Justice in an Imperfect World

In a perfect world, justice delayed is indeed justice denied, but we live in an imperfect world and, therefore, justice delayed sometimes has to be considered as justice served.

Such is the case with Serbian commander Ratko Mladic, architect of the slaughter of 8,000 children, women and men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995. Sixteen years after committing genocide and crimes against humanity, Mladic was arrested in Serbia on May 26 and now awaits extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Srebrenica has become synonymous with mass murder and ethnic cleansing, comparable in intensity to Nazi atrocities against the Jews during World War II. Together with Radovan Karadzic, currently awaiting his own trial for crimes against humanity, Mladic demanded that his troops use rape as a weapon of war. The siege of Sarajevo that the two orchestrated lasted from 1992-1995 and took the lives of an estimated 10,000 Roman Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims. The cruelty was unrelenting, the savagery unmatched.

Mladic was driven by a sense of himself as a savior of his people and as the avenger of historical events that took place almost two centuries ago when Ottoman Turks ruled what is now Serbia. The death of his 23-year-old daughter by suicide in 1994 only increased his thirst for revenge.

Mladic’s arrest, and that of Karadzic in July 2008, sends a strong signal to the world’s despots that their days are numbered, that the long arm of international law will eventually flush them out from any dirty corner of the world they may be hiding in, and bring them to justice.

This is particularly important for Arab tyrants who, for decades, have been torturing and imprisoning their people at will while looting the national treasury for supporting their sybaritic lifestyles.

The Tunisian dictator Ben Ali fled the country when his people rose in revolt against him in January this year. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and his sons were arrested in April for corruption, crimes and using deadly violence against protesters.

As long as the rule of law, and not vengeance, dictates the fate of these modern-day pharaohs, there is reason for optimism, although much remains to be done in a region where hereditary monarchy and oligarchy seems to have become the norm.

Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi has been killing Libyans with impunity since he seized power in 1969. He has never tolerated the slightest dissent and deployed spies and secret police to subjugate his people. Since the uprising against him in February, he has killed thousands of Libyans with the help of mercenaries. He has gone into hiding as NATO targets him and his sycophants in and around Tripoli. International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis-Moreno Ocampo is seeking arrest warrants against Gadhafi, his son Saif al-Islam and spy chief Abdullah al-Sensussi for crimes against humanity.

In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh refuses to bow to people’s will, adamantly clinging to power that he has held for 32 years. Hundreds of Yemenis have been killed and undoubtedly more will die in the coming days.

The situation is grimmest in Syria where Bashar Assad has let loose shadowy, mafia-style gunmen to kill protesters. The gunmen openly shoot people they think are a danger to Assad’s regime. They confiscate and grab whatever they like, be it cars, houses, or even women. So far, Assad’s loyalists and security forces have killed over 1,000 Syrians.

The similarity between Assad and Mladic is frightening. When the Syrian uprising began in March in the southern city of Dar’a, Assad ordered his troops to lay siege to the city, as Mladic did in Sarajevo, shutting off electricity, water and telephones. The army arrested schoolchildren who scrawled ant-government graffiti on walls and imprisoned hundreds of young men simply because of their age. There's also precedent in the family. Hafez Assad, Bashar Assad's father, laid siege to the city of Hama in 1982 and killed some twenty thousand Syrians as the world stood silently by.

Luis-Moreno Ocampo must urgently seek arrest warrants also against Bashar Assad and his brother Maher Assad, head of the elite Republican Guard. His troops continue to fire indiscriminately on peaceful protesters and funeral marchers in Syrian cities.

What these despots never anticipated was the reach of social media. Confronted with Twitter, Facebook and the likes, they appear frustrated even as the killing goes on. When government-appointed goons fire on protesters, the image is instantly broadcast across the globe. When a prisoner is tortured, the act is caught on camera and becomes instant news.

A young, web-savvy generation has found in technology an enabler that aids their revolution. They have lost their fear. There is no stopping them now as they fight and die for freedom and justice.

Generals and dictators who commit genocide against their perceived enemies or their own people cannot escape justice. It may take decades or it may take months, but they will have to account for what they have done and pay the price in courts of law. That is the new reality.

