International Conference of
Writers, Intellectuals and Thinkers
Address by
Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto
Prime Minister
Islamabad November 30,
1995
Ladies and gentlemen,
Distinguished guests!
It is a privilege to welcome the distinguished
writers, intellectuals and thinkers who have
travelled long distances to join their Pakistani
colleagues in the Capital city of Pakistan. I
trust that your stay in Islamabad will be both
pleasant and rewarding.
An International Conference of Writers and
Intellectuals is no small event. You are the
repositories of the best achievements of
mankind, and thus the protectors of the man's
heritage and the guarantors of its continuity.
Your endeavors not only link the past and the
present, but you also represent the cutting edge
of human aspirations for the future. Islamabad
is truly honored with your presence. The people
of Pakistan will surely avidly follow your
exchange of experience and thought as deep down,
human-beings, wherever they are confronted with
the same existential dilemmas and moral choices.
Ladies and gentlemen!
One does not have to detract, at all, from the
excellence and perfection of other arts to claim
that literature has been the most direct
articulation of the human condition. It is the
gift of speech and language, which makes the
history of literature such an excellent mirror
of the history of human civilization. All over
the world, in diverse human communities, we
witness the emergence of strong oral traditions
of literature. I remember my own visit to the
Kyrghyz Republic where the People were
celebrating the Manas tradition, again an oral
tradition, which has been passed down through
hundreds of years, from centuries to centuries.
We talk of the complexity of modern
civilization, but the situation was, by no
means, easy for early man. His own experience of
the joy of birth and the agony of dying was no
different from ours. Around him was the vast and
alien world with its spectacular procession of
sun, moon, stars, day light, night fall and the
changing rhythm of seasons. He found that both
his mind and his body reverberated to this
colossal setting. Primitive though they were,
these early men and women did not miss the great
resonance of the universe, nor did they fail to
respond to it. Soon there were amongst these
early men and women, exceptional individuals
with a remarkable gift of bringing human
responses into coherent shape and formal order.
Soon, hymns were raised to the spirits, deities
and gods who seem to lie along the entire
spectrum of this universal resonance. In his
terrible loneliness, Man created literature to
please these invisible powers. Soon, these
remarkable people gathered their fellowmen into
flocks who shared celestial and earthly visions
and sang out to them. It didn't take long time
for the great oral epics to appear which fused
the mythical beginnings with current events,
beautifully arranged around men who walked much
taller than others and, as heroes of mankind;
nearly challenged the stature of the gods. This
seems to have been the manifest destiny of
mankind. Out of this striving for glory arose
tragedy which we have come to recognize as one
of the greatest literary forms of all times.
Poets and philosophers had already discovered
that the external cosmos had its counterpart in
the internal cosmos of the heart of the man. The
human journey through Time and Space had its
exterior and it also had its interior. Then, the
experience, of living together in a community
crowded man's space with a wide-range of
emotions and social relationships. The burden of
man was, indeed, awesome. Antigone felt the
compulsion not only of the laws of gods, but
also the irresistible forces within her in
fulfilling the rites of burial of a loved one,
Love, hatred, revenge, compassion, martyrdom and
a thousand other situations was the warp of
human existence, Each of these situations was an
enigma which demanded an answer, and an
explanation. The universality of questions and
available answers were the building blocks of
Man's cultural organization. It was an attribute
of their daring creativity that writers and
philosophers took both the domain of gods and of
man as their provenance. They transformed their
communities into distinct, recognizable cultural
entities.
People were, hence forth, to be held together by
common beliefs, attitudes, signs and symbols.
The culture of people thus came to transcend
their superficial history at the cronical of
time.
It became a paradigm of development and quality
as men of literature, as indeed, practitioners
of other arts discovered value in human
experience and invested their communities with
it.
The cultural acquisitions of the civilization
became the measure of its triumph over the flux
of time. The permanence of this cultural
achievement provided, at least, a partial answer
to the inescapable challenge of man's mortality.
Henceforth, poets and artists were at work both
in time and out of it.
Ladies and gentlemen!
I believe the state of man is of ambivalence,
strife and discord. Great warring spirits dwell
in his soul and turn his existence into a battle
ground. The three great religions of
Semitic origin have defined the
state of man as perennially suspended between
Good and Evil. There is a central drama of the
Fall of Man and the possibility of Grace and
Redemption.
