| June 6, 2005 | Monday | Rabi-us-Sani 28, 1426 |
To send a letter to the Editor
Click here
Police force
Foreign office
Menace of smuggling
USA’s ‘moral authority’
Turkey’s EU membership
Valuers’ list
AI on Guantanamo
Malir picture
A poor pay-off by US
Calling cards
CPSP affairs
Handing over Al-Libbi
THE use of plastic bags has been recently banned in Kenya and Rawanda. The ban was recommended by the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA) in April according to which at least two million bags were being handed out each year to people shopping at supermarkets and kiosks in Nairobi alone.
The assistant environment minister of Kenya, Mr Wangari Mathaai, who is also the 2004 Nobel peace prize winner, linked plastic bags waste with malaria as these discarded bags fill with rainwater and hence offer breeding surfaces for malaria- carrying mosquitoes. The other countries that have banned or limited the use of plastic disposables include India, Bangladesh, and Bhutan.
The NWFP Local Council Board also announced a ban on Sept 1, 2004 but nothing happened. In order to ensure a pleasant environment, and avoid pollution, the Karachi city government had fixed July 1, 2004 as the date for implementation of a ban on the manufacture and sale of polyethylene bags in the city but its efforts too have been futile. Plastic bags can often be seen dangling even from tree branches and as heaps of garbage on street corners.
The IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) has found that plastic bags have harmful effects on soil, water and air. When plastic bags get deposited fields in leage quantities they cause soil infertility. The accumulation of plastic prevents the sunlight from entering the soil, thus destroying the beneficial bacteria, so necessary for soil fertility. Plastic is not biodegradable and releases harmful dioxins. Besides, people who work in plastic industries are at a greater risk of cancer and other diseases.
Discarded plastic bags are a notorious clogger of sewage lines and drains because these do not rot and turn into compost. Coloured plastic bags contain harmful toxic metals like chromium and copper which can cause allergies. According to estimates, Pakistan imported 210,000 million tonnes of polyethylene bags in 2003-04, out of which Karachi’s share was around 30 per cent.
There is growing recognition of the need for a sanitation policy and sound operational strategies for dealing with the problem.
The government must ban these plastic bags completely. It stands to reason that when factories stop producing plastic bags, the public will automatically stop using them. As a replacement, jute, cloth and paper bags can be used.
RASHID ASHRAF Karachi
FIRST it was the police, followed by the traffic police, special police, the FSF, the constabulary, the elite force, and now in the offing in Punjab is a new force, the “patrol police”. Despite all these forces, crime has multiplied. Our valiant police force has a unique style of apprehending culprits. It continues to wait until a crime is committed before it springs into action. And once crime like murder or robbery has been committed, the police reach the site of the crime in droves.
The first victims of its investigation are the poor victims of a robbery or dacoity themselves. They have to arrange for food and cold drinks for the men in uniform besides facing scathing questions. Sometimes they even have to arrange for their transport since the official vehicles meant for the job are employed to run errands for the high-ups of the department. If the victims are well connected, the police nab the culprits post haste. Otherwise, the robbed not only have to bear the material loss, they also have to part with money for the police to carry out investigation. How do they manage to arrest the offenders within a day or two in case of influential victims can only be argued as if the police always know who the robbers are in the first place.
The government spends a lot of taxpayer’s money by sending police officers to other countries to get trained in modern methods of investigation but the net result remains zero. It is regrettable that after spending so much of foreign exchange and time in training senior police officers, they fail to deliver. Our police force is only good at VIP duties and not at protecting life and property of the citizens on whose taxes it feeds up.
MAJOR (retd) ANWAR PASHA Lahore
THIS is with reference to a foreign office clarification regarding the president’s quote on Iran’s nuclear programme (Dawn, May 30). According to foreign office spokesman Jalil Abbas Jillani, the president had said: “I do not know. The Iranians are very anxious to have a bomb.” Mr Jillani said that “this reply was given to Der Spiegel’s question if Iran was anxious to obtain a nuclear bomb. The president merely repeated the question posed to him and then said: ‘I don’t know’.”
The reason I have quoted from a Dawn front page news item is to point out that the president and our foreign office spokesman need training in media skills. They should prepare the president for all interviews. They should provide him a list of “probable questions” before an interview or a press conference. Mr Jillani should know as a spokesperson that repeating a question is not the right thing. If the president had been prepared before his interview with the local TV channel, in which he used harsh language regarding the Balochistan imbroglio, his warning would have been better worded.
In 1999, after the general’s interview conducted by a foreign TV channel, I told an ISPR brigadier that the general needs media training. His reply was that a person who rises to the level of chief of army staff knows what he is doing and needs no training.
I think that there is nothing wrong with training as it helps avoiding pitfalls and reminds a person of the basics of facing the media. Most presidents and prime ministers in the developing and developed world do take this training as their words can be of major consequence. As happened in the above case.
