Storms of two kinds blight BD

Norwesters and storms lashed Bangladesh last week, while a cyclone of another kind seems to be brewing in the country.

Norwesters hit several areas in the north on Tuesday, killing 27 people and injuring more than 500.

Three motorized boats, two passenger ferries and one trawler capsized in three rivers between May 15 and May 19 after having, leaving more than a hundred people dead. Some two hundred people remain missing.

The first boat, ML Prince, capsized in the River Bura Gauranga last Sunday, with more than three hundred people on board. As many as 82 bodies have been recovered so far.

The second vessel, M.L. Raipura, capsized with at least 200 passengers on board in the river Jamuna on Tuesday. More than 50 bodies have been recovered to date.

Then a trawler carrying 70 maunds of rice and around 100 passengers was caught in a storm and sank in River Meghna on Thursday. The authorities concerned have not been able to recover any body so far.

In all the three cases, some people managed to swim ashore, many got trapped inside the vessels, while more than a hundred remain missing.

The survivors in all the three incidents alleged that the boats were overloaded, an irregularity almost invariably ignored by the authorities concerned.

Thousands of ferries ply Bangladesh’s network of 230 rivers every day, providing transport primarily for more than 100,000 villagers. Of them, scores die in accidents every year, especially during the stormy season in April and May.

Almost 2,500 people have been killed in nine major disasters over the past three years.

Given that the government cannot be expected to control storms brewing in oceans or in the sky, the administration is nevertheless being justifiably accused of indifference towards boat disasters.

After every such disaster, it has been found that the sunken vessel _ technically unseaworthy in the first place _ was carrying passengers and goods much beyond its capacity. Hardly any vessel owner has ever been punished for such violation of rules.

The insensitivity of successive governments towards such tragedies is evident by the fact that the state has only two age-old rescue ships _ and that too under-equipped _ to salvage sunken vessels.

The result is obvious: never have the authorities concerned been able to recover bodies.

The stormy season is not over yet, while nobody knows as to how many people will fall victim to such accidents.

As hinted at earlier, a storm of another kind is brewing on the political horizon in the wake of a decision by the Awami League to boycott the next general election, due next year.

Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina said her party would participate in the polls only if the governing alliance meets her demand to change the composition of the non-party caretaker government – an interim body that conducts elections – by amending the constitution. The ruling alliance, which has a two-thirds majority in parliament, has already rejected the idea.

Subsequently, the Awami League is out to forge a broad-based opposition alliance, with the left and liberal democratic parties and groups, to organize ‘decisive street power’ against the government.

If the League succeeds in mobilizing the masses against the government and the ruling coalition refuses to reconsider its stance on the opposition’s demand over a caretaker administration, Bangladesh is likely to face a political storm. Nobody knows what price the country has to pay, politically and economically, if the apprehension turns out to be true.

State of uncertainty

FEDERAL Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmad has in no uncertain terms spoken of the prospect of President Pervez Musharraf seeking another term after his current one ends in 2007. “He (Gen Musharraf) will continue as president even after 2007. However, nothing can be said at this stage whether he will retain his army chief’s office as well...,” the minister said.

While eyebrows have been raised about the wisdom of the federal minister’s statement, can it be dismissed as a simple piece of ingratiating courtly behaviour? Does the statement — unmixed in verbiage and transparent in intent — reflect an act of personal initiative or consummate puppetry with the strings playing in the hands of the puppeteer behind the screen? The president himself on Friday said that the information minister was expressing a “personal opinion and not my opinion, and I have never said anything in this regard”.

But what truly matters is the state of uncertainty gripping the nation as a whole about the shape of governance and leadership to come in the next few years — until 2007 and after. Rather than let tongues wag, each with a new story to tell to leave God’s honest creatures wondering about their fate, might it not be appropriate for the president to clearly outline his future plans?

Is it not time for him to put certain questions to himself and go on to answer them as well? Loosely framed, some of the key questions for him to respond could be as follows:

First, regardless of what others might think of his performance through the past four years, does he himself feel satisfied with it as the supreme civil and military leader of Pakistan?

