| December 14, 2001 | Friday | Ramazan 28, 1422 |
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How soon is ‘soon’?
Killed by lethal waste
IT IS obvious that the Palestinian attacks — suicide or otherwise — are not going to stop unless the peace process is revived and they see visible progress in the direction of a Palestinian state. Ariel Sharon is wrong in thinking that ‘taking out’ Yasser Arafat will quell the 14-month old second intifada, which he himself sparked off by visiting the Al-Aqsa compound in September last year. The chain of violence has since continued, with Israel pursuing a policy of state terrorism against the helpless and innocent Palestinian civilians. Deprived of their basic rights to live with dignity and to make a decent living in their own homeland, the Palestinians have been subjected to the worst form of persecution.
Over the past few months it has become increasingly difficult for Yasser Arafat to unilaterally stop violence by Palestinian militants while Israel goes about killing and maiming fellow Palestinians and bulldozing their houses in a most indiscriminate and brutal manner. True, the world community and the US have tried to put pressure on Ariel Sharon not to persist in his policy of ruthless suppression, but the Palestinians feel that they have not tried hard enough — and understandably so. All too often Israel’s tanks have rolled into Palestinian towns and cities, killing and wounding civilians at will. Lately, Israel has been actively pursuing the policy of target killing of the Palestinian leaders; mortar bombs and helicopter gunships have been used in attacks on the Palestinian Authority’s offices and civic institutions in the occupied territories. Gaza airport has been rendered inoperative and the Palestinians have been literally locked in the occupied territories with little means of livelihood on which to survive. Ariel Sharon’s virtual yet undeclared war on the Palestinian people has continued unabated, with little or no strong disapproval from Washington or any other western capital, for that matter. The number of innocent Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks in recent clashes far outnumbers the Israeli victims of the latest cycle of violence.
Now the latest Israeli action of severing all links with the Palestinian Authority and the threat to kill Arafat have also been treated with indifference by the US and EU. It seems that unless a sense of visible evenhandedness prevails on the part of Israel’s western backers toward the two sides in this bloody conflict, there is little hope for the violence in the Middle East to abate or come to an end in the days to come. Over the past fifty years or so, the Palestinians have shown their willingness to sacrifice lives, property and means of livelihood for the higher goal of securing the liberation of their territories from Israeli occupation and creating an independent homeland of their own. Sharons will come and go, but the Palestinians will not cave in to Israeli pressure or brute force in spite of the world’s apathy towards their plight and give up their just struggle. This they will continue to fight with or without Yasser Arafat. It is time the US and the EU rethought their blind support to Israel. The Palestinian people deserve better than what they have been given ten years after they took the bold step of entering into a peace dialogue with Israel in the hope of reaching a just settlement on the basis of peaceful coexistence.
EVERY now and then, the citizens of Islamabad are told that they would “soon” get the chance to exercise their democratic right and elect their own local government. This has been happening for the past half a year or so. On Tuesday, the citizens of Islamabad were once again told that local government elections would “soon” be held in the capital. This was stated by the federal interior minister, Lt-Gen (Rtd) Moinuddin Haider, at a meeting of the office-bearers of the Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry in the federal capital. When is this “soon” ever going to take place? Local government elections throughout the country, with the exception of the cantonments and the capital, have long been completed, and local governments at the district and tehsil levels have already celebrated their hundred days in office. In Islamabad, however, the people are not even being told exactly what the reasons are for the delay. The federal minister merely said that the local government elections in the capital could not be held during the current calendar year because of “several” reasons.
Whatever the reasons for the delay in holding the local government polls in the capital, it looks like this “soon” is going to take many months more. For one thing, an ordinance for holding municipal elections in the capital is yet to be promulgated. According to the Islamabad district administration, once the ordinance is promulgated it will take at least another three months for completing the electoral process, including the demarcation of union councils in the urban areas, objections on the demarcation, and the preparation of the voters’ list. Time would also be required for the announcement of the election schedule, filing of nomination papers, objections on nomination papers and allotment of election symbols. All in all, the citizens of Islamabad would be lucky if they can have their own local government in place before the national elections due at the end of next year.
IT HAS taken the unfortunate deaths of three young children for Karachi’s administration to realize that the city has factories which are polluting the living environment to such an extent that people are dying because of the contamination. Two four-year-olds and one six-year-old child died when they happened to chance upon a powder which they tasted while playing in a playground in a low-income area. Apparently, the playground, situated in a heavily populated area, has long been known to be a dumping ground for all kinds of chemicals from nearby factories, but the authorities did nothing to stop this harmful practice. In most countries, dumping toxic industrial waste in congested residential areas would invite both preventive and punitive action, but not so in Pakistan. The problem isn’t that there are no laws; the problem is that existing legislation — most notably the Pakistan Environment Protection Act of 1997 — is not enforced.
What is also disturbing is that the federal and provincial governments seem to have learnt nothing from past tragedies like this. Cases of discharging of toxic waste into streams and rivers or simply dumping them at disposal sites meant for household waste are quite common in most urban centres. Then, there was the shocking revelation, last year, in a village outside Lahore where hundreds of children had suffered bone deformities after fluoride released from a nearby factory contaminated the local water supply. An inquiry into the incident later absolved the factory of any responsibility and the matter was soon forgotten.
Agreed, Pakistan is a developing country where the quantum of resources devoted to environment protection is limited by other competing priorities. However, certain things can surely be done. A comprehensive survey — at least in all major cities — of factories should be conducted, so that a database can be compiled, making it easier to pinpoint polluters and keep their waste disposal methods and practices under watch. For this, the federal and provincial environmental protection agencies should be given adequate financial and technical resources. Other than that, the environmental tribunals as mandated by the 1997 Act, but which exist only on paper, should be constituted so that those who pollute at least know that they could be proceeded against.