20 2GN The Sunday Times April 10, 2022NEWS WORLD NEWS
has repeatedly insisted “we received an
official document which we must say is
against our people,” waving a piece of
paper he said was a cable from his ambas-
sador in Washington about a meeting with
Donald Lu, assistant US secretary of state
for south and east Asian affairs.
The meeting followed a trip to Moscow
by Khan, who was the first world leader to
visit Putin after he invaded Ukraine. There
he struck a deal to import natural gas as
well as two million tons of wheat from
Russia and declared that the pair had
“great discussions”. The visit was viewed
with anger in Washington as well as White-
hall — Pakistan is the biggest recipient of
British aid. But few beyond Khan’s own
circle believed in a foreign plot to topple
him.
“We’ve seen this movie before,” said
Safiya Ghori-Ahmad, a Pakistan analyst
and former adviser in the US State Depart-
ment. “This is Khan playing to his base
and pointing fingers at an easy scapegoat.”
The cable has not been made public
and Washington has rejected Khan’s accu-deserted him after a reported rift with the
military which helped to bring him to
power in 2018. Opposition parties that
have long been rivals joined together to
call for a vote last Sunday. However, he
tried to avoid it by getting the Speaker,
one of his allies, to dissolve parliament.
The Supreme Court ruled this illegal on
Thursday night and ordered parliament
to reopen for a vote yesterday. Khan’s
allies attempted to delay it by filibustering
with long speeches and the Speaker three
times adjourned the session, but eventu-
ally the military seemed to have lost
patience.
Late last night the Speaker announced
he was resigning “for the good of the
country” and the vote finally went ahead.
It is not clear what Khan will do. “My
message is I have and always will continue
to fight for Pakistan till the last ball,” he
insisted in an address to the
nation on Friday night. He has
already called for supporters to
come out on the streets to pro-
test foreign interference. HeImran Khan, the cricket star turned popu-
list prime minister of Pakistan, was ousted
from office last night in a dramatic mid-
night confidence vote.
Airports closed and paramilitaries sur-
rounded parliament as the vote, which
Khan had repeatedly tried to delay, was
ordered to proceed following a meeting
between him and General Asim Bajwa, the
powerful army chief.
In a country that has spent much of its
75-year existence under military rule,
rumours flew back and forth all evening,
as well as reports that a court petition had
been filed to block Khan from replacing
General Bajwa.
The vote eventually took place at almost
1am Pakistan time and resulted in the
69-year-old Oxford graduate losing by 174
votes, two more than were needed. No
Pakistani prime minister has com-
pleted a full five-year term but Khan
is the first to be voted out of office.
“It’s a great day for democracy in
the country and supremacy of parlia-
ment and a moment of celebration for
all democratic workers,” said Shazia
Marri, an MP from the Pakistan
People’s Party.
Khan insisted he was the
victim of a foreign conspir-
acy, claiming the US
wanted him gone
because of his sup-
port for President
Putin. His informa-
tion minister,
Fawad Hussain,
called it “a sad day
for Pakistan. The return of
looters and a good man
sent home.”
Khan has been fighting
for his political survival for
weeks since losing his par-
liamentary majority when
coalition partnersChristina Lamb
Chief Foreign CorrespondentUS pledging
allegiance to
the words of
a plagiarist
before he claimed to have
written them. Bellamy’s
pledge, Popik said, appeared
to be “identical to the Kansas
version, except for one word,
‘inseparable’,” which became
“indivisible”.
He sent the clipping to
Shapiro at The New Yale Book
of Quotations, who said: “The
dates are clear, that [Francis
Bellamy] did not write [the
pledge]. Whether Frank E
Bellamy wrote it, it’s not a
certainty.”
But it looks more likely.
“We do not have any definite
account that he wrote it,”
added Shapiro. “What we
have is that this seems to have
been circulating in Kansas
schools. And... no one else
has ever come forward.”
Frank Bellamy later served
with the US Army in the
Philippines during the 1898
Spanish-American war.
He died in 1915.
“He didn’t just write this
patriotic prayer,” said
Shapiro. “He lived it.”indivisible, with liberty and
justice for all,” he said. In a
1923 letter to the magazine’s
publishers, Bellamy scoffed
at the idea that “that simple
crook, the Kansas schoolboy,
one Frank E Bellamy”, could
have written it.
