| May 20, 2002 | Monday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 7, 1423 |
Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
Ombudsman’s report
Neglected heritage
NO diplomatic move in recent years has perhaps done more to destroy the chances of peace in the Middle East than the Likud Party’s rejection of the idea of a Palestinian state last week. This drives the last nail in the coffin of the Oslo peace process which has remained virtually abandoned for all these years. The move to reject the Palestinian state idea was led at Likud’s central committee meeting by Benjamin Netanyahu, himself a hard-liner. He had won the election in the post-Rabin period on an anti-peace platform. Since he thought the Oslo accords weighed against Israel, he promised to have the treaty renegotiated. Once elected, he went about tearing up the accords as a calculated policy. First, he delayed the Israeli withdrawal schedule, and then, accusing the Palestinian side of violating the treaty, pressed for a renegotiation of the accords. His successor, Ehud Barak, was no different. The two men succeeded in derailing the peace process with the connivance of the Clinton White House. The result was a series of more summits at Wye, Camp David, Cairo and Sharm el-Sheikh. The treaties were renegotiated to Israel’s advantage and the entire schedule laid down in the Oslo accords was thrown topsy-turvy.
According to the accords signed on the lawns of the White House in September 1993, the Israeli withdrawal should have been completed by July 13, 1994, and negotiations for a final settlement started on April 13, 1996, with the final settlement in place on April 13, 1999. Thanks to the intransigence shown by Netanyahu and Barak, the entire schedule was sabotaged, with the date of a final settlement being nowhere in sight. Till September 2000, the situation was, no doubt, far from satisfactory, but at least both Netanyahu and Barak had not formally abandoned the peace process. In September of the year, Ariel Sharon visited the Islamic holy site despite warnings from the Palestinian Authority that this could lead to violence. Disregarding these warnings, Sharon went ahead with his plan, and through his provocative utterances, touched off a spate of violence. Elected prime minister last year, Sharon has finally ditched the peace process. The recent “incursions” — a euphemism for a full-fledged invasion — the atrocities in several West Bank towns and the massacre in Jenin have destroyed whatever symbols of power that the Palestinian authority possessed.
The Likud decision has thrown the situation back to where it was several decades ago when neither side was prepared to recognize the existence of the other. So much has happened in between. The Palestinian side is prepared to live in peace with Israel, and the saner sections in Israel, too, believe that a lasting peace is possible only when Palestinians live in a state of their own. In the new context, whether a troubled Middle East is to continue to bleed and burn as now or is to move out of the long night of terror and violence will depend crucially on how the US and Europe are going to react to the fateful Likud decision.
THE Sindh ombudsman’s annual report for the year 2001 paints a dismal picture of the working of most government departments, especially those that deal with the public. The ombudsman received a total of 6,637 complaints last year — higher than in preceding years. In the majority of cases, complainants were asked to either first file a complaint with the department concerned, so that in many cases the charges made could not be entertained because the complainants did not comply with this requirement, or other legal or procedural lapses and inadequacies prevented investigation. However, over a quarter of the complaints were admitted for detailed investigation. As expected, most complaints were against departments and agencies whose primary purpose is to provide public amenities. The majority of the charges that the ombudsman’s office investigated pertained to the departments of town planning and housing, education, police, local government, the Karachi Development Authority, the Karachi Building Control Authority and the now-defunct Karachi Metropolitan Corporation.
Unfortunately, the annual publication of the report has not had the effect of bringing down the number of complaints that the ombudsman receives every year. Cases of government officials — especially at the lower levels — not obeying the orders and instruction issued by their superiors, indulging in gross negligence of their duties or wilfully abusing their authority are rampant. In fact, it would be fair to say that the complaints investigated by the ombudsman’s office are only a small proportion of what the public goes through in their dealings with the various government departments and agencies. There seems to be no point in having this otherwise useful channel of relief and rectification for the public unless there is effective follow-up on the good work being done by this institution. This means that its recommendations should not be ignored and its annual report not left to gather dust in some bureaucratic file cabinet. While serving a useful purpose, the office of the ombudsman can only serve as a check on the provincial bureaucracy, point out the most obvious deficiencies and lapses, and suggest appropriate remedial measures. However, the responsibility of going ahead with the suggested reforms rests on the provincial government and its ability to ensure honesty, efficiency and answerability in public administration and convince the administrative heads of the various departments that an efficient and people-friendly bureaucracy is in everyone’s interest.
SOME Buddhist sites and monuments dating back to the Gandhara civilization, which held sway in northern Pakistan from the 7th century BC to 7th century AD, are reported to be in a derelict state. The condition of such antiquities in the Swat Valley is particularly alarming. Most of these are protected monuments and sites, the archaeology department being their official custodian. There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s, when the archaeology department constructed fences around these monuments and hired watchmen to protect them against vandalism. Unfortunately, these measures have not been a success, as the watchmen themselves are seen digging out pieces of terracotta, schist reliefs, lime-plaster statuettes and pottery pieces, and trading them for a pittance. The remains of a Buddhist monastery at Takht-i-Bahi near Mardan, the Shinkardar stupa and the Butkarra remains in Swat are cases in point.
Another casualty of the apathy of the archaeology department is a giant statue of the Buddha carved into a mountainside overlooking the Swat river on the main road to Saidu Sharif from Chakdara. Despite its conspicuous location and size, the Buddha stands smudged and completely defaced today. The Butkarra remains tell yet another sorry tale. The schist reliefs narrating the story of the life of Buddha and a multi-layered large stupa surrounded by a cluster of small votive stupas dating back to Ashoka’s time (2nd century BC) lie exposed to the elements. The figurines and schist reliefs found on the site have been defaced, or have simply crumbled because they were virtually abandoned since shortly after their discovery by Italian archaeologists in the late 1960s. It is time the government paid attention to the decrepit state of these sites and monuments, and the archaeology department spent some of its funds on their conservation — instead of wasting money on controversial projects like the shifting of historical books and artefacts from Karachi to the Lahore Fort.