Back in British India, two other provinces of the future Pakistan were Sindh and Balochistan. Sindhi feudal landowners initially opposed the Pakistan idea and only later gave their grudging support under the naïve hope that Sindh would be largely autonomous. Balochi tribesmen (also divided from ethnic compatriots by a colonial boundary with Iran) preferred an independent Balochistan, which would lead to a secessionist attempt in the 1970s, met with murderous repression by the Pakistani state.
As far as Punjab and Bengal were concerned, Congress leaders would not consent to hand them over to the Muslims. This meant the Brits would partition the mosaic of Hindus and Muslims in each state (and Sikhs in the Punjab, which had been a Sikh state at one point). The Unionist government in Punjab prior to partition backed neither the Muslim League nor the Congress Party.
Into this snake pit of conflicting nationalist aspirations came Viscount “Dickie” Mountbatten, a grandson of Queen Victoria (a credential he would cite frequently). Under the theory that his royal brio could smooth over all differences among gentlemen, he put forward an accelerated deadline for independence—on August 15, 1947, just five months after his arrival in India. Nehru recognized a fellow charmer and hit it off with Dickie right away. But the charm offensive did not work on Jinnah, who preferred to argue points with his formidable legal skills. The offended Mountbatten referred to Jinnah as the “evil genius,” a “psychopathic case,” a “lunatic,” and a “bastard,” characterizations spread by eavesdroppers to both sides. Mountbatten also referred to Pakistan as a flimsy structure that would fall apart. Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina, didn’t help the cause of impartiality either, indulging a schoolgirl crush (possibly more) on Nehru.66
Pakistan: The Unhappy Family
The unhappiest heir of the Brit Quit of 1947 is Pakistan. Jinnah complained that he got a “moth-eaten” Pakistan, with missing halves of Bengal and Punjab, little of Kashmir, some frontier territory, and two disjointed areas of West and East Pakistan.
The Muslim migrants from India to Pakistan, known as the mohajir, later became disillusioned. One of their political leaders, Altaf Hussain, said bitterly in 2000, “My description of the partition as the greatest blunder in the history of mankind is an objective assessment based on the bitter experience of the masses…. Had the subcontinent not been divided, the 180 million Muslims of Bangladesh, 150 million of Pakistan and about 200 million in India would together have made 530 million people and, as such, they would have been a very powerful force in undivided India.67
As late as 1981, only 7 percent of the Pakistani population were primary speakers of the supposed national language, Urdu (Jinnah himself spoke poor Urdu). So, to sum up, Pakistan wound up as a collection of Balochistan, North-West Frontier Province, Sindh (all of whom entertained secession at various times), East Bengal (which successfully seceded in 1971 to become Bangladesh, although only after a genocidal repression by West Pakistani troops), mohajir migrants from India (many of whom regretted the whole thing), and West Punjab (which had its own micro-secessionist movement by the Seraiki linguistic minority).
Democracy never took hold in this rocky soil—the military mounted coups, and no elected civilian ever completed his term of office. Military leaders exploited the unfriendly relations with India to justify military rule and to demand a huge defense budget.
Islam proved imperfect national cement, as many different varieties of Islam competed for the allegiance of Pakistanis. As the Pakistani central bank governor Ishrat Husain put it, “Every conceivable cleavage or difference: Sindhi vs. Punjabi, Mohajirs vs. Pathans, Islam vs. Secularism, Shias vs. Sunnis, Deobandis vs. Barelvis, literates vs. illiterates, Woman vs. Man, Urban vs. Rural—has been exploited to magnify dissensions, giving rise to heinous blood baths, accentuated hatred, and intolerance.68
The American support of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the eighties left behind a huge supply of weapons, including Stinger antiaircraft missiles, and extremist groups and terrorists disposed to use them. The Americans didn’t bother to clean up after themselves when they lost interest in Pakistan and Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. Today, on the border with Afghanistan, former Pathan scouts for the CIA use the CIA trails from twenty years ago to help Al Qaeda fugitives escape from the Americans.69 Terrorists move freely from battlefields in Kashmir and Afghanistan to promote Islamic radicalism within Pakistan.
