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| October 30, 2005 | Sunday | Ramzan 25, 1426 |
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One lie leading to another
Tetanus deaths
Turning a tragedy into an opportunity
THERE is nothing personal about suspicion, General; it comes, to indulge in a mild pun, with the territory. If President General Pervez Musharraf has a fault, it is to take things personally.
A HUMANITARIAN disaster of unimaginable proportions now stares Pakistan in the face. Unless things move fast, no less than 2.3 million people could face starvation in Azad Kashmir and the NWFP. The earlier figure of one million has been raised by the World Food Programme to 2.3 in the light of the revised assessments made by Unicef and Oxfam. The appeal by the WFP coincides with a grim warning by the UN Emergency Coordinator, Mr Jan Vandemoortele, who says it is now or never. “We will not have a second chance,” he said while pleading for a fresh injection of 250 million dollars. He warned that the relief efforts would have to be scaled down if the world did not come up with the required money soon. The disaster the UN and WFP speak of has many dimensions. It includes, first and foremost, food, followed by health and housing. Food involves more than just providing people with the raw material: a large number of survivors do not have the wherewithal for cooking, while the delivery of ready-made food on a continuous basis for months ahead is a daunting challenge. As for health, uninterrupted supply of medicines and the services of medical staff will be required to help people in tents, which obviously cannot be heated. Besides, the local economy has collapsed, because shops and banks have ceased to exist, and transport will take some time more to become normal before business can pick up.
The immediate task is to rush 200,000 more tents. These obviously will comprise a stop-gap arrangement; the long-term strategy requires investment in billions of dollars in the construction of quake-proof homes and buildings. The food question, however, overshadows all other considerations. At present, food is available only for 500,000. This means nearly two million are in danger of starvation in winter. So far the international community has provided only $111 million out of the $550 million needed. Helicopter operations alone require $50 million, and relief agencies fear that if immediate aid does not come, choppers could be kept flying at best for another week. Regrettably, one notices donor fatigue setting in. It is time the government paid attention to the need for mobilizing the country’s own resources as much as possible. Undoubtedly, the people of Pakistan are our greatest asset, for within a week of the quake, the people had donated four billion rupees to the president’s relief fund, and the donations continue.
A relevant point here is the absence the nation felt of the discarded district management system. The basic unit of the Mughal empire’s administration was the district, and the British continued it in a modified form. Its abolition and replacement by a system that has yet to click has turned out to be a tragedy in terms of the administration’s response to the quake. Previously, the commissioner and deputy commissioner were heads of the divisional and district administrations respectively, and they immediately responded to natural or man-made disasters. Today’s nazims have little idea of their responsibilities. They never bother to undertake periodic tours of their areas nor do they act as administrative heads. The slow response of the local administration to the Oct 8 tragedy demands that the merits and demerits of the old and new systems be studied and changes made to make local administration more efficient and responsive.
RUSSIAN novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said: “In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the state.” This has universal application and in recent times never more so than in the case of the US-UK Iraq war, which was launched on the basis of the lie that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction. This has continued to haunt the Bush and Blair administrations, and it has just taken the toll of US Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief adviser, Lewis Libby, indicted for perjury and making false statements. President Bush’s own adviser Karl Rove remains under investigation. Days before the Anglo-US invasion of Iraq, the leader of Britain’s House of Commons and former foreign secretary Robin Cook had resigned saying he could not support the rationale for the war. Two junior ministers and some officials had also resigned, to be followed by Clare Short, a member of the Blair cabinet. In July 2003, a British scientist involved with intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programme, David Kelly, committed suicide amidst reports that he was the source of a leak suggesting that the British government had “sexed up” a dossier on the supposed Iraqi nuclear threat.
A former US ambassador, Joseph Wilson, was sent to Niger in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq was shopping there for nuclear material. Mr Wilson found no evidence of this and reported accordingly. However, the alleged Niger link was used by the Bush administration in making its WMD case against Saddam Hussein. Mr Wilson wrote in an article that if his verdict had been ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, ‘then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretences”. It was then mysteriously leaked, apparently in retaliation, that Mr Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent. Mr Libby is supposed to have been the source of this, which he denied, but he is now accused of lying. The moral basis of a war meant to liberate people and establish democracy has been thoroughly eroded. It is incredible to reflect on how the world has been plunged into chaos by the consequences of actions based on lies meant to fit “preconceptions” and premeditated objectives. Where will they go next? Iran? Syria?
