| August 8, 2002 | Thursday | Jamadi-ul-Awwal 28,1423 |
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Pahalgam killings
Truth about formula milk
AS Israeli tanks rumbled once again into town after town in the West Bank, leaving a trail of death and devastation behind them, the UN General Assembly demanded on Monday that Israeli forces immediately withdraw from all Palestinian areas. The resolution calls for the Israeli military to move back to positions held before September 2000, when the second Palestinian intifada erupted. It also calls for Israel to provide unlimited access to humanitarian and medical aid to the Palestinians. Not surprisingly, the US and Israel voted against the resolution, displaying their contemptuous disregard for world opinion. The irony is that the heavy-handed tactics employed by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who came to power vowing to stamp out ‘terrorism’, have actually fuelled further desperate acts of resistance. It is becoming clearer with every passing day that Israel’s current policy of bludgeoning the Palestinians into submission is actually proving counter-productive. Every brutal tactic employed by the Israelis is met with stiff resistance, and every barbaric atrocity committed against the Palestinians leads to further bloodshed.
There seems to be no end in sight to the cycle of violence and counter-violence because Sharon’s aim is not so much to bring peace to the region but to destroy all chances of a settlement and dictate terms to a divided and demoralized Palestinian population. The resilience and the courage of the Palestinians, however, have proved a formidable obstacle to Sharon’s policy of breaking the back of the Palestinian resistance. In recent weeks, the Israelis have tried every means of repression at their disposal to quell the resistance to Israeli occupation. Israeli tanks have moved into a number of cities in the West Bank, with the army conducting brutal house-to-house searches and reducing countless Palestinian homes to rubble.
The latest punitive strategy is to demolish the homes of suicide bombers without giving any prior notice of the action. Israel has also decided to strip Israeli Arabs of their citizenship on suspicion of links with terrorists. It has imposed lengthy curfews on entire towns, causing untold suffering. On Monday, Israel clamped a total ban on Palestinian travel in much of the West Bank. It has also resumed the practice of using F-16 aircraft to bomb targets in Gaza. Last month, one such attack on a crowded apartment block in Gaza killed 14 people, including a number of children. That attack, in which a senior Hamas leader was targeted and killed, triggered a new wave of retaliatory action, which has led to more deaths and further Israeli repression.
The truth is that such a cycle of violence can at some stage touch off a wider conflict in the region. The only way forward is to open a dialogue on ending the Israeli occupation and offering a speedy timetable for the creation of a Palestinian state. However, Israel and the US have called for a change in the Palestinian leadership and sweeping reforms of the Palestinian Authority, including the removal of Yasser Arafat as president, as a precondition for any movement towards Palestinian statehood. This is not just a palpably unfair demand but also gives Sharon the opportunity to further brutalize the Palestinians and continue with the illegal construction of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land to change the situation on the ground. If the Israelis and Americans believe that a just peace can be built on such a patently unfair and lopsided foundation, they are simply deluding themselves.
THE killing of Hindu pilgrims at Pahalgam in occupied Kashmir on Tuesday was reprehensible. The attack by unknown assailants left at least nine pilgrims dead and another two dozen injured. Who the attackers were is not known. But, true to its practice, India has blamed Pakistan for the attack. What is amazing, however, is the failure of India’s security apparatus. Leading Kashmiri groups had already made it known that they would not attack the pilgrims, and the Indian government had deployed 15,000 policemen along the route for the pilgrims’ security. That terrorists should still have found their way into the tents and launched an attack is a reflection on the Indian government’s failure to ensure the pilgrims’ safety. The terrorists, as ‘chief minister’ Farooq Abdullah said, were able to “sneak in.” The pilgrims themselves were raising slogans, blaming New Delhi for its failure. In fact, as chief of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) said, the Indian government was mainly to blame for the tragedy. According to him, the attack showed “a complete collapse of Advani’s set-up.” The international media has remained sceptical about New Delhi seeing a Pakistani hand in this as in most such occurrences.
Pakistan has promptly condemned the attack and repudiated the Indian charge that Islamabad was behind the crime. As the Pakistan foreign office said, India just could not go on blaming Islamabad for all untoward happenings in occupied territory. The Indian government, it said, had to take responsibility “for what goes on in their territory. We are far away.” The tragedy at Pahalgam should be seen against the background of the half- -a-century-old Kashmir problem and the use of brute force to hold the Kashmiri people down. The slaughter at Pahalgam only adds to the more than 70,000 Kashmiris who have died over the last 13 years of uprising in the held state. Unrest and violence in occupied Kashmir will continue so long as New Delhi does not resile from its obdurate stand not to talk to Pakistan for a just and peaceful solution of the conflict.
IT is disturbing to note that some manufacturers and sellers of infant formula milk are promoting certain brands claiming that advanced formula milk products are a true substitute for mother’s milk. Nothing could be further from the truth. Expressing concern over this unethical practice, the NWFP health minister said in Peshawar the other day that the country was spending some $40 million annually on the import of formula milk, which was the highest amount spent by any country in the world on this particular commodity. Currently, there are some 160 varieties of infant formula milk that make their way into the country. The buyers obviously are not aware of the fact that breastfeed is the best a mother can give her infant in terms of a balanced and healthy diet.
Scientific research in recent years has proved that infant formula can only become a substitute in the rare cases where mother’s milk is either not available or becomes a health risk for the infant if the mother is suffering from a certain contagious disease. Also, scientists believe, there may be a connection between prolonged use of formula milk and a high infant mortality rate, which, in the case of Pakistan, happens to be the highest in the region. Conversely, the practice of breast-feeding in Bangladesh as a rule has reduced the infant mortality rate in that country by 50 per cent in recent years. It seems the government needs to adopt a two-pronged strategy to tackle the issue at hand. While breast-feeding needs to be promoted and popularized through a public awareness campaign over the media and by other means, the import of infant formula and the sales promotional campaigns for it also need to be scrutinized more diligently. Together the two measures can help promote breast-feeding as a safe health practice for both mother and child.