| October 24, 2005 | Monday | Ramzan 19, 1426 |
Eid dilemma
Some worrying thoughts about aid
IT is always difficult to refuse aid when there is desperate need for help. It took them a little while, but Nato forces in Afghanistan did eventually come to offer help to both India and Pakistan for rescue and relief in the devastated regions of Kashmir. India refused the offer. Pakistan has accepted it. If Indian pilots were disallowed from flying their relief helicopters in Kashmir by Pakistan, it was a decision that could be accepted on grounds of security. Pakistan did not want potentially curious pilots snooping around in its airspace, that too in Kashmir.
But Nato forces would not be completely uninterested in hunting their own quarries in the region. They have their own chestnuts in the fire not too far removed from the footprint of the Oct 8 devastation. So it is all very messy, but the need for their help is such that we feel compelled to accept the world’s most powerful war machine, which is more adept at destroying than building anew, to carry our relief operations in Azad Kashmir, and possibly in the Frontier regions too.
In India, the United States has announced a $500,000 relief package to be funnelled through Indian NGOs and some international agencies engaged in relief in Kashmir. Is this unalloyed charity, or are there strings attached and which NGOs are going to get the assignment? India had announced a contribution of $5 million to the American Red Cross for the Katrina relief efforts. How come a poor country like India becomes more generous with the prosperous United States then it has been with its own people generally and in times of calamity?
Of course calamities do bring out the best and the worst in people. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose assassination by America was recently called for by televangelist Pat Robertson, offered fuel, humanitarian aid and relief workers in the Katrina devastation. Cuban President Fidel Castro offered to send medical teams to New Orleans.
On the other hand, please remember that right in the middle of the Kosovo operations, in October 1993, the European Union admitted it was using humanitarian aid as a political weapon in Yugoslavia, with plans to ship winter heating oil to some Serbs but not others on political grounds. There were rumours also that the 15-member bloc was going even furthering its efforts to influence Serbian politics by also pressing aspiring EU-member Hungary to block shipments of Russian natural gas to the republic. Hungary said it was blocking the shipments to Serbia of its own accord.
It was in Sudan in 1999 that the Clinton administration threw out the longstanding US prohibition against using humanitarian aid for explicit military ends. The plan was to supply American food to the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, which had fought a civil war with the country’s Islamic government for more than a decade.
Saeeda Diep is a Pakistani social activist turned relief worker whose sincerity and grit are regarded by her Indian colleagues with high respect. She wrote an anguished letter from her recent visit to Azad Kashmir. It has been circulating on the email circuit.
“Let me just share a few observations which maybe of some help to other volunteers who have not been to the earthquake hit areas so far. First of all, as a volunteer you should be prepared to rough it out and take whatever you think you may need for your own comfort yourself,” Saeeda writes.
“Take your own warm clothes, sleeping bag , surgical mask and do not forget to get yourself vaccinated. Anything you do as a volunteer counts. Do not expect to always work as a front line worker, assist those who need your help as best as you can. Do not go to these areas as a tourist and just to be an onlooker. This is about all of us and the best way to help is to get involved in a simple and humble manner. People need support, but do not patronize them. Wherever you can give comfort, do that.”
In her plea, the Pakistani activist adds presciently: “I request the philanthropists and humanitarian groups to review their relief initiatives for quake victims and survivors. Relief efforts without taking into account the diverse needs of victims would bring difficulties than benefits to the needy. I have seen the relief supplies are being dumped on roadsides as these do not meet the requirements of disaster survivors. I also witnessed that relief goods and services are being concentrated in easily accessible areas. There is a chance if relief goods and services are delayed most of the survivors will die as weather is getting very cold up at mountains.”
As if to confirm this worrying fear, from Srinagar came reports of diversion of relief material sent by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation in Delhi. It was discovered that activists of the Jammu and Kashmir’s Congress Party were siphoning off the aid for their own constituencies.
During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and after, NGOs and the international community relieved their consciences, and their aging food stocks, by dumping dried maize husks on the refugees. The people did not have the machines to grind it into flour or the water to boil it. “The children were so hungry that they ate it and suffered internal bleeding — some died,” says John Giblin, a British researcher in Kigali. Some of these issues have been chronicled with considerable transparency by Tony Vaux, a former Oxfam official, in his book The Selfish Altruist. Vaux and his associates, over stressed and under funded, decided sometimes who would live and who would not. Food and medical aid became entangled with politics and military action.
It is also from this position that he raises his most fundamental issue. Vaux points out that aid workers are in positions of power and that power corrupts. Aid organisations and workers develop interests, organisational and personal, in seeing that acts are done in a certain way and that they receive credit.