Nevertheless, the American government enthusiastically backs the Pakistani government again today as a reward for the alliance in the war on terror, showering it with World Bank and IMF loans and U.S. foreign aid. Pakistan was the world’s largest recipient of foreign aid in 2002: some $2.1 billion. The Americans tactfully overlook unpleasant things such as suppression of democracy, intelligence agencies linked to terrorists, and nuclear proliferation.
Recently it was said in Pakistan: “Fifty-two years ago we started with a beacon of hope and today that beacon is no more and we stand in darkness. There is despondency and hopelessness surrounding us with no light visible anywhere around. The slide down has been gradual but has rapidly accelerated in the last many years…. Violence and terrorism have been going on for years and we are weary and sick of this Kalashnikov culture.70 These are not statements by an anti-government radical, but those of Pervez Musharraf, the current military leader of Pakistan.
One should not go too far and demonize Pakistan, or dismiss it as a completely artificial state. People of every nation are more complex than what makes national statistics or international headlines. Most Pakistanis are proud of their nationality, with much of which to be proud. The economy has grown despite all obstacles, and a world-class professional elite and talented diaspora achieve a lot. Still, one wishes that their transition from British rule to independence had been a little more constructive, and the American back-and-forth support of military action from Pakistani soil not quite so shortsighted. Pakistan survives in spite of Western bungling.
Capital of the Apocalypse
Sudan was engulfed virtually from the moment of its birth in a civil war between the Arab/Muslim North and the African/Christian/animist South. The British who went to all that grief to partition Muslims and Hindus in India—who were intermixed throughout the subcontinent in one colony—for some reason combined Arab Muslims and African Christians from more defined separate colonies into a single state in Sudan. The British gave in to pressure from educated northerners, who traditionally subjugated southerners. Another version is that the fateful unification of Sudan was determined by a British bureaucratic spat—the British Arabists who managed the North overcame the British Africanists who managed the South. The Brits barely consulted the southerners, who later made their feelings known through civil war.
The British were not ignorant about the North-South difference. A British special commission reported in 1956 that “for historical reasons the Southerners regard the Northern Sudanese as their traditional enemies.71 For centuries, the Arabs in the North raided the South for slaves. Northern slave raiding peaked in the 1870s, when domestic slavery of southerners in the North became widespread. British colonial rule abolished slavery on paper, but northern slavery continued under other guises: the “slaves” were renamed “servants.72 The inspector-general of the Sudan for the British in 1898 gave his view on the Africans in the South: “These god-forsaken swine do not deserve to be treated like free and independent men.73
Sharing these enlightened views, Arab northerners used to call African southerners “slave” ( abid ) to their faces. The northerners are more discreet now but still use the word in private or jokingly in public. As Sudanese scholar Francis Deng explains, “The term abid…is the exact equivalent of ‘nigger’ in American popular usage.74
The British treated the South as separate for decades before independence, even banning migration between the North and the South. Without consulting southerners, they reversed this policy less than a decade before independence. A British bureaucrat, civil secretary Sir James Robertson, decreed
the unity of Sudan in a memo of December 16, 1946.75 Out of that memo came a half century of civil war.
