orphans to be around 2 lakh. We don't know the authenticity of these reports. There are thousands of NGOs in Kashmir, majority of them have been created by government or government run agencies. These so called NGOs supposedly fetch money for the development of Kashmir. Where does this money go? Nobody seems to know? Most of the times money is donated for the Kashmir region as it is the worst hit conflict area as compared to Jammu and Ladakh regions. But unfortunately people running these NGOs invest this money for the development of Jammu and Ladakh regions. Problems don't end here. Some NGOs even go further, spending hefty amounts of money on various research and development projects which don't yield any effective results. The position of many orphanages in Kashmir is somewhat similar. They too are not ready to share their expenditures. Moreover, if you are a Kashmiri you are not allowed to meet orphans in the most of the orphanages in Kashmir. However, people visiting from foreign countries are welcomed in these orphanages by their managers.
In Kashmir NGO culture is very nascent and people are not much aware of their scope, functioning, roles, source of funding etc. So civil society needs to come forward and define the scope and functioning of NGOs. It has been seen mostly after the 2005 earthquake that most of the NGOs are being dubbed as Christian missionaries, which is not true. There is no doubt that there are NGOs which aim to spread Christianity, but not all the NGOs can be bracketed in the same category, as has been perceived by some of our people.
Most of the times government funds meant for development are lapsed because project proposals do not justify the purpose and equally fail to justify the outcome of the program or the project. A government official disclosed in a workshop, organized by IMPA for the capacity building of NGOs, that thousands of project proposals are rejected as they are not written in a professional way. So we need to train people in Project designing, Monitoring and evaluation to reach our goal effectively
International and national NGOs need to build capacity of local NGOs to pave the way for local people to change their lives according to their wishes and needs. It is the local people who understand the situation in a better way. We have seen in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake some NGOs distributing lipstick, mineral water and other luxury items in Tanghdar, Kupwara. So to start work in a particular area or region, we have to have a good knowledge of the culture, topography, demography, social inhibitions. Without keeping these factors in mind we would end up harming a community instead of helping them.

suggestions
We need to have goal oriented and time bound projects and programs, which will help us check whether we are reach our goals in stipulated time or not. We have seen some international NGOs working here from last one or two decades without producing any substantial results. NGOs need to be time bound and specific. Many NGOs are shifting from one sector to another. Some times NGOs consider themselves parallel to the government. It is not easy to replace the government. Even if it is, one should not try to. Otherwise they tend to overstretch their domain and as a result they are not able to do justice with the particular issue. A marvelous example of specific and goal oriented project undertaken can be that of Muhammad Yunus who established Grameen Bank (an organisation established for the sole purpose of providing micro-credit loans to poorest of the poor in Bangladesh). Yunus gave 27 dollars to 42 hardworking skilled people to start their business, with an agreement that they will pay him back. It was not a big deal for Yunus to donate this money to these poor people but he didn't want to build a begging culture, unlike most of our NGOs. After many disappointments from different quarters, he planned to establish his own bank and thus he laid the foundation of Grameen Bank on October 2nd, 1983. Grameen Bank works now in more than 46,000 villages, through 1,267 branches and over 12,000 staff. The bank lent more than 4.5 billion dollars. They have now started giving loans to beggars to help them come out of begging and start selling things. Had Muhammad Yunus switched from one project to other he would not have reached anywhere. So our NGOs need to be focused to reach their goals. We need to develop the strategy to be effective in our work in a way so that do no harm, even unintentionally.
Tail piece
There is no doubt that there are some NGOs in Kashmir who have been doing a commendable job for the upliftment of the needy in our society. Some NGOs have played an important role for the rehabilitation of earthquake affected families in different parts of Valley. NGOs in Kashmir have been working in odd conditions, under the threat from many sides in the conflict. At the same time many NGOs have been hijacked by different people and organizations to further their personal interests. It is high time that NGOs in Kashmir work more positively, transparently and with a clear cut strategy so that people will not look at them with suspicion and stop giving this noble profession a bad name. NGOs in Kashmir are known for money swindling, nepotism, shady character, and what not. Hope the NGOs in Kashmir would turn a new leaf and prove to be agents of a positive and fruitful social change.