Children of a lesser God

Could you imagine the wrath and fury of an American response to an attack in which 300,000 Americans, mostly civilians, were to lose their lives? Unlike the US, a tragedy of similar proportions has struck Gazans. More than 1,800 of the 1.8 million Gazans (0.1 per cent of their population) have lost their lives in Israel's indiscriminate aggression. It may sound small, but 0.1 per cent is a huge statistics. If a conflict were to claim the lives of 0.1 per cent of the American population, the death toll would exceed 300,000. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are one of the most disenfranchised people. They constitute the globe's single largest group of stateless people. Being stateless, the Palestinians could be bombed, shelled, and massacred by another nation-state whose rights and privileges will continue to be recognised by other nation-states, even in the presence of irrefutable evidence of its indiscriminate aggression against the unarmed civilians. The post-colonial Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are inhabited by several indigenous groups, many of them Muslims, vying for legitimacy in a world that tries to conform formal structures of association to the nation-state model. The plight of Palestinians in Gaza reveals how disadvantaged they and other similar communities are when Palestinian children playing football on a beach are murdered in an indiscriminate attacks, yet the children are blamed for their own deaths. The fact that generation after generation has grown up in refugee camps tells us that our sophistication in dispute management and resolution makes sense only in textbooks. The continued unresolved grievances of Afghans, Biharis, Kurds, and Palestinians demand of the international community to devise new and effective models of dispute resolution that prevent successive generations from the miserable life of refugee camps. Those who grew up in the 80s in large cities in Pakistan witnessed the Afghan refugee crisis first hand. Millions of Afghans moved to urban Pakistan, predominantly settling in and near Peshawar and Quetta, but later gravitating south to other cities, including Karachi. I recall from the mid-80s walking to Gordon College in Rawalpindi and passing by open waste dumps on College Road where Afghan children scavenged metals and other recyclables. Thirty years later, I see even more children, not just Afghan refugees, scavenging on the streets in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. The decades-long Afghan conflict has destroyed the prospects of a decent life and a promising future for the successive generations of Afghans. The proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union, supported by the mercenaries from Pakistan and the Arab world, has fuelled the Afghan conflict over decades and introduced even more complex dynamics, such that months after the presidential elections, Afghanistan fails to elect a leader. At some level, the Afghan refugees are fortunate, at least more fortunate than the Biharis, who do not have even the right to be a refugee in Pakistan. The Biharis remain displaced and confined to camps, being condemned to an uncertain future with no state actor or international agency making a serious effort to end their plight. Kurds are another group being victimised by not one but several States. Their distinct language, culture, history, aspiration for statehood and geography makes them one of the most deserving people for an independent state. Still, they are discriminated against by Turkey, Iraq, and Iran who lay claim to the Kurd lands, but have no affinity for the Kurdish people. The post-colonial mapmaking somehow left the Kurds without a State of their own. Little, if any, sympathy was shown by the post-Colonial Muslim masters who took over the States that now lay claim to parts of Kurdistan. Palestinians are a people without a State. hey don't have a passport, currency, a fiscal, monetary, or foreign policy. In the world of nation-states, Palestinians are nobodies. No surprise then that Israel killed 1,800 Palestinians, mostly civilians (including women and children), destroyed civilian infrastructure including power plants, water supply and sewage systems, attacked United Nations designated shelters, and still Palestinians had no State representation to plead their case. Their plight is being presented to the world by a handful of independent media outlets and fearless UN operatives, who have put their careers, and even lives, on line to highlight the death and destruction of Palestinian civilians. If Palestinians had a State to represent them, it could have entered into security agreements with other world powers to secure its borders. The Palestinian State could have asked international agencies to be more forceful in restricting Israeli aggression. Palestinians, Kurds, Biharis, and to some extent Afghans are examples of people lacking the shelter and protections a State offers to its people. Keeping them and others stateless will only prolong their misery and add unknown risks to global peace and security. A new bold charter is needed to immediately offer the shelter of statehood to the globe's inherently disenfranchised peoples.