| June 4, 2003 | Wednesday | Rabi-us-Sani 3, 1424 |
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Small savers’ plight
A missed opportunity
WHILE things seem to be moving in the right direction in the Middle East, one big question mark hanging over the roadmap is the bona fides of Ariel Sharon. Is the Israeli prime minister sincere to the cause of peace? Specifically, has he really accepted the roadmap? Unveiled by President George Bush on April 30, the roadmap envisages the establishment of a “provisional” Palestinian state by 2005. Has Sharon accepted a two-state solution from the depth of his heart? Let us not forget that Sharon is the man who is responsible for the second intifada that began in September 2000 and has since then claimed hundreds of lives, mostly Palestinian. Though not in power then, he visited the Islamic holy sites in Al Quds despite being told not to do so. By a quirk of circumstances, and by his appeal to the Israeli right, Sharon won the election and is now prime minister at a time when crucial steps are to be taken to seriously address a question that has been the Middle East’s festering wound since the Balfour Declaration (1917).
Today, there is some change in the geopolitical scenario in the sense that for the first time Washington seems genuinely involved with the Palestinian question. The roadmap is heavily tilted in favour of Israel. Nevertheless, the Palestinian Authority was the first to accept it. The Sharon government waffled and wavered before finally announcing its acceptance. Yet it has expressed as many as 14 reservations about it and expects the Bush administration to address them. At the same time, Sharon has continued the settlements activity. The roadmap not only calls for a halt to such activity; it proposes a dismantling of all Jewish settlements built after March 2001. It remains to be seen whether Israel will really do this.
Sharon is obsessed with hate. He was not only the brains behind the Begin government’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982; he was responsible for the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Sabra-Chattila. After becoming prime minister, he reacted to the intifada and the suicide bombings with savage fury. His government not only increased the frequency of targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders and killing of civilians; he ordered the reoccupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip last year.
One hopeful development, though, in the midst of all the depressing signs, is Sharon’s admission last week that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza could not be “sustained” for long. This has prompted US Secretary of State Colin Powell to sound upbeat about the latest Middle East peace initiative. He also expects more positive developments on the peace front to emerge from President Bush’s meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Jordan’s Aqaba today. At any rate, whether the concept of peace and stability in the Middle East on the basis of coexistence between Israel and Palestine as sovereign states envisaged in the roadmap is to materialize, a crucial factor will be the kind of pressure and persuasion that the US and other exponents of the plan bring to bear on Israel to go along and not to look for pretexts and opportunities to undermine it the way it scuttled the Oslo process.
THE assurance of the Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan that the national savings schemes are not being wound up will be widely welcomed. He gave this assurance at a meeting of the FPCCI standing committee on banking. Earlier, reports that the mark-up on these schemes would be further reduced had given rise to apprehensions that these may ultimately be terminated. Already the mark-up on these schemes has been reduced by about 50 per cent. The reduction, however, seems unavoidable in the context of the economic policies being pursued over the last several years. Also, the argument why should the government borrow at a high mark-up and burden the exchequer when funds are available at lower rates is quite valid. Because of this consideration the mark-up rate on national savings schemes has now been linked to the mark-up rate of Pakistan Investment Bonds whose interest rate is determined on the basis of two auctions of treasury bills plus a certain margin. Currently the return on national savings schemes ranges between 8.5 and nine per cent. On the basis of the existing formula the rates are now due for revision on July 1 next.
Apart from economic considerations, there is a social and human side to savings schemes. In the absence of a social security system, these were introduced for a degree of benefit for the economically weak sections of society like pensioners and widows. It was for this reason that a rate higher than the prevailing rate of return on bank deposits was offered. Unfortunately the schemes were misused by resourceful people by borrowing from banks at low interest rates and investing the money in savings schemes for a sizable profit. Measures are now said to be under consideration to plug this loophole. This should have been done long ago. While the scope of the schemes no doubt needs to be restricted, the interests of the indigent people who have come to depend for subsistence on the earnings from these schemes deserve to be protected. These people are now being doubly squeezed by lower savings rates and rising inflation on the one hand and rising utility charges and sales tax on the other. So long as the state does not come up with a social safety net for them, it has an obligation to ensure a stable minimum return for small savers, providing them a sufficient margin over the prevailing rate of inflation so that they are able to make both ends meet.
THE reason for non-inclusion of three of Pakistan’s archaeological sites, namely Harappa, Mehrgarh and Rehman Dheri, to Unesco’s World Heritage List this year is nothing but bureaucratic wrangling. The archaeology department failed to convince The Survey of Pakistan that providing the required aerial maps of the sites to the world body would not jeopardize Pakistan’s security. So when Unesco meets to consider the inclusion of more world archaeological sites to the WHL later this month in Paris, the names of the three Pakistani sites in question will be taken off the list. There is no guarantee that The Survey of Pakistan will change its routine approach to the subject even next year. This is despite the fact that the aerial maps of the six Pakistani archaeological sites which are already on the world body’s heritage list were happily handed over to it in 1981.
None of the three sites in question is located near a military cantonment or a strategic installation, which makes the refusal by The Survey of Pakistan all the more absurd. The three sites are in dire need of receiving immediate international technical and monetary assistance, which will now have to wait at least for another year. Pakistan has worked very hard with the country representatives of Unesco over the past decade to get these sites listed on the WHL, which Unesco finally accepted last year. The archaeology department would do well to convince the relevant authorities of the importance of meeting this requirement well in time for the Unesco meeting next year. The excavated sites at Harappa, Mehrgarh and Rehman Dheri are lying exposed to the elements and need urgent international support to protect them from decay.