| June 10, 2002 | Monday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 28,1423 |
Reaping the whirlwind?
‘Peace is not (merely) the absence of war’
Transporters on warpath
Heading up north
The issue precisely is that when the city administration had tried to shift a number of unauthorized terminuses of inter- city bus operators out of town, the transporters went to court. Their petition was rejected. Now that the city administration is getting ready to remove these unauthorized bus terminuses, the transporters have chosen to defy.
BALOCHISTAN is facing water shortage, with the prolonged spell of drought making the situation unbearable. Most water sources — perennial or otherwise — have dried up. Over 30 per cent animals are dead, means of livelihood are reduced to almost nill, and the level of poverty has risen steeply in rural areas.
Although there was some rain, most of the regions are yet to recover from the deadly effects of the drought. People do not expect to lead a normal life for another three to four years.
The residents of the Quetta city were alarmed following reports that the sources of water are going to dry up in the next 10 to 15 years, turning the city into a ghost town, sooner or later.
When President Gen Pervez Musharraf was told about the seriousness of the situation, he immediately formed a committee comprising the governor and the corps commander to use all available sources to combat water shortage in Quetta.
The Geological Survey of Pakistan (GSP), with its headquarters in Quetta, was asked to find water for local residents. As a national institution it has done much for development, covering all sectors of human activities. When asked to find additional sources of underground water, the GSP scientists, helped by other agencies, did a superb job. They undertook a survey of Koh-i-Murdar, overlooking the Quetta Valley.
About 120 tests of vertical electrical soundings were undertaken in the vicinity of Murdar Ghar for detecting underground water potentials, according to Syed Hasan Gohar, GSP director-general. Attempts were made to detect and access the underground water occurrence in the hard rock at 300 to 500 metres by vertical electrical soundings, he says.
In the first phase, the GSP scientists and others found a large quantity of fresh subsoil water. They conducted 35 test bores initially. About 22 test bores were successful. All were high-yielding wells. Most of the wells were energized and are under the process of completion.
The total output from the wells is estimated to be 12.4 million gallons a day (MGD). It is more than what the 900 tubewells and other dug wells are supplying water to the Quetta Valley for drinking and agriculture. Over 200 tubewells of Wasa and other government agencies are currently supplying water to the Quetta City.
With the new discovery, Quetta is getting 3.5 MGD additional water. Six tubewells were sunk for the purpose to supplement water supply to the Quetta city. The National Economic Council (NEC) is expected to approve the water supply scheme, a mega project of Balochistan, shortly. It will cost Rs6 billion.
About 25 MGD will be supplied to Quetta to meet its future requirement for another 25 years. Four new plants will also be set up to recycle used water for agriculture and other uses, including tree plantation.
The director, planning, Dr Ishaq Ghaznavi, says the GSP is already engaged in the second phase of underground water supply in the Quetta Valley. He says investigations are being conducted in the Takto range where prospects of finding new sources of water are very bright. He says the survey is complete and test wells are being bored.
According to him, the GSP has already prepared the PC-I for ‘accelerated underground water exploration in Balochistan and submitted it to the federal government. It will cost Rs147.275 million to investigate hard rocks for underground water throughout Balochistan.
The GSP geophysicist has already found water in Sinjavi after completing investigations and undertaking a test bore in the valley. Russel Nazirullah, superintending geophysicist, has confirmed that water found in the Sinjavi Valley is catering to the needs of local orchards.
Sinjavi is known for its very good quality of fruits. Its residents, mostly owners of orchards, were once worried about depletion of water resources but are now happy with the new discovery of water in the area.
The whole of Balochistan is facing the water shortage in varying degrees. The provincial government will have to use the valuable services of GSP scientists in carrying out investigations for underground water in Chaghai, Kharan, Mastung, Kalat, Khuzdar, Awaran, Zhob, Qila Saifullah, Killa Abdullah, Loralai and other districts of Makran and Sibi regions.
