Bhutto sowing hatred
The hospitality syndicated newspaper columns provide prominent personalities should be used for spreading universal human values, as can be seen in Hillary Clinton's Talk it over. However, if the writer has hatred at heart and a poison pen, it results in exactly the opposite effect. I am referring to Benazir Bhutto's feature: Bombing the innocents -- a thing of the past (The Jakarta Post, May 5, 1996).
The death of 50 innocent people in the Lahore bomb blast on Idul Adha day is indeed tragic. It is a heinous terrorist act, and needs to be condemned, as Bhutto has done. But what about the bombing of Imran Khan's Cancer Hospital which killed five people only two weeks earlier? Or the blasts carried out in India day-in and day-out by Bhutto's pet Kashmiri terrorists which kill innocent Indians and foreign tourists? She does not even make a passing reference to these equally heartrending tragedies. Her logic seems to be that terrorism directed against her adversaries is OK, but not against her government.
While she made baseless allegations against India for the bus bomb, Imran Khan was alleging that he suspects Pakistani government agencies for the hospital bomb.
It is well-known that Pakistani politicians suffer from India- phobia, and that is the reason why SAARC, SAPTA and other regional fora do not succeed. In any regional or international forum, whatever the agenda, Pakistan delegates raise the Kashmir dispute to vitiate the whole process. This dispute is as old as Pakistan itself, and neutral experts on the subject agree that there is no solution which is acceptable to all parties concerned. Even three wars have not produce a solution.
In such a situation, if Bhutto is really serious that SAARC should progress like ASEAN, she should agree to maintain the status quo on the Kashmir front, stop aiding and arming terrorists and kidnappers, and divert energies to alleviate poverty. For the myopic Pakistani politicians, however, there is no greater problem in the world than the Kashmiri dispute. It is their only capital in domestic politics.
It was indeed a strange coincidence that ANteve aired the much acclaimed film Gandhi on the same day that you published Bhutto's column. There was the apostle of peace, falling a victim in the cause of spreading amity and love between Hindus and Moslems in the subcontinent, and here we have Bhutto talking of regional cooperation but doing exactly the opposite by trying to deepen the divisions across the Indo-Pakistan border.
You cannot reap peace and progress by sowing hatred and distrust; nor will the bombings be a thing of the past.
H V SUMAN
Jakarta