Second, does the quantum of his achievements through his tenure measure up to his own vision and expectations in keeping with his own seven-point agenda of October 17, 1999?

Third, won’t his open-ended tenure as army chief may not have some impact on the very nature of the time-bound command of the army chief?

Fourth, could his active support and participation in the global war on terrorism may have gone too far to involve Pakistan and the army without an exit strategy?

The fifth and last question must pertain to the irrevocable reality of mortality: nothing is there for ever.

Now a broad brush picture of the state of politics in the country. Would it be at all right or fair to say that our political parties and, worse still, politics at the national level have all but failed in terms of a clear message and workable manifesto for the nation?

Scarcely anything more damaging and unfortunate could happen to the common weal and general health of the nation than feuding parties without a clear mandate even for their own rank and file.

The mainstream PPP and the Muslim League-N periodically hit the media headlines in bubble-like episodes. Thanks to the impulsive and largely unwarranted panic reaction of the authorities to the coming of Mr Asif Ali Zardari, what might well have passed as a non-event turned into an international story.

The MMA’s ‘Million March’, heralded by high-profile publicity, passed off without leaving many footprints. This was because of the deliberate and relative nonchalance of the law-enforcing authorities.

The common folk are indeed disillusioned with the value and the substance of our political roadshows involving mass violence. They have had too much of it already and seem to be in no mood to have more of it.

However, this is not to dismiss the grim possibility of a disorderly, leaderless, anarchical eruption of mass fury hitting suddenly and uncontrollably. The fire behind the mass flare-up would hardly be politics, but deprivation, poverty, unemployment and mounting inflation.

Sheikh Rashid’s feeling hope about Gen Musharraf continuing to stay as president beyond 2007 acquires grave implications in view of the fast disappearing or weakening state institutions. Individuals alone can at best ensure preservation of the status quo without achieving enduring stability.

It is time for the president, his advisers and ministers to think of the state of affairs beyond Musharraf. The leaders of the three major parties — the PPP, the Muslim League-N and the MQM — stay in exile with little or no likelihood of returning home anytime soon. The PML of Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain has been (and remains) in the throes of internal differences.

Its top leadership had to approach the president to adjudicate and make peace between the dissidents and their leaders. The president did so in the ‘national interest’, the last thing for a soldier and serving army chief to do.

—The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.

Hospitals for shopping plazas!

THERE is reason to be shocked at the reported prospects that the Mideast Hospital in Clifton is closed and is likely to be replaced by a shopping mall. (I thought that only cinema houses were being closed in town to make way for shopping malls and commercial plazas.)     Ever since work on the under construction underpass in Clifton began and dust has been kicked up in the air making the environment hazy and hazardous, the Mideast Hospital somehow got sidelined. One often wondered about how patients and their attendants must be getting to this place in an emergency.     Having said this brings me very quickly to a point that citizens now realize and regard as very relevant and high priority the need to have a hospital in the neighbourhood. Therefore with the closure of Mideast Hospital one believes that not just the residents of Clifton and Defence are affected or rather deprived, but it is Karachi that loses a hospital, which turned integral to the healthcare system of the city. Mideast Hospital did not get its patients only from Karachi, but also from the interior of Sindh.    I cannot recall off hand any other hospital of this size and significance being closed down in town, and one only prays that this does not begin a trend. When we lost the first cinema house, there were fears that more would go. More did. And see the way they go, and get demolished to be replaced by those disturbing symbols of consumerism — shopping plazas. Will this happen to this Mideast hospital site too? Right now there is only speculation.    Take into account the fact that the state is steadily and surely withdrawing its support from the health sector, and with the change in values that is taking place, it is the private sector that is going to expand its canvass of operations. And from the shape of things being unfold, private health care is going to be expensive. A very worrying if not altogether scary scenario seems to be upcoming if one takes into account the poverty trap that exists.