THE deaths of 22 earthquake survivors by tetanus should be a cause for concern for the government and its partners managing the relief operation. According to the World Health Organization, another 111 who had been infected with tetanus were under treatment. Tetanus affects the nervous system and one of its first symptoms is a stiffening of the jaw (hence tetanus is sometimes referred to as ‘lockjaw’) and the neck and followed by severe muscle spasms. It is caused by bacteria that can be found especially in agricultural soil, dirt or organic waste and can be contracted by humans through a wound or a cut which is not cleaned properly or left untreated for a long time. Though tetanus is entirely preventable through vaccination, unfortunately those living in the quake-affected areas have not been comprehensively protected against it, which is why so many have died.
While the WHO has said that the number of tetanus cases is tapering off, there is no guarantee that the numbers will not rise again, especially given that there are still some areas in remote valleys where the injured have yet to be given medical treatment. The best way to minimize such cases or those of other infectious diseases is for the government to launch a crash immunization programme especially for children and the elderly, both of whom are more vulnerable to infectious diseases in the post-disaster environment. Another point to note is that when wounds are being cleaned and dressed, the patients should be asked to come back to have the dressing changed. In many cases this is not happening, the result being that many survivors are walking around with dressings that are soiled and need to be changed.
When Lyse Doucet of the BBC asked him how he could allay suspicions that Indians might entertain about his radical offer to melt the Line of Control in Kashmir, he blew a minor fuse, answering on the lines of, “If they are suspicious about me then I will get suspicious about them” etc.
There is also institutional suspicion in relations between warring neighbours, as well suspicion of institutions. The Pakistan military establishment might harbour suspicions about India that are as justified, within the framework of its commitments and compulsions, as the Indian military establishment’s are about Pakistan. That has to be factored into any equation that seeks to balance the betrayals of the past against hopes about the future.
And yet, paradoxically, that personal element is also an asset. Pakistan’s peace initiatives towards India are propelled to a great extent by the dynamic of General Musharraf’s personal will. He is sincere, and has given as much evidence of his sincerity as is perhaps realistically possible. He also believes that Dr Manmohan Singh is equally sincere in his desire for peace, and has said so publicly; when personality is critical, trust is vital.
India’s prime minister is in politics but not of politics. Even those who disagree with him never go so far as to doubt his sincerity. Dr Singh, who keeps his private thoughts private, has not given us too many hints about what he thinks of General Musharraf, but the circumstantial evidence is positive. There would not have been a four-hour dinner between them in New York in September otherwise.
I cannot think of a parallel relationship between two serving chief executives of India and Pakistan. There was mistrust and worse between Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, which spilled over into the brief Nehru-Liaquat Ali Khan era. Liaquat’s civilian successors did not merit much attention from Nehru. By the time Ayub Khan came to power in Pakistan’s first military coup, and stabilized his regime, Nehru began to fade.
Ayub Khan went to war with Lal Bahadur Shastri; ironically, the two established a certain rapport during the post-conflict peace talks in Tashkent. It was, tragically, too late, for Shastri did not survive Tashkent. Yahya Khan’s shallow obstinacy could hardly be good news for either his country or the subcontinent; his legacy is well-known. Theoretically, the Indira Gandhi-Zulfikar Ali Bhutto relationship held promise. Both were populist in their politics and sophisticated in their personal lives. But they spent their time mopping up the dire consequences of war.
The oddest couple was surely Ziaul Haq and Morarji Desai. They had more in common than you might think. Both were 19th century prohibitionist puritans whose efforts at social reform energized a sectarian base. Both were pro-American in their policies, Desai by ideological preference and Zia by utilitarian choice. They came to power at the same time, but since only one of them was a democrat, they left power on different dates and through different routes.
Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi shared a similar inheritance as well as a similar problem: they were disliked by their entrenched power centres, and were destabilized when they tried to reach out to each other.
