| January 31, 2002 | Thursday | Ziqa’ad 16, 1422 |
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Year of the Mountains
Mysterious outbreak
ONE hopes India will have the good sense to respond positively to Pakistan’s latest offer to ease tension on the common border. As the Foreign Office spokesman said on Tuesday, Islamabad wanted to have talks with New Delhi for a phased withdrawal of troops from their present positions to their peacetime locations. The withdrawal would begin, he said, only after an agreement had been reached on a pull-back schedule. This could be followed by “a comprehensive dialogue” on Kashmir and other issues. The spokesman also referred to a number of other problems, which, he believed, could be tackled on a reciprocal basis. Specifically, he referred to the suspension of the rail and bus services which New Delhi announced in the wake of the Dec 13 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building.
The stand-off along the border has led to a crisis that India is very keen to exploit. It serves no other purpose save that of perpetuating a high degree of tension and acrimony. Such an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation India thinks is suited to its purpose of making its presence felt as a regional hegemon. Undeniably, its pride and sense of self-importance were hurt because the events since Sept 11 placed Pakistan in a pivotal position vis-a-vis the world coalition’s war on terrorism. India’s hurried offer of logistic support to the US was politely declined, and it was Pakistan, instead, which became the centre of the world’s diplomatic and military activity. However, the attack on its parliament building came handy to India as an excuse for whipping up a wholly uncalled-for crisis and creating war hysteria. The aim was to tell the world that America was not the only country that had been made a target of terrorist attacks. It too had repeatedly suffered the same fate and as such had the same right that the Americans had invoked in going after the perpetrators and sources of those attacks. Discerning eyes cannot fail to see the difference between the two situations, however.
An eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between the two countries is too dangerous to be allowed to continue indefinitely. It runs the risk of an accidental war which no one may want. Correctly have countries friendly to both Pakistan and India asked them to exercise restraint. Pakistan, on its part, has shown patience and restraint. It did not rush troops to the borders; it did so only after the Indian deployment had created a serious security threat for it. On Tuesday again, Islamabad reaffirmed its resolve never to be the first to start a war. It is time New Delhi accepted Islamabad’s offer of talks for a phased withdrawal. The sacking of one of India’s generals shows how blundering local commanders can trigger a conflict without quite aiming at it. Once a phased withdrawal begins, the two sides can move to the all-important task of starting negotiations on Kashmir. The troops may withdraw and the threat of war may recede, but the continuation of the Kashmir dispute will always be a source of tension and conflict in South Asia. It must be resolved in the interest of peace and prosperity of South Asia’s billion plus people.
THROUGHOUT the year 2002, designated as the United Nations International Year of Mountains, global attention will be focused on the increasingly degraded state of the world’s mountain ecosystems. The hope is that the debate will lead to practical proposals to reverse this potentially catastrophic trend. Some 600 million people worldwide live in mountainous regions, which serve as a source of water for over half of the world’s population. With mountains under immense pressure from a formidable array of sources, fears are that ecological disasters in the highlands will also affect billions of people who live in the plains. In South Asia alone, some half a billion people depend on mountains as the primary source for their water supply. Over the years, however, fragile mountain ecosystems have been facing growing pressure from a number of sources, including natural and man-made disasters as well as armed conflicts. According to a recent report, 23 out of the 27 major global conflicts are taking place in mountainous regions. Many of these conflicts — in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Nepal among others — are raging in South Asia alone. Apart from the massive loss of lives, these conflicts have put immense pressure on the natural resources of war-ravaged areas. In many such disturbed regions, large-scale deforestation has taken place. In other places, displaced populations have caused havoc to the environment as well as disrupted the normal cycle of agriculture. Human interventions too have made matters worse. Growing pollution, insensitive development projects, unbridled mining, large-scale deforestation and climate change have all played their part in degrading the environment. Alarmingly, global warming is responsible for the rapid depletion of glacier cover worldwide, with scientists predicting that a half of the world’s glacier mass could disappear within the next fifty years. This phenomenon could trigger further dramatic changes in climate, with highly unpredictable consequences. If the Year of the Mountains succeeds in making people aware of the threats to mountain ecosystems, as well as the huge number of people who would be affected by greater degradation, it would have more than served its purpose.
HUNDREDS of people living in the hilly areas of Sindh’s Dadu district have become infected with a parasitic skin disease. Spread by sand flies which are much smaller than mosquitoes and hence harder to detect, cutaneous leishmaniasis causes sores or lesions on the skin of those infected and is not fatal if treated well in time. According to medical experts, the sores can heal on their own but that can take months or even years and will leave ugly scars on the patient’s skin. The disease is spread by sand flies, which are most active from dusk to dawn, so perhaps the best way to prevent its occurrence is to use insecticide to make sure that there are as few of these pests as possible. The other precaution is to wear clothes that cover the arms and legs so that the chance of exposed skin being bitten is reduced.
Fortunately treating this type of skin disease does not require patients to be hospitalized. However, they need to be diagnosed in time and given either oral treatment or injections. Unfortunately, Dadu is a backward rural area and its health-care facilities are not quite up to the mark. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that there aren’t enough doctors or injections to treat the disease. We hope the Sindh health department will not sit back and watch this epidemic spread further. Medical teams with the requisite medicine (injections or otherwise) should be immediately sent to the affected areas so that treatment can begin in earnest. In addition, the local administration should educate the people on taking precautions against the sand flies.