Rabindranath Tagore

Today is the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the Bengali poet whose protean genius enthralls millions of Bengali-speaking people to this day. That he has been largely forgotten in the West after he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 for Gitanjali (Song-Offerings) is a cause for sorrow, for his poems and songs remain a timeless source of inspiration.

When Tagore was born in Kolkata, India, the American Civil War had just begun. Leo Tolstoy was reaching the heights of his powers as a novelist. James Clerk Maxwell had published his electromagnetic equations. The world was in the throes of a dramatic transformation. Tagore's contributions to literature and the vision he articulated for a world where tyranny had no place and freedom was everyone's birthright hastened this transformation.

Tagore went on to create a body of work greater in scope and power than Gitanjali, His true genius bloomed after he won the Nobel Prize, a fact unique in the history of literature.

A significant amount of Tagore's work is infused with a vision of greatness he saw possible in his native land, a confluence of civilizations due to Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Skihs, Jains, Paris, Christians, Mongols, Dravidians and Aryans. India, as he saw it, was greater than the sum of its parts, a vision that continues to challenge India of today.

Britain in Tagore's time ruled India with an iron hand. But the rulers were becoming nervous. A young activist named Mohandas Gandhi had returned from South Africa in 1915 to lead the nationalist movement. becoming a proponent of Satyagraha (eagerness for truth, otherwise known as passive resistance) to British rule. Although Tagore and Gandhi differed on methods by which to achieve independence, both believed fervently in regenerating their people people by curbing their communal instincts. Both believed that India's hope lay in forging unity among people of different races and religions.

Politics did not interest Rabindranath but that did not keep him from boldly opposing British tyranny.

When government troops led by English officers opened fire on a political gathering in Amritsar in 1919, killing 379 Indians and wounding scores of others, Tagore renounced the knighthood England had bestowed on him four years earlier. As a poet, he felt it was the strongest statement he could make to draw world attention to the crime.

It cost him friendships in the literary circles of Europe and popularity even in America, but he considered this act one of the high points of his life. It was also during this time that he composed some of his most powerful poems against tyranny and injustice. "Question" is a poem that stirs deep emotions in its impassioned plea for understanding sorrow and tragedy in a world meant to be just and filled with grace.

When Gandhi was imprisoned without trial in 1932, he condemned it. In a letter to England's Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, he warned that the British were closing the door on peaceful negotiations with India.

Tagore was self-taught. Attempts by his parents to educate him in schools completely failed. Young Rabindranath found conventional classrooms suffocating. In 1901, he founded an experimental school at Shantiniketan (Abode of Peace) near Kolkata, free from traditional restrictions. Classes were held in open air and joy in learning was the priority.

By 1921, the school had evolved into Vishwa-Bharati (World) University where students from all over India came to study. Tagore saw in it a model of his vision, of an India greater than the sum of its parts. It is a testimony to Tagore's ideal that funding for the University came from both Hindus and Muslims. A frequent visitor to Shantiniketan was a young politician named Jawaharlal Nehru, whose only daughter, Indira Gandhi, was then a student at the World University.

Tagore did not live long enough to see the end of the British Raj and the partition of the sub-continent along religious lines in 1947, He died six years earlier, still nurturing vision of a harmonious India, as riots were flaring.

In "The Religion of Men," a set of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1930, Tagore said: "Freedom in the mere sense of independence has no content, and therefore no meaning. Perfect freedom lies in a harmony of relationship."

From Jalabad to Abbottabad and Back

The distance from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to Abbottabad, Pakistan, is 158.9 miles, or approximately 160 miles. Let's say that half of this distance lies in Afghanistan and half in Pakistan.

This means that the four AH-60 Black Hawk stealth choppers (if published reports are to be believed) that the SEAL commandos used to kill Osama Bin Laden flew for half of 320 miles, that is, 160 miles round trip inside Pakistan.

Typical speed of these choppers range from 140-160 mph. Using the lower limit as the average speed of the choppers over mountainous terrain at night implies that they flew in Pakistan's airspace for just over an hour. Add 40 minutes to that for the operation itself, an additional 10 minutes to destroy the damaged helicopter, and the total time the commandos spent in Pakistan amounts to no more than 2 hours.