Human history provides ample testimony that men
and women have not always chosen the path of
redemption. In the name of ideology or a social
system or an economic order, they have often
opted for tyranny and injustice. Intolerant
cultures have burnt thousands of people who held
different beliefs on the stake, exterminated
hundreds of thousands in gas chambers and
sanctioned the merciless massacres of people of
another creed or ethnic origin. This propensity
to deviate from the noblest calling of man has
been so persistent that a pessimistic view of
human nature hangs like a dark cloud over the
entire canon of our philosophical thought.
The 20th century will long be remembered as the
century of death and destruction. The preceding
century had generated great optimism about the
achievements of human knowledge. Scientific
discoveries in every field of enquiry fastered
the view that the progress and development were
the natural dynamics of human civilization and
that there was no limit to human achievement.
Though there were grave voices of caution, the
general drift of .thought was to trust the new
sciences to banish disease, poverty and
degradation forever. It is, indeed, tragic that
within a very short time, man converted the
mastery bestowed by science into a massive
technology of war, death and torture. At another
plane the new opportunities created by science
were harnessed to manipulation, totalitarian
control, torture and exile.
Ladies and gentlemen!
Honesty demands that we admit freely that men of
considerable learning made their services
available to tyrannical regimes in the
fulfillment of their dark designs. Fortunately
for mankind, the majority of writers, thinkers
and philosophers opposed fascism, opposed
tyrannical dispensations, often at the price of
their life or their liberty. So, the saga of
resistance to tyranny constitutes a glorious
heritage of that human race. At a writers'
conference like this, one must applaud this
tradition of upholding truth in the face of
grave peril.
The essence of man's historical experience is
that human-beings flourish and develop, I
believe, in liberal cultures. A liberal culture
admits diversity and plurality. It encourages
freedom. It encourages and nurtures honest
disagreement. It possesses the power to tolerate
divergent points of view and even reconcile them
in a new synthesis. It celebrates the signs and
symbols of all people and denies sanction to
their destruction under any pretext.
A liberal culture is, in fact, another name for
civil society. The historical framework of
culture in the areas now comprising Pakistan is
defined by tolerance and acceptance of
diversity.
In the pre-Islamic era, Buddhism constrained
man's weakness for instant gratification of all
human-desires and it created a culture given to
caring and fellow-feeling. In course of time,
Buddhism fused with occidental influences
brought by the Greeks and this led to the
flowering of an extraordinary culture known as
the Gandhara Civilization.
The advent of Islam in this area also had
certain unique characteristics of its own.
Before Islam arrived here, the Message of the
Book had interacted with ancient civilizations
including that of Iran, and Islamic culture has
been enriched by the great literature produced
by the Sufi poets. This literature inspired
meditation of God, contemplation of Nature and
introspection about the state of man in the
local vernaculars and became a major factor in
the widespread acceptance of Islam. It is
tempting to suggest that the democracy is the
logical extension of a liberal culture and there
is a large element of truth in this, but history
does not provide a definitive cause and effect
relationship. Similarly, one is inclined to
assume that by definition democracy promotes
higher forms of literature. This again is not
entirely true because some of the greatest
literature was produced under circumstances of
terrible suffering. In many cases, it was the
struggle for democracy or struggle for freedom,
or struggle for equality which provided the
inspiration for master pieces of literature.
Times of trouble marked by an absence of
democracy, rather than a contended democratic
culture, seem to drive writers to the highest
attainment of form and substance.
You will, no doubt, deliberate upon these
relationships with a more specific reference to
literature and men of letters. For myself today,
I would like to talk of democracy from a
somewhat different angle. We have had the seeds
of democracy in the ancient republics of Greece.
But this is a concept which is very different
from what we mean by the sovereignty of the
people and freedom of the individual today. We
must regard that early experience as a noble
beginning but no more.
For hundreds of years to follow, men and women
lived under political systems characterized by
authoritarianism and often by despotism. Even in
the last two hundred years, which are defined as
years of enlightenment, human societies have had
more than share of dictatorship of individuals,
military over-lords on monolithic political
parties. What are truly heartening is the
ceaseless efforts made by men of vision to
demonstrate that all such political regimes lack
a fundamental legitimacy. They extended and
deepened the currents of human thoughts by
analyzing various political alternatives and
developing the argument that political life must
evolve in the direction of liberal democracy,
where power is shared, where rulers are elected
and held to account and where people have the
inalienable right to vote them in or vote them
out. It was demonstrated convincingly that other
forms of government had, more often than not,
ended in disaster. Legitimacy could come out
from the collective will of the people.