The nineties disappeared in alternate cycles of uncertainty and instability. The two bombwallahs were the second odd couple: Atal Behari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif. They took one dramatic leap forward with the Lahore agreement, and were equally stunned when the leap ended up in a somersault. The relationship between Vajpayee and Pervez Musharraf
was always clouded on the Indian side by the memory of Kargil, in which trust was the first casualty.
Their faces at the first official meal of the infamous Agra summit, a lunch in Delhi, were worth a thousand pictures. Vajpayee’s face was ice, Musharraf’s was stone. Lal Krishna Advani’s face, for those who might be interested, was granite punctuated by two very careful eyes.
Trust began to develop only during Vajpayee’s second gambit for peace, which went to ground when time ran out on him. Manmohan Singh and Musharraf, having developed the trust, have time on their side. Experience, their own and that of others, should warn them that time is an unreliable ally, always prone to slip and crash on the unforeseen.
It is boring to repeat that a terrible tragedy can be converted into a momentous opportunity. But was the general running ahead of history when he made the most radical, even audacious, offer in six decades of confrontation over Kashmir? Analysts have suggested that by military training General Musharraf is a better tactician than a strategist. However, the offer to melt the border that separates two sides of Kashmir so that people can help one another in the aftermath of a numbing earthquake is a strategic masterstroke. It was made in the context of a crisis, but the idea has already been stretched towards an undefined timeframe. Is this the way to a solution of the one problem that has prevented India and Pakistan from being natural, friendly neighbours?
Much depends on how you define a solution. Is the solution about geography, or is it about people? Is it about Kashmir or Kashmiris? Geography is possessive, acquisitive. Once we shift the radar to the problems of Kashmiris, and how to minimize them if we cannot end them, then ideas, options and opportunities open up.
General Musharraf says that the world is aware of his ideas, and uses some key words: identify ... demilitarize ... self-governance ... superstructure (to oversee the process). Each of these terms is loaded with snares and infested with barbed wire from the past, not the least of them being identity. The map of Jammu and Kashmir in October 1947, before the first war started, was vastly different from what it is today, and I am not talking about the Line of Control, which came into being at the end of that war and has not shifted since.
Demilitarization will require trust between institutions much more than between individuals, however important the latter might be. Self-governance is a comfortable thought; the means of achieving the authority that will govern less so. Will such governments be democratically elected? Definitions of democracy are not the same on either side of the Line of Control, and indeed differ sharply within Pakistan.
Democracy does not mean the same thing to Pervez Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. Long before thoughts of superstructure engage us, the structure might be straddled with hurdles. And so on. But what is undeniable is that General Musharraf has thrown an innovative lasso across the divide in a search for answers.
The critical fact of the Indian response was its immediacy. The suggestion had barely been made when Delhi said yes. A principle has been established, and we are already way beyond a bus route between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad. Yasin Malik has already tested the principle, and has reached Pakistan-occupied Kashmir with funds for relief. A year ago, the idea of Yasin Malik, or any member of the Hurriyat, visiting Pakistan was considered unacceptable by Delhi. Today we are discussing means of normalizing contacts between a divided people. If there is some applause in the air it is only because both hands are clapping.
It is my view that the dialogue between India and Pakistan works when handled in incremental, digestible portions. Sometimes the increments are large, as in this practical move towards soft borders, but, since they are unencumbered by other demands, they become, slowly, digestible. The present chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed (who may not be chief minister by the time Eid comes along) has suggested to Delhi that five crossing points be identified to turn the idea into reality. Another step, that is, in the digestion process. If you continue to change reality on the ground, minds will continue to open at the higher reaches of power.
Suspicion is a fog. The dense Kashmir fog is streaked with too much blood. A fog never lifts suddenly, except in fantasy. It clears slowly, invisibly, and only if the environment improves. The Kashmir fog has overpowered the day and seized the night. But it is in the ability of the leaders of India and Pakistan to improve the environment.
This subcontinent suffered a political earthquake nearly six decades ago. The last bit of uncleared debris lies in Kashmir. A natural earthquake has given General Musharraf and Dr Manmohan Singh what can only be described as a God-sent chance to clear that debris.
The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.