There should be a master plan for carrying out investigations for finding underground water resources for which a huge project should be launched with the financial support of the federal government. Priority requires that the needs of the people of Chaghai and Kharan should be given top importance. According to French experts, Chaghai alone can irrigate more than a million acres of cultivable land in the district alone, using the existing sources of subsoil water.
The month of April was wasted in stage managing the referendum. In the month of May we locked ourselves in bunkers fearing war. And with indications in June that after all we may have escaped what looked like an imminent nuclear conflagration we have now begun rather tentatively the annual budget ritual which is likely to last until July 1, 2002. And from there it would be only two weeks to the commencement of the mandatory 90 days election season as the President has already fixed October 12 as the poll date. So, the government is left with only about 20 days to announce the proposed constitutional changes, replace the referendum-fame Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), let go those cabinet members who want to contest the elections and free itself from the unwanted baggage of King’s Party and the so-called National Alliance of political con artists. But so far instead of preparing the ground for the last lap to ‘genuine’ democracy we seem to be doing nothing more than a daily hairdo and weekly face-lift to appear the picture of confidence and complete control on the TV screen.
There are indications that international observers and monitors would keep away from the October elections if the CEC is not replaced with a person of proven integrity and high administrative calibre and who would also be acceptable to all the contesting parties. There are also indications that the exercise of fabricating an IJI-like political conglomerate has already degenerated into a farce. If this is the bunch in whose basket the government wants to put all its political eggs, then the chances of a pliable parliament emerging look very dim because most of the stalwarts of this conglomerate are likely to lose even their deposits in a free and fair election. And if attempts are made to manufacture a parliament through referendum-like rigging then Musharraf is likely to get nothing more or nothing less than what Zia got after the 1985 elections.
War clouds hovering over the subcontinent seem about to disappear. But it is going to be nothing more than a breather of a couple of months for Pakistan. The Indian intention seems to be to stop short of war but bleed Pakistan politically and economically by keeping its troops in high alert till about October. Of course, this is going to extract a heavy price from India as well. But it would be like a man in a cheap two-piece suit losing his jacket while in our case, India believes, the loss would leave us without even a fig leaf. This continuing pressure from across the LoC and the international border in the coming weeks and months would perhaps tempt the government to postpone the elections. This idea would appear all the more tempting to the government facing abject failure in its venture to put together an election alliance capable of keeping the PPP and PML(N) out of the next parliament. But postponement of polls would be viewed by India as a sign that we have blinked and it would then further up the ante and advance the goal post.
India is already talking of permanent stoppage of what it calls the “cross-border terrorism” and end to “harbouring of terrorists” on Pakistani soil. And Mr Vajpayee introduced a new term in the Kashmir litany when he talked about Line of Self-Control in Almaty. It would be interesting to hear from our official managers of foreign affairs as to what they thought Vajpayee meant when he used this term. If however, the government did not blink and held elections in October then it would be a totally new ball game even for India. Of course, in a free and fair election with the institution of the Army playing the referee and not a party to the polls, it would not be possible to predict as to who would win the elections and form the next government notwithstanding the claims of the PPP and the PML(N).
But one thing is for sure, with an elected government in Islamabad the Indians would lose a lot of international support which they now enjoy just because there is a military government in Pakistan. And this would also enable the Army not only to go back to the barracks without appearing to be capitulating but it would also get the space to readjust its Kashmir policy to the new international environment without appearing to be losing its dignity and honour.
The writing on the wall is very clear. Those in India and Pakistan who thought that they could continue to hold on to their respective historical positions on Kashmir after 9.11 were either too naive or had not understood the full significance of the September 11 incident. Pakistan’s bleed India-in-Kashmir (BinK) policy had dictated its Taliban policy of mid-1990s and subsequently the latter had sustained the former policy. After the collapse of our Taliban policy following 9.11 we should have quickly adjusted our BinK policy before coming under pressure from the international community which India has so cleverly used to its advantage. Even in the case of Taliban we were rendered holding the empty sack when the Northern Alliance walked into Kabul under air cover provided by the Americans. This had happened because we had wasted a lot of precious time looking for the non-existent ‘moderate’ Taliban among the Pakistan based Pushtoon refugees.