Not all of us have had to use the Mideast hospital. But the thought that it was there for a kind of reassurance. We have visited the hospital to see patients admitted there, detailed a Clifton resident, who was unhappy at the thought that the hospital had closed down. Another Defence resident felt that the absence of this hospital would always be felt in the days ahead, as there was no comparable solution in sight.   I have heard citizens discussing the May 20th report which has an interesting background to the way in which the land for this hospital was sold, and bought and built upon. The plots on which the Mideast hospital came up were residential. Not amenity plots, please note. An order that was passed in the seventies had noted that Dr Jatoi purchased the residential plots from the open market and requested that two plots be amalgamated and he may be allowed to build a five-storey hospital. “The request was approved by the Minister for Housing and Town  Planning as a special case. The building plans were approved by the KDA accordingly and the construction of the hospital started”.     Now it is evident that the plots were residential and not commercial, citizens are keen and demand that instead of a shopping mall or some other commercial enterprise, the land be used for residential purpose only. One optimistic and even naïve citizen went to the extent of saying that this hospital should be replaced by a still better and modern hospital. The argument being that with a growing population medical facilities are more necessary than shopping plazas.     Of course, the end of a hospital like the Mideast is viewed in many ways. There are people who would certainly have happy memories of this place. Others may want not to remember the place at all, for what they went through. This is not quite the point. The Mideast hospital became a reference point, or a landmark in that part of Clifton. Like Schon Circle which may not be called that once the underpass is completed. Like the Submarine Chowk in Gizri, where there is no submarine left. Or for that matter Purani Numaish and Guru Mandir which no longer are there. There are so many examples like these in Karachi.     If they do build a shopping mall here would they call it the Mideast shopping plaza? In the days ahead which makes one wonder what future generations would think of us being the people who gave up hospitals for shopping centres. Someone could ask: Were things so good then that they didn’t need hospitals? Or rather were matters so materialistic that the people preferred to have shopping plazas rather than affordable health care facility?     Will the closing down of one hospital in Clifton start a trend? After all there is more fun and money in shopping malls as we have seen from Park Towers and The Forum, to name a couple. All this is not reflective of the exorbitant price of land, but a depressing reminder of the signs of the times. Pontificate carefully, slowly, and seriously read in between the lines.

Accidents and fines all over

A NEWS report earlier in the week revealed that on an average, at least 35 people were killed in road accidents in Lahore every month. The report was based on data collected over the last 12 months. It said that of the 604 accident-related cases filed with the police last year, only 346 were arraigned in a court of law while the rest were settled out of court. Astonishingly, no one was punished in any of the cases so far heard by the courts.

Lahore traffic is in dire straits, indeed. The city’s traffic police chief says that he is short by at least 1,000 traffic constables. Many of those that he does have on duty are deputed for protecting the VIPs. This means that when power starts playing hide and seek in these summer months and traffic lights stop functioning, there will be bigger and messier jams.

The Punjab government has no plans to increase the number of traffic police in the metropolis even though the last police reforms —- that were carried out more on paper and less on the ground —- provided for such and other improvements. The few diligent cops that do their duty, along The Mall, for instance, are seen concentrating their energies on issuing traffic violation tickets. There seems to be little else besides that they are trained to do.

A burnt-up friend, a Sheikh Sahib at that, complained the other day that he was fined on taking a left turn on a green light at the Charing Cross, because the cop booked him for not flashing an indicator before taking the turn. This was very bookish, to say the least. He offered the cop Rs50 for letting him go, thinking he would still save Rs30 and a bit of running around, but the cop declined, and demanded Rs100 for doing him the favour. At this point, the good Sheikh Sahib said he didn’t want to spoil the police, and decided to go by the book.

Speaking of traffic fines, another report this week revealed that the motorway police collected a hefty Rs64.9 million in fines from errant motorists in the last four months alone. Now that’s a lot of money and should make Premier Aziz a very happy man in terms of keeping his government’s books out of the red. It is time that some of the wealth thus collected started trickling down to the ordinary people. How about the average commuter who has the misfortune of being stuck with a rickety public transport?