The British gave the South promises of constitutional protection in the new Sudan, through autonomy in a federal system, but didn’t keep the promises. The Sudanese replaced eight hundred British colonial officers in the run-up to independence. Only eight of the eight hundred new officials were southerners. Northern military officers moved into the South.76 On January 1, 1956, Sudan became independent. The National Assembly appointed a constitutional commission to design the structure of the new state; only three of its forty-six members were southerners.77 A historian later summed up the “the shambles of independence, when international intervention circumvented the self-determination process, the general populace was denied a final vote on their own future, and a decision on the form of government under which the Sudanese were to live as one people was deferred to a never-realized future.78 A civil war lasted until a settlement in 1972, killing five hundred thousand Sudanese.79
After a decade of peace, civil war began again in 1983. Sudanese president Jafar Numeiry imposed the Islamic penal code, the Shari’a, on the whole country in a bid to get Islamist support for his faltering regime. Just as the British let down the South at independence, now it was the turn of the Americans to coddle the North and shun the South. In 1983, Numeiry was Washington’s man. The Americans saw him as a strategic ally against Qaddafi in Libya and the Soviet-backed Marxists in Ethiopia. The friendship with Numeiry started under Jimmy Carter, whom Numeiry made grateful with his support of the Camp David Peace Accords. Reagan continued the policy of friendship with northern Sudan, which he lucidly explained at a press conference: “We do know that Colonel Qaddafi has been and will continue to be a destabilizing force in the region, so nothing would surprise us, and we do know that Sudan is…Sudan is…Sudan is…one of those countries in that region of Africa.80
Numeiry got nearly $1.5 billion in U.S. aid before his fellow officers kicked him out in 1985.81 U.S. friendship continued with the northern Islamists who succeeded Numeiry. The World Bank did its part, lending eight hundred million dollars to the northern regimes in the period 1983–1993. Only after the first Gulf War did the Islamist regime finally outlive its usefulness and become a pariah on the list of terrorist states.
The southern rebels in Civil War II were led by John Garang. Garang further strengthened Washington’s resolve to cozy up to the North when he accepted arms and refuge wherever he could get them, which included Libya and Soviet-backed Ethiopia. Moreover, Garang was far from a saint, with his own human rights abuses and massacres. The people of the South were the pawns in a game played by others, caught between the ruthless rebels and Western-supported northern governments perpetrating atrocities against the South.
Sudan Today
Yet history keeps repeating itself. In the new millennium, with the war on terror and to some extent before, the northern Sudanese government and the U.S. government decided to make amends. President George W. Bush certified Sudan as making progress toward peace and humanitarian assistance, although he noted the government’s poor cooperation with humanitarian relief. Bush’s certification enabled Sudan to restart a relationship with the IMF and the World Bank. The International Monetary Fund praised five years of economic reforms by the government in its 2002 report, and commends the government because “the authorities have given a high priority to poverty reduction.82 The World Bank’s chief economist for Africa praised Sudan as one of Africa’s economic success stories.
Meanwhile, back in the real Sudan, there was still an Islamist dictatorship, the civil war went on despite perpetual peace negotiations, and the old horrors kept recurring. A 2002 Médecins sans Frontières report notes in the Western Upper Nile region “that repeated displacement and continued fighting, coupled with lack of access to health care and humanitarian aid, are slowly killing off the region’s people.83 A peace deal between North and South was finally announced in 2004, and signed in 2005. John Garang joined a national unity government, but died soon after in a helicopter crash.
However, just as Sudan settled one civil war, another burst of violence made headlines in 2004–2005, in the province of Darfur. The Janjaweed (Arab militias) attacked Africans, some of whom had rebelled against discrimination and maltreatment. African villagers fled into Chad. Counting those displaced within Darfur, 2.5 million people have lost their homes and 400,000 have died, either at the hands of the Janjaweed or indirectly from starvation and ill health in the horrendous refugee camps.84 The Janjaweed terrorized civilians with arsons, rapes, and massacres.85
Meanwhile, there wasn’t energy left over from civil war for any economic development. Per capita income stayed stagnant for decades. In 1994 it was below what it was at independence in 1956. Ten percent of Sudanese children will not live to see their fifth birthday. Only one out of every seventy-one Sudanese has a phone. Twenty-eight percent of Sudanese children attend secondary school. While much of the world achieved universal primary enrollment, only a little over half of Sudanese kids go to elementary school.86 Sudan has four million internal refugees.87 The expansion of oil exports from Sudan has led to an upturn in per capita income since 1994, but oil is often a curse in the long run, as we have seen. Through all the horrors, aid kept flowing to Sudan, with a total of twenty-three billion dollars in today’s dollars over 1960–2002.