In the case of BinK, first we refused to accept the international definition of terrorism and kept insisting that what was happening in Occupied Kashmir was Jihad and freedom struggle until the visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair forced us to abandon this position. And then we thought we could exploit our new found friendship with the Americans to our advantage and therefore, kept pursuing the policy of BinK without so much as even a pause until President Bush asked Musharraf to live up to his words. And today we find ourselves welcoming the assurance held out on behalf of India by US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage that New Delhi would soon de-escalate the tension on the diplomatic and military fronts but at the same time are forced to do nothing more than condemn the arrest of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference leader Ali Gilani by the Indian police on the charges of receiving money from ISI to fund ‘terrorism’ in the Occupied Kashmir!!—Onlooker
A FRIEND has sent me a poem by Gil Scott-Heron. Titled, Work for Peace, it runs as follows:
Back when Eisenhower was the President
Golf Courses was where most of his time was spent.
So I never paid much attention to what the President said
Because in general, I believed the General was politically dead,
But he always seemed to know how the muscles were going to be flexed
He kept mumbling something about a military-industrial complex.
The military and the monetary
The military and the monetary
The military and the monetary
Get together whenever they think it’s necessary
They have turned our brothers and sisters into mercenaries,
They are turning the planet into a cemetery.
The military and the monetary
Use the media as intermediaries.
They are determined to keep the citizens secondary
They make so many decisions that seem arbitrary.
We’ve been standing behind the ‘Commander-in-Chief’
Who was under a spotlight shaking like a leaf
Because the ship of the state had landed on an economic reef
So we knew he’d be bringing us messages of grief.
The military and the monetary
Were ‘Shielded’ by January and went ‘Storming’ into February.
They brought us pot-bellied Generals as luminaries.
Two weeks before I hadn’t heard of the sons of *****es
And then all of a sudden they were legendary.
They took the honour from the honorary
They took the dignity from the dignitaries
They took the secrets form the secretaries
But they left the ‘*****’ in ‘obituary’
Yeah, they had some ‘smart bombs’
But they had some dumb ones as well
They scared the hell outta CNN in that Baghdad hotel.
The military and the monetary
The military and monetary
The military and monetary
Get together whenever they think it’s necessary War in the desert sometimes sure could seem scary
But they beamed out the war to all of their subsidiaries
Tried making ‘so damn insane’ [Saddam Hussain] a worthy adversary
Keeping all of the citizens secondary
Scaring old folks into coronaries
Making us all wonder if all this was really, truly necessary.
We’ve got to work for peace. We’ve got to work for peace.
If we all believed in peace we could have peace.
The only thing wrong with peace is that
You can’t make no money from it.
The military and the monetary
Get together whenever they think it’s necessary
They have turned our brothers and sisters into mercenaries
We are turning parts of the planet into a cemetery.
We hounded the Ayatollah religiously,
Bombed Libya and killed Qadafi’s son hideously.
We turned our back on our allies, the Panamanians
Watched Ollie North selling guns to the Iranians
Witnessed Gorbachev slaughtering Lithuanians
So we better warn the Amish, they may bomb the Pennsylvanians.
We’ve got to work for peace.
Peace ain’t coming this way
We’ve got to work for peace.
Peace is not (merely) the absence of war
It is the absence of the rumours of war and the threats of war
And the preparation for war.
Peace is not (merely) the absence of war
We will have all touched the power of peace within ourselves.
Because we will have all come to peace within ourselves.
Peace ain’t gonna be easy.
Peace ain’t gonna be free.
We’ve got to work for peace.
MY car stopped at a red light on the Main Boulevard in Gulberg. On my right, a girl appeared with a bunch of non-descript flowers. She was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. Her eyes were as green as makes no difference and she was fair as fair could be. She wasn’t selling, she wasn’t begging. She just held up the flowers for me to see.