The 20th century experienced the denial of
individual's freedom on unprecedented scale
under Naz'iism and Stalinism. The propagandists
of these evil regimes argued with some
justification that their apparatus of coercion
and control had, at least in the short run, made
things better for people in the material sense.
The inescapable truth, however, was that these
non-democratic experiments resulted in millions
of deaths and the destruction of large areas,
particularly in Europe. The horrors of the
totalitarianism have left a lasting memory
behind. Also men and women have discovered the
great virtue of dignity through the harrowing
memory of its denial by totalitarian regimes. A
consensus has, therefore, emerged now, as we are
at the end of the century, that while there may
be no ideal way of governance, the most
satisfactory one is that of democracy.
Human societies are turning their back on
self-styled heroes who looked larger than life
when they strutted on the world stage and are
reaffirming the advantages of ordering their
affairs in civic societies regulated by
democratic institutions whose roles are clearly
defined by the Constitution. Unfortunately,
those who have just emerged from the darkness of
dictatorship often have a mindset shaped by the
forces of tyranny.
Today, in Pakistan, the President, the
Parliament, the Judiciary, the Armed Forces, the
Provincial Governments are working in accordance
with the Constitution. Instead of taking
satisfaction from the dawn of a constitutional
order, some elements act as agent provocateurs
and claim that the President, the Parliament,
the Judiciary, the Armed Forces, the Provincial
Governments are working as the hand maidens of
the political government instead of taking on
the government in an extra constitutional
manner. There can be neither greater lie nor any
greater disrespect to the Constitution, the
verdict of democracy and the verdict of the
people itself than to make such a claim. The
political government today does not face
intrigue, conspiracy, confrontation from the
different organs of government because all these
organs are fulfilling their obligations
according to the constitution and according to
the oath that they have taken to uphold the
Constitution. Political governments cannot be
weakened or undermined by subjective evaluation
of gloom and doom of a handful of people filled
with lust of power that they look to extra
constitutional means to achieve their ends.
Political governments are to be judged by the
people of a country in fair, free and impartial
elections.
It is only two years, in Pakistan, since the
different organs of the state started to work in
accordance with the Constitution and the oath
that they have taken. The forces of tyranny had
for 17 years, directly or indirectly, tried to
sow the seeds of discord and disruption. And the
forces of tyranny are still busy. They talk of a
change of system, not a change of governments.
They claim that all democratic governments are
the same. They claim that the answer, therefore,
lies in the so-called Islamic Revolution. In
fact, the people of Pakistan have already seen
the so-called Islamic Revolution in Pakistan
when the pristine name of the last Messenger of
God was cynically exploited by a bunch of
clerics trying to act more pious than the most
pious.
In 1977 in Pakistan, a follower of the Muslim
brotherhood, General Zia-ul-Haq seized power. He
announced a change in system. He announced that
only good and pious men as he defined them could
take part in elections. So, elections on party
basis were never held. The so-called discredited
politicians of the past were to be disqualified
and new, fresh and clean faces were to be found.
These so-called clean faces turned out to be the
dirtiest of the lot. They were the ones without
conscience who were prepared to betray their
people and democratic principles of the founder
of the country, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali
Jinnah, for a loaf of bread. An unholy alliance
was created to sustain an unrepresentative and
unaccountable regime. This was an alliance
between the clerics and the opportunistic
politicians. This so- called new system
introduced the politics of violence and
corruption in the body politic of Pakistan. It
betrayed the blood of the martyrs who formed
Pakistan as a modern, liberal Muslim social
democracy. These people traded in drugs and guns
and were unscrupulous enough to plunder the
funds of Jihad in Afghanistan to enrich
themselves and their families.
Behold the landscape of Pakistan and see a new
class of the rich, fortune hunters who made
their fortunes on the backs of political
prisoners, the cries of the lashed, the screams
of the tortured. No dissent was allowed. The
press was censored. Political activity was
banned. Women were degraded and humiliated.
Minorities were persecuted. Discrimination,
intolerance, hatred were the hallmark of the
so-called Islamic Revolution led by General Zia,
supported by the clerics and the corrupt unknown
charlatans who were made into politicians.
Ethnicity, sectarianism, terrorism, narco-politics,
kalashnikov culture, violence was spawned by
this unholy group of unelected and unelectable
people. Money was lavishly given to clerical
parties. They were asked to set up schools to
train robots in the use of arms and in the use
of hatred. The declared purpose was the noble
one. The declared purpose was to fight Jihad.