Did U.S. forces jam Pakistani radars? Who knows, but the fact is that 2 hours is too long for a country not to be aware that its airspace has been violated. Pakistan's intelligence service and the army probably were complicit in the operation. If so, that was a good thing. After all, if Pakistani forces killed bin Laden or got into a confrontation with the commandos in the terrorist's compound, it would have been disastrous for the Muslim nation.

All's well that ends well. The terrorist mastermind has been eliminated. Al-Qaida has received a debilitating blow. The world is safer. And Muslims can go about toppling dictators in the Middle East for tyranny to end, freedom to triumph and an Arab renaissance to begin.

On the Death of Bin Laden

Justice must be served because, unlike revenge, justice is a moral imperative. Without justice, there can be no peace, no progress and no closure.

With the commando raid in Abbottabad that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, there is now a sense of closure, not just for the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks but for Muslims as well. The violent ideology of bin Laden and al-Qaida held Muslims captive for a decade and created existential difficulties for them. With the demise of the terrorist mastermind, Muslims, especially American Muslims, heaved a huge sigh of relief.

Tahir Anwar, the Imam of the South Bay Islamic Association of San Jose, California, struggled with words to express his relief. “It is actually beyond relief,” he said. “Beside killing thousands of innocent people, Bin Laden damaged our religion and society. Other than a few extremists, his message of violence never resonated with Muslims. He was a marginal figure who inflicted tremendous suffering on people. I am happy that the head of the snake has been cut-off and there is now one less evil person on earth.”

The Quran is clear on the question of justice. “O you who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor, for Allah can best protect both.” (4:135)

Dr. Rajabally, a frequent speaker in Islamic conferences who also runs a shelter for abused Muslim women and victims of domestic violence in the San Francisco Bay Area, hopes for two developments to occur in the wake of bin Laden’s death. First, that the recruitment of the vulnerable to fanatical causes around the globe will stop and second, that the U.S. government will treat American-Muslims as an ally in the fight against terrorists and not subject them to racial profiling and similar indignities. “Islam is for justice,” said Rajabally. “Bin Laden committed injustice on a global scale. He gave Islam and Muslims a bad name. He treated Muslims who did not agree with his violent methods – the overwhelming majority of Muslims – as his number one enemy. We are grateful that justice has been finally served.”

Bin Laden was no martyr. He created a personality cult out of his feral fantasy and unbounded egotism, even as America helped create the monster that he became. Many impressionable young Muslims unfortunately fell under his sway only to undermine their faith and waste their lives. Bin Laden preached an ideology of violence in the name of Islam that was rooted not in theology but in ruthless political ambition.

The Arab Spring that is currently transforming the Middle East is proof of how insignificant bin Laden had become. One could argue that he still wielded some influence among the Arabs but after the Tunisian uprising, he became completely irrelevant. While he tried to channel Muslim anger against U.S. foreign policy for his own political hegemony, the revolutions by Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans, Yemenis and Syrians are signs that Muslims are taking responsibility for their own condition instead of blaming others for it. In that context, ideologues like bin Laden lose all credibility.

American-Muslims were heartened by President Obama when he said “… the United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam … Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al-Qaida has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.”

In spite of these considerations, I must confess to being disturbed by the raucous celebration that broke out when bin Laden’s death was announced. How can the death of a human being, no matter how vile, be a cause for celebration and exultation? What should have been a somber occasion turned into a festival with street-dancing and fist-pumping. There is something morally repulsive and spiritually eroding in taking pleasure in the death of a human being.

With the bin Laden "event" behind him, Barack Obama has all but ensured a second-term for himself as president of the United States. Unless something goes horribly awry, and this president has proved extraordinarily lucky in everything he has done so far to make that possibility remote, look for Obama to deliver his second inaugural speech in January of 2013.

Now that bin Laden is dead, America must get out of Afghanistan and Iraq fast. Unlike George Bush, Barack Obama can claim that the mission has indeed been accomplished. There is no need to linger in those countries anymore. What should have been a war on ideas after 9/11 became two viciously polarizing wars of death and destruction, costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Only in withdrawal can come the ultimate closure.