BABAR AYAZ Karachi
SMUGGLING has been present in our country since 1947. Last year, smuggling from Iran and Afghanistan increased, forcing Pakistani industries to stop their operations. Sales of legal industries have decreased and one of the reasons is the rampant smuggling of products from neighbouring countries. Though the country’s economy expanded during the fiscal year, the industrial sector showed a negative trend.
Cigarettes legitimately move through the “in transit” regime without tax until they reach the final end market — at which point tax is payable. Most smuggling involves cigarettes moving out of the untaxed distribution chain and entering the end market illegally. Organized crime groups are involved in the movement of cigarette into Pakistan and/or its distribution.
Pakistan’s international borders with Afghanistan and China are used as a channel for smuggled cigarettes entering and leaving the country. In 2004, 71.8 billion cigarettes were sold in the country out of which 56.4 billion were legal and 15.4 billion were illegal.
Counterfeiting has had very serious effects not only on legitimate manufacturers (in terms of brand reputation and lost income) but also on governments, workers, consumers and society in Pakistan. The direct loss to the government of Pakistan is more than Rs7 billion annually. This is a big amount Pakistan is losing annually owing to the black sheep in this sector.
Workers also suffer because counterfeit products result in fewer jobs in the legitimate manufacturing and retailing sectors. Workers are now facing problems with the rapid increase of illegitimate industries. The government should take strict and immediate action against illegal activities in the tobacco industry.
COL (retd) AHMED CHOUDHRY Lahore
IN his column (May 28), Mr Irfan Hussain has dealt with the treatment of prisoners at Bagram and Abu Ghraib and, while criticizing the Americans, has also, rightly, talked of the hypocrisy of some of the criticism emanating from the Muslim world. He refers in this connection to the oppression practised in many Muslim countries.
Well and good. It is his conclusion that raises a disturbing question. He says that “clearly, if America wishes to win back its moral authority”, it will have to look into the actions of its senior civilian and military officials.
“Win back its moral authority”? When did the US ever command any moral authority? Not at least since 1945, when it dropped two atomic bombs
on Japan. Not since the late
50s and 60s when it went on
a crusade in South-East Asia and used napalm against villagers in Vietnam. In fact, looking back at the past half a century, it is difficult to find an instance where the US exercised a moral authority, which we are now asking it to “win back”.
This is just one instance where we have allowed ourselves to unconscionably accept America’s moral superiority when actually its superiority has been based on military strength.
NAIMAH
Karachi
THIS refers to Mr K Murad Bey’s letter regarding Turkish EU membership (May 27). Mr Bey has lamented that Turkey has stood as a staunch ally of the West against communism and qualifies economically to become an EU member. Still the EU is effectively blocking Turkish entry in the Union just because the Turks are Muslims. Mr Bey has suggested that Muslims should present themselves as modern, moderate, progressive and “enlightened” to become more acceptable to the West and to bridge the religious gap that has become more evident after 9/11.
Among 50 odd Muslim countries only Turkey can be regarded as “enlightened” and modern by prevalent definitions of enlightenment. Turkey has presented itself as a secular country and has moved in this direction since the abolition of the caliphate by Kamal Ataturk. Despite this, the prime reason for banning Turkish entry into the EU is Turkey’s religious identity. Evidently no amount of moderation and appeasement on the part of the Muslim world can satisfy the West and remove the prejudice in their hearts. If you give them an inch they will want a mile until Muslims renounce their faith (God forbid) and enter their ranks. The history of the past 1,500 years is enough to prove this fact.
IBTESAM RAHIM KHAN
Islamabad
I ENDORSE the views expressed in Mr Saifullah Tareen’s letter “Valuers’ list” (May 4). I would like to add
for the benefit of all concerned, specially the State Bank of Pakistan, to take into account the following suggestions if the recommendation of Mr Tareen to appoint a committee to review the system is accepted:
a. The criterion for registration of valuers is cumbersome in general and devoid of essential technical requirements in particular. Since valuation is a highly technical matter, one of the criteria should be the presence of engineers in the firm/company, etc, with at least 20 years of specialized valuation experience.
b. The setup of the Pakistan Banks Association should essentially comprise key personnel having engineering experience of valuation so that registration is approved only on the basis of technical merit and not registration fee payment and other non-technical conditions.
c. Individuals who qualify the above criteria should also be considered for registration for which financial conditions should be waived. After all, the Asian Development Bank registers individual consultants with valuation expertise under their DICON (data on individual consultation) system without payment of fee or non-technical conditions.
I would further add for information of the State Bank that scheme 29, which dealt with write-off of loans on the basis of forced sale value, was also processed on a non-technical basis by the non-technical committee which neither had a procedure/mechanism to counter-check the valuation worked out by the Pakistan Banks Association’s approved valuers, nor were members qualified and sufficiently experienced in or conversant with valuation issues.