The declared purpose was to fight for freedom in
Afghanistan, Kashmir and wherever it was
threatened. The real purpose was to create a
constituency and to create a cadre and to create
the manpower to seize power by violent means
should the dictatorship come unhinged. The real
purpose was to make sure that democracy could
never take root that polling stations would be
seized and the ballot papers should be stamped.
But the dream did not materialize; the dictator
died. His class of supporters, the clerics and
the opportunist politicians tried to derail
democracy in 1988, but in 1993 they lost power.
But they have not given up their ambitions to
discredit the Quaid-i-Azam's dream of a liberal
democratic state. They called the Quaid-i-Azam
Mohammad Ali Jinnah who was fighting for
Pakistan an unbeliever or Kafir and accused him
of being a British agent. They lied and
slandered the great founder of the great nation.
And today, nearly fifty years later, they tell
the same lies. Those who oppose their politics
of greed, the politics of violence, the politics
of thuggery and dictatorship are called American
agents and disbelievers.
Let us call a spade a spade. Elected governments
are only agents of God and agents of the
creatures of God, that is the people who elect
them. The real agents are these so-called
clerics toting their guns bought during the hay
day of the cold war with CIA funds and running
their organizations by money given for the Jihad
in Afghanistan. It is said that hell hath no
fury like a woman scorned. Allow me to say that
hell hath no fury like a cleric scorned. Why did
the British and the CIA fund the clerics? The
British had an Empire where the sun never set.
They clearly believed in the politics of "divide
and rule". They funded the clerics to oppose,
discredit and confront the nationalist
politicians who wanted freedom from colonial
rule.
Colonialism more or less ended with the end of
Second World War. The Yalta Conference brought
with it the end of the Second World War. The CIA
took up where the British had left. They needed
the clerics to confront godless communism. To
prevent countries from going communist clerics
were funded. Once the fight for the free world
ended on the war torn and ravaged soil of
Afghanistan, the clerics were dumped like hot
potatoes.
And hell hath no fury like a cleric scorned. So,
the clerics funded, organized and trained by the
forces of Imperialism and the west took up arms
against the West to get their attention once
again. They cannot get power through democracy,
nor were they trained to support democracy. So,
they are against democracy. And anyone who
supports democracy is branded as a pro-west, as
a non-believer, as a prelude to set the stage
for dictatorship and authoritarian rule. Let me
at this stage state that the Pakistan People's
Party government and I make a clear distinction
between clerics and religious scholars.
Religious scholars are those who devote
themselves to religion and teach others
religion, who spread the Message. Clerics are
those who have a political agenda of tyranny
which they try to hide by cynically exploiting
the name of religion.
Let me also say that the clerics are exploiting
a western insensitivity, be they the issues of a
political nature such as the ongoing conflicts
in Afghanistan, the bloody repression in
Kashmir, the genocide in Bosnia, be it the
economic deprivation, poverty and debt trap of
the developing countries or be it attempts at
cultural domination. Some of you might have
recently heard of an abortive coup attempt in
Pakistan. Again, who were these people who
wanted to bring in a so-called Islamic
Revolution? Who were these people who wanted to
call themselves Amir-ul-Momineen and declare
Pakistan a sectarian state? Who were these
people who wanted to murder the President, the
Prime Minister, the Chief of the Army Staff and
the elite corp of the Pakistan Armed Forces? Who
were these people prepared to break their solemn
oath to God and country? Who were these people
who were going to send the Judges of the
Superior Judiciary packing home and establish
their agents in so-called Shariat Courts? They
were a small group of power hungry adventurers
who would have plunged Pakistan into a civil
war, destroyed the cream of our Armed Forces,
opened to attack our sensitive military
institutions and threatened the security of the
unborn children of Pakistan. Their own personal
and professional lives would make scandalous
reading.
All I will say is that they were morally and
financially corrupt and they wanted to teach the
nation piety. These unpious adventurers wanted
to throw out the political representatives
branded by them as feudals and traders (Tajir
Siyasatdans) and bring in so-called clean
people. For clean read corrupt crooks who would
have sold their soul for political power without
political legitimacy.
The new order was more or less the same as the
old order of 1977 which had lasted nearly 17
years, the order of intolerance, hatred,
violence, self-righteous and victimization. And
unholy alliance between the clerics and the
unscrupulous, unelectable individuals, who are
fortune seekers, was the aim that they had in
mind.
Here I might add that generally speaking these
politically motivated groups like to use the
name of charities, NGOs and try to disguise
their real agenda under a cloak of goody goody
two shoes. Of course, the majority of charities
are good. The majority of charities do serve
people. And we have seen noble work done by
charities such as the Edhi Foundation and Orangi
Pilot and many others.