Then for a fleeting half second I looked into her eyes. I thought I saw a hint of pride in them. Or was it disdain or lack of interest? I don’t know but my hand went involuntarily to my pocket. Luckily, I found that I had a fiver. The green signal was seconds away. I rolled the window down in tearing hurry and gave the money to her. She accepted the money, threw down the flowers she had and walked away. She did not run like the local beggar-children do. She just walked away —- like a princess, if you like.
She was obviously an Afghan refugee child. Refugee or not, she shouldn’t have been allowed to beg or work for a living. She should have been at school. But she was out on the road. I saw her a good two or perhaps three weeks ago. The hand with which she accepted the money was grimy but no amount of grime could hide its essential loveliness.
I have been looking for her ever since but I haven’t seen her anywhere along the length of the Main Boulevard through which I drive twice a day. I want to take her home, give her the dress she deserves and engage a teacher for her. But friends tell me I shouldn’t because that’s the way her parents want her to be. I tell you there ought to be a law to prevent this from happening. What manner of parents are they? But there must be countless other beggar-princesses like the one I saw not so long ago. They are the victims of George Bush’s war against terrorism. Does George W ever think of such children?
WE were discussing Mr Kamran Lashari’s plans to beautify Lahore and bemoaning the death of the many trees that had been hacked down in the process.
Mr Intizar Husain commented: “Trees have no place in Mr Lashari scheme of things because he doesn’t think that trees are beautiful.”
Upon this Shafqat Tanvir Mirza, a fellow-columnist, said: “I think they are cutting down trees because they are all taller than Lashari.”
I am told that Mr Lashari spent his early years on Temple Road and since there are no trees (the bylanes may have some) on Temple Road, and since he spent his formative years in a tree-less environment, he thinks that tall, graceful trees have no place in a ‘beautiful’ Lahore.
THE Penguin Dictionary of Difficult Words by Bill Bryson has this to say of the word ‘mishap’:
“Dictionaries generally define mishap as an unlucky accident, but most people give it a more narrow meaning than that —- and one that would rule out this headline from The Times: ‘30 die in mishap’. Used carefully, a mishap should suggest no more than a not very serious accident. It isn’t possible to say at what point it becomes an inadequate description for a misfortune, but it is unlikely to involve more than superficial injuries and certainly not multiple fatalities”.
So my advice to young colleagues in the profession is: Never say ‘30 die in mishap’. And it would be unpardonable to say, ‘30 killed in mishap’, for the simple reason that a mishap never kills. It is your own bad luck that does the dirty trick. In any case, when we have fatalities in mind, we should leave mishap well enough alone.
An organization, grandiosely called the Supreme Council of All Pakistan Transporters (Scapt), is threatening the government with ‘action.’ This virtually amounts to converting defiance into open warfare. Later this month the leadership of the Scapt will meet and set up an all-Pakistan body to confront the government. This body may well be called the War Council of the Supreme Council of All Pakistan Transporters.
In a way this is just as well that the battle lines have been all but drawn by the Scapt. One can safely presume that the transporters will threaten a “wheel jam” action as the first round. That is their favourite tactic. No city in Pakistan has been so frequently subjected to this kind of blackmail as Karachi. So far, the transporters have managed to get away with it. This time it may not be so easy because the transporters are manifestly in defiance of the high court. Another difference in the situation is that this time the city has an elected government. One should expect that unlike the congenitally spineless bureaucracy, this elected city government should be more confident, backed as it is by public consent and support.
This issue of shifting inter-city bus terminuses to proper locations is not new. This renewed rumpus might remind one of the way the old subzi mandi mafia managed to defy the government till some years after the new subzi mandi had been in place. In the case of the inter-city bus terminuses it is quite clear that this has been hanging fire for around two years. The city administration has to explain why no effective action was taken once the court had given its verdict in perfectly clear terms.