“Saving lives,” he writes, “can be intoxicating, especially when people are weak and vulnerable…The motive of pity so easily interacts with the motive for cruelty, and the desire to help so easily becomes the desire for power .... Managers in the ‘disaster relief industry’,like those in charge of homes for children or the elderly, have the opportunity to abuse power because they are dealing with vulnerable people.” It would be only vain to assert that we are better off thanthe worst of us.
In remarks that would leave many people surprised, India’s main communist party the CPI(M) said last week that Communist China was not its role model and the party was in favour of adapting Marxism to Indian conditions. “China is not our role model. For that matter, no other country is,” party General Secretary Prakash Karat told to an interactive session with Forum of Financial Writers. He said the party was in favour of adapting Marxist ideology to suit Indian needs and conditions. The Marxist Communist Party has been of this view since 1964, Karat said, noting there were several issues on which lessons could be learnt from China but not on all matters.
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IT is almost as if Karachians have been caught in a moment of indecision: whether or not to celebrate Eidul Fitr with the fervour that is seen every year in the city. The thought of thousands of dead men, women and children upcountry and the millions of quake victims left without a roof over their heads in rain and cold has shaken even the most ardent believer in the festivities of this season of celebration.
Yes, malls are being lit up as we approach the end of Ramazan, but the rush of people thronging shops in search of the right outfit and the matching pair of shoes is yet to build up. There are people — especially those with young children, who do not want to have the Eid holidays marred for their offspring — who are seen scouring the shops for something to please but which doesn’t look ostentatious. There are many who have decided to observe the day quietly, not forgetting those who will return to tents or partially damaged homes after attending Eid prayers in makeshift mosques.
The result is that business has not been as brisk as before and tailors, who normally refused to take orders one week into the fasting month, are now promising to get stitching done within a few days.
Perhaps this half-hearted celebratory mood is the best reflection of a nation sharing a tragedy.
Doing dishes – how!
On her way to work a colleague often takes the Mai Kolachi route in the mornings. On one such occasion she witnessed something that would, possibly forever, keep her from eating at weddings and parties.
She saw a pickup with many ‘degs’ loaded at the back. While the driver stopped near where the wall around the Boating Basin is broken, two men got down and, lifting the huge cooking pots out of the vehicle, carried them one by one to the dirty water in the Boating Basin to rinse them.
It is obvious that they represented some catering service and were bringing back their cooking pots and utensils the morning after a late night party. The pickup didn’t have a painted logo or name of the caterers but this may explain why so many people these days are falling ill after attending wedding dinners.
Return of the native
The chairman of one of the largest industrial groups of Bangladesh, A.S.F. Rahman, was only two when his father, Fazlur Rahman, one of the trusted lieutenants of the Quaid-i-Azam, moved from Dacca (as it was then spelt) to Karachi in 1947. The senior Mr Rahman was minister of education and information in the cabinet of Liaquat Ali Khan, after whose assassination he was inducted by Khawaja Nazimuddin into his cabinet. Mr Fazlur Rahman remained in the central government till 1955, but his link with the Muslim League continued until his death in 1966.
His son, Sohail to his many friends in Karachi, refuses to accept the city as his second home. “If anything, I’ll call it my first home because I spent my formative years here. I did my O- and A-levels from the Karachi Grammar School. Some of my very good friends are either here or have migrated from this city,” says Rahman who came to Karachi last week from Dhaka for the opening of the first of his chain of outlets dealing in ready-made clothes.
Rahman, who was in Karachi until 1964, when he went abroad for studies, returned to what was then the capital of East Pakistan. “I have been visiting Karachi every other year, but this time I have come after four years and the developments in the city appear quite startling. With so many flyovers and one underpass, it is a pleasure to drive here. The roads have been widened as well. I wish that could happen in Dhaka too.”
He also remembers that there was just one man with a revolver in his pocket who served as a guard to his father, a far cry from the vans of armed-to-their-teeth policemen that our provincial ministers now have at their beck and call.
Loss of dignity
A couple of days back a colleague saw what he describes as a most unedifying spectacle: a traffic policeman, perched precariously on the front bumper of a slow-moving truck, was being clobbered mercilessly by the driver and his assistant. As the truck swung from one side to another, the driver also hurled abuses at the policeman, who, when he had had enough, jumped off and allowed the truck to speed away.
In an incident of almost similar nature, a driver of an inter-city bus gunned down a police constable on Sharea Pakistan who had motioned the driver to pull up.
While such violations of law are beyond doubt reprehensible, a lot of times people motorists feel that the only reason why traffic policemen stop them is to make some extra money. And when the motorists don’t pull up, traffic policemen with bikes don’t even bother to chase them.
— By Karachian
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