But I remember a former Western Ambassador who
was very keen to know what my government
intended in 1988 to do about the NGOs which had
been set up during the Afghan Jehad. Of course,
I did not understand his question. Those NGOs
set up with Western funds or funds brought from
Muslim countries on Western pointation had a lot
to do with creating warriors to fight for the
free world and Afghanistan. I did not realize
this until last year, but I learnt of the close
association of Ramzi Yousaf, the dreaded
terrorist involved in the World Trade Centre and
an NGO which has been set up to provide relief
in Peshawar.
So, the next time you are asked to donate to a
noble charity, please ask for the audit reports.
Many of others who had little properties or real
estate have started building luxurious homes and
plazas and their tax returns do not indicate
where this money came from ?
Many Arabs came to Pakistan too. If these Arabs
are against their countries, and everybody has
the right to defense, let them go back and fight
in their own countries. In Islam, courage is the
code word and death in the way of Allah is
welcomed as martyrdom. Instead, like cowards
they hide in Pakistan while plotting against
their own countries. We, in Pakistan, fought
against General Zia. We faced the threat of
death because we believed in the righteousness
of our cause. Except for one year, for an ear
infection, I spent all twelve years of Zia's
Martial Law in Pakistan, in prison or out on the
streets protesting. So, these individuals should
now go back to their own countries and fight
their own political battles instead of hiding
like cowards over here.
The recent bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in
Islamabad, has enraged the people of Pakistan.
We do not expect our guests to abuse our
hospitality. This is against the Message of God.
No guest is allowed to abuse our hospitality.
According to our customs, if an enemy enters our
house, he is to be treated honorably, for
hospitality cannot be abused.
So, dear writers, guests, I am here to tell you
that the battle between the free world and the
Communism is over. But the battle between
democracy and dictatorship still rages. And
while this battle shapes up in the Muslim World
or in the South, the lack of concern by the West
for global issues such as freedom in Kashmir or
debt relievement and cultural domination adds
fuel to a combustible mixture.
In these new battles which are shaping up the
intellectuals, writers, poets will make their
own contribution. And in making this
contribution you will have to sift fact from
fiction.
Ladies and gentlemen!
In this speech I talked about the crisis of
authoritarianism in the world. But in fact, the
problem is much deeper. It is a crisis of human
thought itself. Many philosophers in the West
speak of a crisis in western philosophy.
Violence, alienation, the disintegration of
family, the erosion of values and above all, a
deep anxiety about the future of the planet
which we have so ruthlessly exploited all
combine to produce a new angst. Unable to cope
with it so many of the young people seek refuge
in strange cults or simply drop out of their
societies. The answer has to be found in the
collective wisdom of men and women although I
believe the disintegration of the traditional
family has had a part to play.
It is sad that some intellectuals in the West
seek to submerge this real crisis of mind and
soul in imaginary confrontations between the
East and the West, between Christianity and
Islam, between Christianity and Confucianism.
These battle cries are false as no battle has to
be joined. Technology has brought us to a point
where the East and the West and the North and
the South are much too close and their only
option is to work together and not at cross
purposes.
I trust that this great Conference will reaffirm
the resolve to work together. And I trust that
this Conference will once again proclaim the
universal brotherhood of men and women. Let the
voice of this conference be heard in support of
peace and harmony. Let its deliberations become
a fresh emphasis on the dignity of men and women
and on freedom. Pakistan's national poet, Iqbal
visualizes the journey of man as virtually an
un-ending journey to reach God. There is
constant struggle and there is constant
striving. For all this striving the destination
may still be very far away. Let this conference
make its own contribution to that eternal
striving for finding the ultimate truth.
Ladies and gentlemen !
On behalf of the Government of Pakistan, I would
first like to congratulate Mr. Fakhr Zaman for
the hard work he has put together in organizing
and bringing this conference to success. As one
of the poets and writers who gave off his best
during the years of struggle and tyranny, I am
glad to see that the democratic culture has not
softened him and he continues to strive. And I
would like to announce two awards. One for an
outstanding work on literature in any language,
and the second for an individual or organization
for distinguished work in promoting the cause of
democracy anywhere in the world. The first award
for literature shall be named after our founding
father: the Quaid-i-Azam Award; the second award
will be named after Pakistan's first directly
elected Prime Minister; the Quaid-i-Awam Award.
Thank you very much.
