| November 21, 2002 | Thursday | Ramazan 15, 1423 |
Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
Kasur prison deaths
Dead fish hazard
THE new Turkish prime minister seems to have moved fast to reassure his NATO allies about his government’s future policies. In a speech to a NATO parliamentarians’ meeting in Istanbul, Abdullah Gul pledged his government’s commitment to Turkey’s “strategic partnership with the US” and said he would maintain his “focus” on Turkey’s membership of the European Union. His reassuring speech comes in the wake of similar statements from Recep Tayyip Erdogan, chief of Gul’s Justice and Development party, who has repeatedly made it clear that his party will continue to maintain Turkey’s European orientation. The statements should serve to allay apprehensions in western circles which suspect the party has a hidden Islamic agenda.
The tasks before Gul, a trained economist, are challenging. They are as much economic as they are political. A favourite of the financial markets, Gul has pledged to carry forward the IMF-prescribed reform, for at stake is a fantastic 31 billion-dollar loan package. More than a decade of mismanagement has thrown Turkey into an economic crisis considered the worst since 1945. The economy has shrunk by 9.4 per cent, inflation is rampant, the privatization process has been painfully slow, and unemployment continues to rise. Besides, he will have to come down hard on corruption, because graft was one of the major reasons for the electoral defeat of the secular parties.
On the domestic front, the party has made it clear it will relax some of the secular laws to permit greater cultural freedom. Most probably, the ban on women wearing scarves will go, and there will be liberalization in educational institutions as well. However, the Gul government will have to tread carefully because Turkey’s well-entrenched secular establishment, especially the army, will be watching him carefully. An indication of the secular establishment’s attitude came when President Necdet Sezer refused to accept Beshir Altay as Gul’s nominee for the post of education minister. Altay has strong views on religious matters and was once the rector of a university. Gul then proposed a new man who was accepted by the president. This only goes to show the tight-rope walk he will have to do to satisfy his voters without risking the generals’ ire.
On the foreign policy front, both Erdogan and Gul have said they will work vigorously for Turkey’s EU membership. Washington is in favour of Turkey’s admission, but there is strong opposition from many EU countries, especially Germany. There are already millions of Turkish immigrants in Germany, and Berlin fears that Turkey’s entry will open the flood-gates of Turkish immigrants. There is, however, a section of opinion within the EU which feels that a moderate Islamic country like Turkey should be encouraged to associate itself with Europe instead of being spurned. Then there is the unresolved Cyprus problem. The EU has warned it will give membership to Greek Cyprus even if there is no solution of the dispute with the Turkish part of the island by 2004. Also looming large is the possibility of an American attack on Iraq. Ankara opposes a military invasion of Iraq and believes it could lead to grave consequences for the entire region. But at the same time it cannot be indifferent to American pressure because of Washington’s clout with the IMF. Taken together, the economic, internal and foreign policy issues pose a challenge to Gul’s political skills and his economic acumen. He will have to go slow on the Islamic agenda and do more on the domestic front to pull Turkey out of the economic crisis.
THE weekend death of two prisoners due to torture by jail officials in Kasur again underlines the endemic culture of violence that flourishes in the country’s prison system. Together with two other prisoners, who were subjected to equally brutal treatment and suffered serious injuries for allegedly protesting against their transfer from Sahiwal jail, the dead men were among some 90 prisoners declared ‘troublemakers’ after a riot in the Kasur prison last week. If the prisoners were protesting against being moved from one jail to another, the rational course of action would have been to find out the reason for their objection. If this had been done, there would not have been a mini-riot and no reprisals by the prison authorities subsequently called for. In any case, no jail official has any right to set upon the men in his care and beat them to pulp. Such highhandedness has indeed become a major cause of recurrent unrest in prisons. So obvious seems to have been the element of abrupt action in this case that the IG Prisons, Punjab, speaking at a press conference, admitted that initial findings indicated that the Kasur jail staff had misused their powers.
Although an investigation is under way departmental inquiries alone will not lead to an improvement in the situation. Similar previous investigations have made no difference to jail conditions or the behaviour of the prison officials. Senior functionaries look the other way whenever instances of degrading or inhuman treatment of inmates are brought to their notice. Junior ranks, secure in the knowledge that they will stay out of harm’s way, resort to more excesses. Brutalization of inmates has thus assumed an almost institutional shape, making hardened criminals out of even docile inmates and breeding further defiance of law. The government can demonstrate better commitment to prison reforms and the humane treatment of prisoners by devising stringent checks on jail staff and punishing delinquent officials.
THE mysterious appearance of thousands of dead fish in coastal waters off Karachi poses a serious health and environmental hazard. The federal environmental protection agency has taken notice of this development and ordered an inquiry as has the Sindh government. According to reports, many of the dead fish were taken away by scavengers. The possibility that they might be bought by local poultry farms for use in chicken feed is particularly disturbing. It could create a chain of contamination problems. It is imperative that the Sindh and city governments should ensure, perhaps by monitoring all local poultry farms and places selling seafood, that these poisoned fish are not used.
As far as finding the cause of the mass fish fatalities is concerned, tests might be able to prove what kind of contamination or toxins discharged into the sea did the havoc, but they may not necessarily be able to pinpoint the source. The reason is that the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) lacks the necessary technical and financial resources, and the muscle, to go after environmental polluters. A logical start would be to begin looking at factories in the city’s Korangi Industrial Area since many of them are situated close to the part of the coast where the dead fish were washed ashore. SEPA’s resolve to fight pollution is further complicated and compromised by the fact that many of the polluters are government or semi-official bodies like the Defence Housing Authority and state-owned oil companies, and much of the effluent they generate goes straight into the Arabian Sea. Hypothetically, if it is proved that the fish died from oil spills from a nearby government refinery, will the environment protection authorities be able to take action against the offender? SEPA needs to enforce the existing legislation on environmental pollution by using the powers under this law to punish industrial polluters. For that, it needs the support of the government, and more funding, trained staff, and equipment.