Drawing the parallel between the shifting of subzi mandi and the inter-city bus terminuses is not far fetched. In that case, too, some very powerful interests were resisting the shift.
And when interests so formidable come into a clash with the bureaucracy, the latter nearly always prefers to lose — of course not without a tangible consideration. Some such factor may have been in play here as well so that transporters have managed to hold their ground where they are in trespass as well as transgression. All this must be vacated.
If it comes to a real battle, as it well might, the elected city administration should take on the challenge and make sure to defeat it, once and for all. The Supreme Council of All Pakistan Transporters should be disabused of its misconceived arrogance. No council, however self-styled ‘supreme,’ can be allowed to play funny games with the elected administration and most certainly none with the judiciary. The Scapt is now plainly in conflict with both at the same time. This is asking for trouble and trouble they should be given with compound interest by the elected city administration. The city Nazim has a challenge on his hands and he has no choice but to pick up the gauntlet and do battle till the opponent is vanquished fit and proper. Road transport mafia has grown too big for its boots. It is time they were put in their place, that is under the law.
Within the city, the bus transporters are playing havoc with everything that comes in their way. No matter how loudly it is denied, the fact remains that without the tacit support of the traffic police administration, the bus transporters cannot take the law into their hands with the audacity that they do. And all of this in full public view. Money used to make the mare go. Now it makes so much also to go and get out of the way.
So where do we go from here? First, we go to ensure that the illegal inter-city bus terminuses are removed. The sooner the better. The city administration should have its forces in high alert well before the Scapt assemble what may actually turn out to be its war council to defy the government and the law and the high court — all at once. An administration elected by the people just cannot afford to be browbeaten by offenders against the law and courts. If the bus terminuses are not made to abide by the court verdict, and if the administration fails to ensure full compliance with letter and spirit of the law, it will itself attract contempt proceedings. Period.
The summer holidays are upon us and the schools have closed. This is the time when many Karachi people head out of the city for a much-needed vacation. Some go away to London or other parts of Europe, some go to the Far East, while a sizeable proportion chooses to stay in Pakistan and go up north. In fact, this year there might well be many more people going to the Northern Areas because of the temporary closure of visa services by many western countries.
Northern Pakistan offers a host of choices to just about any kind of visitor, from the casual tourist who wants to go to all the ‘touristy’ places, to the intrepid trekker who really wants to live on the edge. Starting from the extreme west are the Hindukush mountains of Chitral and the three Kalash valleys. However, given Chitral’s proximity to the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar, and the fact that the US ad nauseum keeps saying that some Taliban remnants might have crossed over the border into Pakistan, it might be a good idea to give this place a miss at least this year.
Moving east you come to the Swat valley, also described ad nauseum as the Switzerland of Pakistan (though there decidedly are more picturesque areas in the several other regions). Further east is the Karakoram Highway (or as the local people call it the Shahrah-i-Resham) and the Kohistan region, definitely a place to be avoided. To its east is the thoroughly beautiful Kaghan valley with some incredible opportunities for trekkers, especially the trek from Naran to Lulusar lake (better to ignore the overcrowded Saiful Muluk) and to the 14,400 feet high Babusar pass. On the KKH one can set up base in Gilgit — the Hunza Inn is an excellent and affordable place to stay — or head towards Skardu.
Domestic tourists will probably find fewer foreign trekkers in these areas this year because of the border tension. This could mean cheaper rooms and transport, or just the opposite since the local tour operators and hotel owners might want to charge more to make up for the revenue lost from the reduced number of foreign visitors.
However, the favourite haunt of many people from Karachi — and quite a few have built homes there — is Nathiagali. For someone who has been going there every summer it’s quite amazing that on each visit I manage to run into friends or acquaintances from Karachi. Murree is much too crowded but a day trip might be okay. Around Nathiagali visitors can always go to Ayubia — quite a ‘touristy’ thing to do — but what is even better is the hike up to 11,000 feet high Miranjani, the highest peak in the area. A reasonably fit person can make the round trip, beginning from the Governor House retreat, in a few hours and the best time to go is early morning. On a clear day from the top of Miranjani you can see Nanga Parbat towering over the northeastern horizon, around 170 kilometres away as the crow flies.