Recently, however, the
historian Barry Popik made a
startling discovery while
searching the database of
newspapers.com. Looking up
the words of America the
Beautiful, he found an earlier
version from 1902 “that no
one had thought existed”. So
he searched phrases from the
Pledge of Allegiance, “to see if
there’s anything before
September 1892”. Up popped
an article in The Republican,
of Hays City, Kansas, from
May 21, 1892, describing a
ceremony on April 30 in
which high school students
swore allegiance to the flag
using almost exactly the same
words that Francis Bellamy
claimed to have written —
more than three monthspromotions department of
the magazine and in the 1920s
insisted it was his creation.
The report sided with
Bellamy, noting that “his
clerical connection gives
added weight to his
testimony”. Originally from
New York, he had served for
several years at a church in
Boston before taking a job at
the magazine in 1891, as it
prepared for the 400th
anniversary of the voyage of
Columbus.
As part of this celebration,
Upham wanted a flag in every
school and something for the
children to say as they saluted
it. The question of what this
should be was still unresolved
by August 1892, according to
Bellamy. He said that one hot
night that month, he spent
“two sweating hours” trying
to distil American history into
something short and snappy.
Eventually, he wrote: “I
pledge allegiance to my flag
and to the republic for which
it stands: one nation,put the same words in a
school essay on the duty
citizens had to their country.
In 1898, after he had left
school, his old principal
entered this essay in another
competition, where it was
chosen as the winner.
Margarette Miller, the
author of the 1946 book I
Pledge Allegiance, apparently
encountered the claim that
the pledge had been written
by the schoolboy. According
to a congressional report
published in 1957, she
concluded he had “simply
lifted the text” from The
Youth’s Companion and
passed it off as his own.
That report, seeking
definitively to establish the
authorship of the pledge,
presumed it had been written
by someone at the magazine.
It examined competing
claims made by friends of the
editor, James Upham, who
maintained that he had
written it, and by Francis
Bellamy, who worked in theKansas schoolboy whose
name, by a strange quirk, was
Frank Bellamy.
In Kansas — though almost
nowhere else — Frank E
Bellamy of Cherryvale was
credited with writing the
pledge in January 1890 for a
competition in The Youth’s
Companion magazine.
Pupils were asked to write
what they were thinking
about as they saluted the flag.
Frank entered but received
no acknowledgement that his
entry had been received,
according to Joyce Long, a
researcher for the Kansas
Historical Society. He later
told a Kansas newspaper that
he wrote again to the
magazine when he saw his
words published without
attribution in September
1892, as a suggested pledge
for schools, and was
informed that all submissions
became the magazine’s
property.
A few years after that,
according to the society, heEvery morning in schools all
over America, pupils declare
their loyalty to the flag and to
the republic for which it
stands, reciting a patriotic
creed long attributed to a
Baptist minister named
Francis Bellamy.
Now the authorship of the
Pledge of Allegiance has been
thrown into doubt by the
discovery of a report in a
Kansas newspaper from 1892
that features children reciting
the pledge months before
Bellamy claimed to have
written it.
“My conclusion is that
Francis Bellamy lied, really
quite outrageously, and it
appears that he may have
stolen the credit from a
13-year-old boy,” said Fred
Shapiro, editor of The New
Yale Book of Quotations.
The discovery adds
credence to a claim, long
dismissed, that the pledge
was actually written by aWill Pavia New YorkMany American children recite the pledge every school dayKhan’s transition from popular cricketer to stubborn hardliner
was seen by some as a lesson in the corrupting nature of powerAAMIR QURESHI/AFP/GETTY IMAGESbelieve there is a high
likelihood that he is no longer
in Malaysian waters, based on
the movement of sea
currents, as well as the time
and location where the other
victims were found,” said
Cyril Edward Nuing, the
Mersing district police chief.
Details began to emerge
yesterday of the bravery of
Grodem, the Norwegian
diving instructor who had
been training the other three
and desperately fought to
keep them together on the
surface.
The sea was calm and
officials had expressed the
hope of rescuing all four
people. Light rain would have
given them drinking water.
Chesters was bobbing on
open waters for two days
until he was spotted by a
fishing vessel. Originally from
Sheffield, he had only
recently moved his family to
the tourist hotspot after
working as a senior engineer
on Shell’s Appomattox oil rig
in the Gulf of Mexico.
The mother of Molina, the
French teenager in the diving
group, had always been
optimistic that her daughter
would survive the ordeal.
Esther Molina, 57, who
lives in Malaysia, said on
Thursday: “We’re hoping for
the best. She’s a strong girl,
she’ll kick ass.”
Her prayers were
answered the next day when
she was plucked from the sea
by fishermen.
All diving activities off
Mersing have been
suspended while inquiries
are carried out. Police are
assessing the dive equipment
and location, and confirmed
the boat’s captain is being
investigated for drug use.