Thus in case of dispute in valuation figures between a bank’s appointed valuer and the borrower’s appointed valuer, the committee simply appointed its own valuer as final judge. However, it is interesting to note that in a case handled by me when this final judge valuation happened to be lower than that of borrowers-appointed valuer, the committee was in a fix and decided on the basis of the borrowers-appointed valuer. The national loss of time was over six months just for nothing and for which no one is accountable.
M. SIRAJUL HASSAN
(Ex-deputy managing
director, IDBP)
Karachi
THIS refers to the news item ‘Bush rejects Amnesty report on Guantanamo’ (June 1). When the same Amnesty International releases any of its investigative reports about human rights abuse in Pakistan, specially about prisons in the rural areas of the country, the same Bush administration makes a lot of hue and cry about it, and Pakistan is promptly put on the human rights watch list. It accepts each and everything which is said in the AI reports.
It is ironic that when the same Amnesty International points to America’s own human rights abuses, its observations are outrightly rejected as “baseless” and “absurd”. How come the most prestigious human rights watch group suddenly becomes absurd in its findings? Has Amnesty International started hiring Muslims “who hate America”?
The one word which comes to mind is “eyewash”.
ANAS A. KHAN
Via email
THIS is with reference to the photograph published in Dawn on June 2.
The picture shows half a dozen men lying on a road, with their hands tied behind their backs and faces covered with their own clothes. There are four uniformed men standing around them with guns, one standing with a foot on the back of one of the half-naked lying men.
The difference between this and the pictures from Abu Ghraib jail of Iraq is that this happened in Malir, Karachi; the men in uniform are citizens of the same country and follow the same religion as those being humiliated on the road before their fellow citizens; and last but not least everyone, including those in uniform, know that no one’s going to ask them anything about this and there will never be any court of law where they have to justify their actions.
M. Baloch
Karachi
THIS is with reference to Ms Neerja Tripathi’s letter (May 26). Her statement that India did not attack Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 is not true, and by this she has tested the memories of people all over the globe which are not as short as she imagines.
On September 6, 1965 India launched a fierce attack on the Lahore border and the false news of the capture of Lahore also got announced through the BBC. In 1971, India not only attacked Pakistan but also captured our eastern wing, which is now Bangladesh — thus dismembering our country.
At the time of the capture of the former East Pakistan, the then Indian prime minister Mrs Indira Gandhi had proudly acclaimed that the “two-nation theory”, on the basis of which Pakistan was established, has been drowned in the Bay of Bengal.
GHULAM MUHAMMAD
Karachi
DOMESTIC and long-distance calling cards are meant to save customers’ time and money. Several private and state-owned companies have launched calling cards, promising to provide reliable services to the consumers. But as they say, good things rarely last in Pakistan. Some of these companies claim to be providing extra 50 per cent call time as compared to others in the market. All this sounds well and good but they are in fact misleading people.
In reality, at the end of the day, the money consumed in calls on one card is the same as that charged by other cards. A five-minute call becomes too expensive as Rs10 to 20 are simply deducted the moment one connects, and even upon connection — while the charges continue to be deducted — there is disturbance and line disruption. A Rs250 calling card used for overseas has eight minutes and a Rs500 calling card has merely 18 minutes. In case of disturbance, the balance continues to decrease.
So what does one do? There being no rule or regulation to check such practices, the poor consumer has nowhere to go or complain. The government should take note of such practices and address them so that the people’s rights can be protected and safeguarded.
SADIA BADAR
Via email
THE decision taken by the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan (CPSP) to disqualify doctors from appearing in the FCPS part-II exams in March 2005 is disturbing.
The CPSP has taken this decision without offering any concrete reason and now its president is bent upon disallowing doctors to appear for the exams on one pretext or the other. No doctor is going to court or lodging a formal protest for fear of becoming a target of the CPSP, but the health ministry should be in a better position to tackle the situation.
Perhaps all this is why our doctors prefer to work in a foreign country because one is not stopped from qualifying for something without reason.
I appeal to the president and prime minister of Pakistan to intervene and save the future of these doctors who have been working day and night on a meagre stipend of Rs6,200 per month in pursuit of higher qualifications.
UMBEREEN GUL
Islamabad
I WAS shocked to read that Pakistan has handed over Abu Farraj al-Libbi to the United States. Gen Pervez Musharraf said on CNN that Al Libbi had been handed over despite the two attempts which he had engineered on the president’s own life. But what about justice for the 17 Pakistanis killed in one of those attempts? Is the president expecting to get justice for them from the US?
YAQOOB MATHEWS
Cambridge, UK
You can also send letters to the Editor
Just send your message to the following address:
Make sure you include your full name, postal address, e-mail address, and in the case of Pakistan your day-time telephone number.