Conclusions
Western intervention in the government of the Rest, whether during colonization or decolonization, has been on the far side of unhelpful. The West should learn from its colonial history when it indulges neo-imperialist fantasies. They didn’t work before and they won’t work now.
SNAPSHOT: GHANA FINDS ITS SWARTHMORE*
PATRICK AWUAH WAS BORN in Ghana in 1965. He came of age just as Ghana was going through its worst times. When he was seventeen, the long economic decline was reaching its nadir. The military government was destroying the economy with draconian price controls on consumer goods. Patrick’s mother was a wholesaler offering essential consumer goods such as soap. The price controls put the consumer price of soap below what Patrick’s mother paid her suppliers for the soap.
Patrick was lucky to find an escape route. Although his family could afford to put up only a hundred dollars for his college education, he got a scholarship to study at Swarthmore, and left Ghana. He pursued a double major of engineering and economics. A fledgling software company hired Patrick fresh out of Swarthmore. The name of the company was Microsoft.
Seven years later, Patrick was a Microsoft millionaire and looking for ways to help his native country. He decided first to get an MBA at Berkeley. Then he moved back to Ghana to start a private university in Accra, called Ashesi University. “Ashesi” means “beginning” in the local Fanti dialect. Patrick put up his own funds, raised money from old colleagues at Microsoft, and gave free tuition to half of the entering class, smart kids from poor families. Twenty percent of the students are from the most extreme poverty. The other half, from richer families, paid four thousand dollars a year in tuition. Patrick built an impressive facility with good computers, Internet connections, and classrooms.
I have visited Ashesi three times, and I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and talent of the students. The curriculum marries liberal arts to computer science and business. Patrick Awuah’s goal is to teach the students to solve problems, not just engage in rote memorization. He wanted to build the “Swarthmore of Ghana.” “We want to train people as critical thinkers,” he says. One of his most satisfying moments came when a student sent him an e-mail, “Mr. Awuah, I am thinking now.”
Patrick’s main surprise has been the lack of interest of the official aid agencies in his university. It is a mystery why a Ghanaian Swarthmore, started and run by a Ghanaian, that offers scholarships to young West Africans eager to improve their talents, would not attract support from Western donors. Despite donors’ ideals of “local ownership” and “participation,” I have come across several other incidents of th
e aid community rejecting worthy projects initiated and led by Africans, including a homegrown university in Burundi (meanwhile financing 88 percent of government spending for the gangsters who ran Burundi), and a master’s scholarship program for Africans run by two leading African professors in American higher education.
Still, Patrick doesn’t let lack of aid funds stand in his way. Morale is high among his staff. “Ashesi people are proud because it’s going to have a place in Ghana’s history,” Patrick Awuah says.
SNAPSHOT: PROFESSOR KINGSFIELD GOES TO INDIA
JAYANTH KRISHNAN, A PROFESSOR at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota, tells the story of Indian legal education in his paper “Professor Kingsfield Goes to India.88 In the 1950s, the Ford Foundation began spending millions of dollars to promote legal education in India. India’s democratic constitution impressed Ford, and the Foundation decided to train Indians in Western legal doctrine to spread respect for democratic institutions and rule of law. Ford sent a number of distinguished American law professors to India to try to set up American-style law schools in the 1950s and 1960s.
Perhaps because the American professors were not professional development consultants, they told Ford that its idea was crazy. The American law school model did not translate well to India, and it was unlikely to have much effect if it did. Caste divisions, patronage politics at both the national and university level, and low respect for law professors and students plagued Indian legal education at the time. Law professors and students did little to earn respect, with frequent absenteeism and low academic standards, as noted by both American and Indian commentators. Practicing lawyers took and paid bribes and tied up cases in court for long periods to maximize fees. Harvard Law professor Arthur von Mehren suggested that the majority of the population failed to embrace the legal system because the laws on the books were of Western rather than indigenous origin. But Ford forged ahead, with a large grant to the Banaras Hindu University law faculty in 1964.
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