| January 22, 2002 | Tuesday | Ziqa’ad 7, 1422 |
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Test of autonomy
AS AN indifferent world looks on, Israel has stepped up its campaign to systematically oppress the Palestinian people and target every symbol of their self-determination. With their leader Yasser Arafat suffering the indignity of being under siege in his Ramallah headquarters for over six weeks, the Israelis have been busy destroying a series of important symbols of Palestinian self-rule. The latest to be hit was the Palestinian radio and television headquarters, which was reduced to rubble by the Israelis in an operation meant to accentuate the Palestinians’ helplessness and to render them, literally, voiceless. Earlier, Israeli soldiers had gratuitously dug up the airstrip at Gaza airport, the main gateway for flights into and out of Palestinian territory. The latest excuse for these punishing actions was provided by an attack on a banquet hall inside Israel on Friday, when a gunman went on a shooting spree that left six persons dead. Following that terrible act, the Israelis decided to punish the Palestinian people collectively and surrounding their leader’s headquarters with a cordon of tanks. As Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon put it, when Arafat “opens the windows of his Ramallah offices, he sees our tanks and knows he has nowhere to go”.
Meanwhile, the regular Israeli incursions into Palestinian territories continue, with town after town besieged by Israeli tanks and people humiliated in the name of anti-terrorist drives. The aim is increasingly clear: Sharon, who recently dubbed Arafat as “irrelevant”, seeks to create a new ground reality in which the Palestinian leader is sidelined and all vestiges of the current experiment with self-rule abandoned. Sharon is clearly contemptuous of the Oslo accord and is keen to restore the pre-Oslo status quo. Some observers believe that his hidden agenda is to divide the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into tiny territories so that Israel can negotiate a separate peace with local influentials rather than dealing with a national leader such as Arafat. Many Palestinians believe that Sharon’s aims are even more sinister. They argue that the relentless pressure on the population of the occupied territories - who have to suffer arbitrary road blocks, searches, sieges, the bulldozing of their homes and an economic blockade aimed at impoverishing them - is designed to break their will and force them either to leave the lands of their ancestors or to submit to Israeli overlordship as their unchangeable fate.
Given the enduring spirit and courage shown by the Palestinians and their deep attachment to their land, it is difficult to see the Israelis succeeding in their wicked designs. In fact, many Israeli policies are already proving counter-productive. The decision to humiliate and isolate Arafat has had the opposite effect even among those who have been critical of his moderate policies. Thousands of Palestinians across the Gaza Strip came out on Sunday to rally round their leader who is still considered, despite all his shortcomings, as a symbol of Palestinian resistance and unity. Given this reality, any new local leader who tries to cut a private deal with the Israelis is likely to be denounced as a traitor to the cause. If anything, Israel risks allowing a far more hardline leadership to emerge out of any post-Arafat vacuum. Arafat has been put in a hopelessly difficult position by the Israelis. Despite giving him very limited room to manoeuvre, the Israelis blame any attack on Israeli targets as his responsibility. Meanwhile, Israel remains free to carry out its ruthless policies of state terrorism against the Palestinians expecting Arafat’s Palestinian Authority to rein in all protest. It is this kind of cynical policy of repression that builds up desperation and anger, and provokes hardline Palestinians to resort to terrorist acts as a form of protest or retaliation.
Israeli’s state terrorism can only beget more terrorism by the victims. Sadly, this obvious connection between Israel’s ruthless policies and Palestinian militancy is ignored by Israel’s main allies in the West, specially the US. Washington seems to have given the Israelis a free hand to treat the Palestinians as they deem fit, without realizing that such one-sidedness could lead to a conflagration in the region. While not entirely writing off Arafat, the US has stood by and silently watched him being humiliated and rendered a virtual prisoner in his own homeland. Awed perhaps by the overwhelming might of the US, even most Arab and Muslim nations have been reduced increasingly to paying lip service to the plight of the Palestinians. The world’s indifference has increased the Palestinians’ desperation and could push them towards extremism. The international community must persuade the US to rein in Sharon and force him back to the negotiating table. If allowed to pursue his extremist agenda, his policies will only stoke the fires of terrorism and plunge the region into a terrible bloodbath.
THE announcement of the long-awaited Punjab Medical and Health Institutions Ordinance, 2002, fulfils an important requirement for improving the working of autonomous medical colleges and hospitals. In the absence of rules and regulations, these institutions were facing several administrative and financial problems affecting patient welfare. The new law, among other things, aims at establishing and improving medical institutions to provide quality and affordable health care.
Some increase in costs was inevitable after autonomy, but the biggest worry after a long tradition of subsidized health cover at various public hospitals was that the government was reducing its role in providing health care to the people. In particular, the experience of the poor and indigent patients after autonomy has not been encouraging. In many cases, they have had to buy medicines from chemists’ shops outside the hospitals and even pay an admission fee in addition to a daily charge. This was in spite of the claim of some hospitals that medicines are supplied free for emergency and hardship cases. Staff negligence and lengthy procedures involved in obtaining free medicines were recurrent complaints.
To some extent, the failure to properly use the option of providing some facilities free of cost was understandable. In the absence of institutional arrangements for audit by independent firms, doctors thought that they might be accused later of reducing the hospital’s income if they started using the option too liberally and frequently. The new law caters to important requirements of budget and audit of the autonomous institutions. As such, it should not be difficult to provide enough resources to meet the expenses of those needing free-of-cost medical cover or prolonged treatment. What the government should clearly demonstrate is that it is fully committed to providing quality and affordable health-care to the poor and vulnerable sections of society. This will help dispel the impression that autonomy might put an added burden on the low-income groups harried by the rise in the cost of living.
The test of autonomy lies in the ability of the medical institutions and health-care centres to provide for the common citizen in terms of essential medical facilities and professional care and attention. To this end, it is necessary to tackle basic administrative problems including lack of motivation among medical staff, and improve management of hospital affairs and enhance the quality of education in health sciences. Close monitoring of the autonomous institutions by experts and eminent professionals for eliminating shortcomings surfacing during the implementation of the new law is essential for promoting better public health care.