But the Punjab government seems to have other plans. Instead of improving public transport, it is now considering to clamp a ban on rented motorbikes, saying these have the potential of being used for committing crimes, particularly in Lahore. This now, and all these years we were told it was stolen motorbikes that were used for carrying out acts of terror. The police have obviously failed to curb motorcycle thefts, that’s why they are now recommending the second best thing: a ban on rented motorcycles. It is the theft that needs to be banned, for once.

This also reminds one of the rosy pictures Lahoris were once shown by the erstwhile Sharifs of a light rail transit system for the city. Initially, a 15-km track was to be laid between Bhati Chowk and Chungi Amar Sadhu. This was later stretched to 34 kilometres, from the Ravi bridge to the airport, and that’s when it flew out of the window. It seems like the project was also sent into exile with the Sharifs. If so, the Punjab government would do well to demand it back from Saudi Arabia —- with or without its custodians.

THE government’s crackdown on adulterated water and food also made headlines this week. The confiscated lot included 200,000 bottles of spurious mineral water, 12 metric tons of adulterated spices, 10 tons of loose tea and several tons of tomato ketchup. The food department also seized some 400,000 packets of harmful pan masala and some 4,000 drums meant for storing chemicals, which were being used for food storage.

Good show, you would say. But think again. It’s funny that a large number of those involved in the spurious trade mysteriously escaped arrest. The foodstuff seized by the department was not found in one place but collected by food inspectors from various parts of Lahore. Yet no one was even fined. The food department has a lot to learn from the city’s traffic police.

Another news item revealed that a large number of imported soft drinks and canned food containers found in glitzy supermarkets are actually ‘expired’ items, which our shrewd ‘khepias’ pick up for a pittance from the Middle and Far East markets. The bulk of these are smuggled into the country via the coastal areas of Sindh and Balochistan.

All this, while it’s hard for an ordinary citizen to smuggle a three-piece suit into Punjab from a Bara market in the neighbouring Frontier. One wonders what secret road networks the pucca ‘khepias’ use.

SOME 58 religious scholars, acting under the leadership of the Ruet-i-Hilal (moon-sighting) Committee chairman, have issued an edict, saying Islam does not permit suicide attacks against Muslims. Carefully wording the edict, they went on to explain that its applied only to Pakistan and not Muslim territories under illegal non-Muslim occupation.

Even then, the denunciation of the fatwa in question came first from Iraq, followed by hardliners in Lebanon and, curiously so, by the MMA back home. One wonders which part of the edict the MMA has a bigger problem with: Islam not permitting suicide attacks against Muslims or the territorial confinement of the edict to within Pakistan’s borders?

It is nuances like these on the part of the religious alliance which have kept the public puzzled about their stances on various issues. Not just that, a leading component party of the alliance has invited the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and the Joint Action Committee of the NGOs, which were lobbying for a mixed-gender run opposed by the same party, to join the MMA in its demand for expelling the American ambassador from Pakistan. The proposed move is in retaliation for alleged desecration of the Quran by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay.

The NGOs did not look set to take the bait as a quid pro quo, especially after the PPP threw its weight behind the ‘cause’ of holding a mixed marathon. It is funny that at a time when inflation and unemployment are reigning supreme and more and more people are being pushed to live below the poverty line, we think that symbolic acts of expelling an ambassador or boys and girls running in the street will be popular moves.

THE city government is considering a proposal to hand over the cleaning, waste management and disposal and upkeep of main arteries to the private sector. If the move means a reduction in the non-development expenditure of the city government, then it is in public interest and should be welcomed.

The critical aspect that needs to be evaluated is as to how the private sector will make the essential services allotted to it a profitable proposition. Levying of any additional taxes that the government might have in mind to help it wash its hands clean of the city’s sanitation services will be unfair. Attention will also have to be paid to the selection of dumping grounds and the processes involved. —Observer