Other must-do hikes include the trek up to the other big peak of the area, 10,500 feet high Mushkpuri, which begins from the Donga Gali bazar, and the pipeline walk from Ayubia to Donga Gali. Local people insist that mountain leopards have been spotted on both the latter trails but usually at night.
An invaluable book for trekkers and hiking enthusiasts is Isobel Shaw’s Pakistan Handbook which can be bought from most good bookstores in the city.
Thousands of people in Karachi have their meals from roadside restaurants and thelawalas every day. Most of their customers are office people and these include not only low-level employees but also mid-level managerial staff. It is because of this loyal clientele that these eating places do reasonably good business.
One day, while some people were having lunch at precisely such a restaurant in the Nursery area, a tube light just above the counter, where cooked food was placed in some pans, exploded. The fine pieces of the glass from the tube fell all over the cooked food.
However, a colleague who was there says that she saw the owner of the place serve the same food to customers who came later.
Clearly, it is good to save food but must people save food with small glass pieces in it? The colleague was quite peeved at this lack of good sense by the owner of the makeshift restaurant. As usual, it is the consumer who has to bear the brunt of those out to make a quick buck — in this case, selling food laced with little pieces of glass.
Gone are the days when young talented artists had to wait years to gain recognition. First it was Park Towers and the Point and now it’s the Forum. Of late, all these new shopping malls have been holding art exhibitions for new and budding artists. A colleague who recently went to one of these shows said that it was also a good way of using the lots of extra space these buildings have.
Gulgee inaugurated the art exhibition held at the Forum telling the people present that he was happy to see that public interest in art was growing. He spoke of Ahmed Pervez saying that it was sad to see that such a great painter like him had to spend the last days of his life in a miserable financial condition. However, that could be said of many artists, writers and thinkers even in other countries. We all know, or maybe some of us surely know, that both van Gogh and Nietschze spent the last few years of their tormented lives gradually becoming insane. Both died in extreme penury and without much public recognition by their contemporaries.
As far as this show is concerned, it had sculptures, paintings and photographic exhibits. Almost all the participants were students of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. And if their annual thesis show is anything to go by, the exhibit must be quite interesting. Rabia Shoaib, a former student of the school, told my colleague that since it was an exhibition for amateurs, it seemed only fair that she enter the work she did in her second year of art school. Madiha Ijaz, who’s still a student, had some pretty interesting photographs on display. Since it was a show put up by artists who were primarily not even out of college, the prices were not all that steep, ranging from a low of Rs 400 to a high of around Rs 4000. The show at the Forum will go on until June 25.
He says that not long ago the council got a new cafeteria which was inaugurated with much fanfare. However, it soon became a place where anyone in their right mind would not go to eat. He says that when he went he found that the tables inside the place had not been dusted in ages and that a gutter flowed right past its entrance.
The art gallery has no natural light and its atmosphere is further spoilt by what he says happens when the air conditioners are switched on. Apparently, some pigeons have made their nests close to these ACs and when they are switched on the hall of the gallery smells of bird droppings.
The colleague also seemed upset by some other things he saw. For one thing, there seem to be too many hangers-on loitering around the place. And then, last week, while coming out of the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts (CIAC), housed in the premises, he saw a man, with his sleeves rolled-up, using very bad language against some CIAC students.
The Council has often been a subject of much controversy in the past. It elections have been highly contentious. Some of its own members have, from time to time, made accusations of financial mismanagement and of the misuse of the council’s precious land. One wonders whether Karachi will ever get an arts council that is relatively free of politics and which actually takes some initiative in undertaking programmes whose appeal go beyond the personal tastes of those in the governing body.
— By Karachian