| January 11, 2003 | Saturday | Ziqa'ad 7, 1423 |
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Libraries in decline
Blocking development
WITH the chief UN inspector’s statement that his commission has so far found no evidence that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, the United States must reconsider its bellicose policy towards Baghdad. Mr Hans Blix told the Security Council on Thursday: “We have now been there for some two months and been covering the country in ever wider sweeps, and we haven’t found any smoking gun.” The Blix report thus knocks much of the bottom out of America’s case for a military attack to disarm Iraq. Of course, Mr Blix qualified his remarks by saying that Iraq’s declaration required under the Security Council Resolution 1441 was incomplete and that there were gaps in it. It is quite possible that the Iraqi declaration, compiled in haste to meet the UN’s 30-day deadline, contained some omissions.
Indeed, given the relatively well-developed industrial and scientific infrastructure Iraq has, certain sites and projects or detailed information about them might have been left out. Yet Baghdad had submitted a 12,000-page declaration, which was quite comprehensive in nature. If Iraq had deliberately withheld some vital facts, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency which have been visiting and peering into every suspected project and laboratory for weeks should have unearthed these by now and exposed Baghdad’s culpability on this score. Instead, Mr Blix told reporters on Thursday that there was no ground for the international community to inflict “serious consequences” on Iraq as threatened by the Security Council.
However, the Bush administration does not seem to be concerned with facts. Ignoring Unmovic’s findings, the White House said the US knew “for a fact” that WMDs were there. More astonishing was the comment by Washington’s ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, that Iraq had to admit that it possessed WMDs. “Anything less is not cooperation and will constitute further material breach of the UN resolutions.” Taken together, the reactions by the White House and its UN ambassador mean that America does not really concern itself with the truth of the matter, that it does not have confidence in the UN inspectors, and that, irrespective of what the Blix findings are, Washington has already indicted Baghdad by discovering that Iraq is in a “further material breach” of the UN resolutions.
Unmovic’s work is not yet over, and Mr Blix told the Security Council that now it intends to interview Iraqi scientists so as to fill the gaps in the Baghdad declaration. Iraq affirms that it is still keen on maintaining cooperation with Unmovic. General Amin, Iraq’s liaison man with Unmovic, said his government would welcome any questions from the inspectors provided these were “relevant.” He has also lodged a protest with the UN because the inspectors had overstepped their mark and were carrying on “pure intelligence work.”
The final report by the Blix team is due to be tabled before the Security Council later this month. In the meantime, Mr Blix will have to resist US pressure to be seen as working on America’s behalf. If, as Mr Blix says, no smoking gun has yet been found, there is no reason for him to assert that it is for Iraq to establish its innocence and present “credible evidence” to that effect. This flies in the face of the fundamental principle of justice — that a person is innocent unless found guilty.
ONE important indicator of the value a country places on learning is the number of libraries it has. In this respect, Pakistan presents a sorry spectacle. Once providing a focal point for students, researchers and laymen alike, the country’s public libraries have steadily seen a marked decline. Many prestigious libraries are now badly maintained, poorly organized and starved of new books and publications. Even the larger cities have only a handful of worthwhile libraries, and those that do exist are starved of funds and attention. Already under assault from television and the internet, reading is gradually losing its appeal for a vast majority of young people. The absence of libraries, coupled with the dependence on conformism and rote learning, has hastened the decline.
Successive governments have shown no interest in promoting libraries or reading. Only a minute part of the already meagre education budget is set aside for this purpose. As a result, most government schools have no libraries, and children, especially from poor families, have little chance of gaining access to books. While there are some well-maintained libraries in both the public and private sectors, they mainly cater to specialist researchers and are relatively inaccessible to the general public. The few good libraries run by foreign missions have also recently fallen victim to the unsettled conditions following the events of September 11. While booklovers and NGOs have launched some initiatives to promote the cause of libraries, what is needed is a coordinated effort to convince elected representatives and related government departments that money spent on libraries is an investment in the future. One could learn from the example of India, where several states have passed legislation which makes it mandatory for local bodies to set aside a proportion of their income for libraries. A society that does not recognize the importance of libraries is destined to be a poorer society — in every sense of the word.
AS IT is natural with practically any city, growth in terms of population and thus expansion in terms of road network and building construction is inevitable. In the case of Islamabad, an official survey in the mid-1990s had predicted that road density in the city would double in 10 years. But over the years, encroachments of all sorts have sprouted haphazardly in many parts of unused land marked as “right of way” in the original master plan of Islamabad and reserved for future expansion. The result is that these encroachments have come in the way of development, especially in cases where the existing roads or avenues need to be widened.
While structures like wayside eating establishments can easily be demolished, encroachments in the form of mushroom habitations, shrines, religious schools, mosques and small graveyards present a more difficult challenge. The authorities should at least take greater care to ensure that such encroachments do not come up in other parts of the city. Having to get these structures removed during the course of road expansion only serves to delay, if not hinder, development projects. The longer an unauthorized encampment or building is permitted to stay, the greater is the dislocation involved in both material and human terms. The authorities have to ensure that each and every structure, building, street or road is carefully laid out so that the expansion of the city takes place in a well-planned and orderly manner.