Several islands close to the
town are popular dive spots
for tourists. Diving accidents
are rare, however. In 2013 a
British tourist died when she
was struck by a passing boat’s
propeller while diving off the
resort island of Kecil in the
South China Sea.
Malaysia’s white-sand
beaches and lush rainforests
have long made it a popular
attraction but the tourism
industry was hit hard by
travel curbs during the
coronavirus pandemic.
The country’s borders only
reopened to foreigners on
April 1 after being closed for
more than two years because
of Covid-19.
@DavidCollinsSTThe Malaysian
authorities are
continuing the
search for the
body of Nathen
Renze ChestersThe
skipper
sailed
back
while
high on
drugssations. Most believe his downfall came as
a result of soaring inflation and economic
mismanagement which led him to get
through four finance ministers in as many
years and the rupee to fall to record lows,
along with worsening relations with his
military backers.
Khan fell out with General Bajwa over
whether to extend his term, due for
renewal this autumn, and a failed attempt
to install his candidate as chief of ISI, the
military intelligence.
The army also made clear in a recent
tweet that it did not agree with his anti-
American stance, which caused relations
between the two countries to dip to their
lowest ebb. Khan had yet to hear from
President Biden since the Taliban victory
in Afghanistan. He is also believed to have
fallen out with his third wife, Bushra, a
long-time spiritual adviser who many saw
as his conduit to the military. The couple
married just before the 2018 elections
after she told him this was necessary for
him to become prime minister.
The opposition are now expected to
install as prime minister Shehbaz Sharif,
70, younger brother of three-time former
premier Nawaz Sharif. The former chief
minister of Punjab enjoys good relations
with the military and has a reputation as
an effective administrator. It will also be a
return to the dynastic politics of the past
where power switched between two fami-
lies, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos.
“The good thing about Imran was he
was a break from this,” said Shuja Nawaz,
director of the South Asia Centre at the
Atlantic Council, a Washington-based
think tank. “But in the end he fell for all
the same weaknesses.”
“I hope Khan doesn’t bring people out
on the street,” he added. “It will only harm
the economy and the poor who are
already suffering — and the army will not
hesitate to step in once again. We could
end up with an ‘Egypt on the Indus’
scenario.”
Additional reporting by Haroon Janjua in
IslamabadKhan’s innings is over as
he is ousted from power
Pakistani leader loses confidence vote after attempt to blame American interference
British diver
saved from seas
off Malaysia says
son has drowned
A teenager who disappeared
with three others on a diving
trip off the coast of Malaysia
has died, according to his
British father, who was found
drifting in the South China
Sea.
Adrian Chesters, 46, and
his son Nathen, 14, a Dutch
citizen, were on a training
dive nine miles off the coastal
town of Mersing on
Wednesday. They surfaced
after 40 minutes underwater
to find their boat had gone.
The captain was suspected of
being high on drugs.
They struggled to stay
together after surfacing but
were eventually separated by
strong currents. The group’s
diving instructor, Kristine
Grodem, 35, was
miraculously rescued by a tug
boat on Thursday more than
30 miles from where she and
the others had surfaced.
Chesters and an 18-year-old
Frenchwoman, Alexia
Molina, were spotted by
fishermen and pulled from
the sea at 1am on Friday.
They are in a stable condition
in hospital. Chesters, a British
oil engineer working for
Shell, told the coastguard
yesterday that his son,
apparently exhausted, had
died while they were adrift.
The incident is reminiscent
of the 2003 film Open Water,
in which an American couple
go scuba diving only to find
themselves stranded when
the crew of the boat leaves
them behind.
The Malaysian authorities
have opened an investigation.
The boat’s captain claimed he
had left the area where the
group had begun their dive
after they failed to resurface
at around noon on
Wednesday.
The skipper was told to
provide a urine sample to
polices and was later arrested
when he tested positive for
methamphetamine, also
known as crystal meth.
Investigators now believe
he simply “abandoned” the
group and sailed back to
shore while high on drugs,
leaving the divers at the
mercy of the South China Sea.
The search began on
Wednesday at about 2.30pm
and involved a Bombardier
jet, three helicopters, 11 boats
and about 100 personnel,
including rescue divers.
But the hunt for Nathen
has proved fruitless. “WeDavid CollinsMALAYSIAN MARITIME ENFORCEMENT AGENCY/APPakistan People’s Party supporters in Karachi celebrate the supreme court’s ruling against Imran Khan on Thursday that the dissolution of parliament was illegalASIF HASSAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES