In the spirit of Ramazan

THE essence and sanctity of Eid-ul-Fitr following the sacred month of Ramazan remains supreme; sadly, it coincides this year with the shattering aftermath of the calamity of October 8. The tragedy is unprecedented in both human and material terms, but the overwhelming response to it has been equally unprecedented. Thousands are working day and night to provide relief and bring comfort to those affected. Professionals and volunteers are labouring in tricky terrain and chilling weather to provide medical care, food supplies and shelter. The task of rehabilitation is enormous, and it will take many months for a semblance of normal life to be restored in the worst-hit areas. It is times like these that test the mettle of a nation: they also bring home the lessons faith seeks to teach through abstinence and sharing in months such as Ramazan.

Eid-ul-Fitr is so called because before offering the traditional congregational prayers of thanksgiving, those who have fasted are asked to give a prescribed quantity of food grains or the equivalent price in money to those in want. The symbolism of this injunction is to round off the exercise of Ramazan’s self-restraint by obliging the more fortunate to remember the deprived in their midst. It is remarkable how this spirit of fellow feeling moved high and low as the full horror of the earthquake disaster began to unfold. While some religious leaders debated abstruse questions of sin and retribution, many religious organizations, political parties, NGOs and ordinary people swung into action, moved by the suffering of their compatriots. This was the best proof that they could give of their compassion, of their love for fellow human beings, of their readiness to share and sacrifice — virtues that man is repeatedly enjoined to uphold and practise. This was supreme proof of the human spirit rising above rituals and the entanglements of daily life in help of others.

Can this sentiment and motivation be preserved? This is the question before everyone today on Eid-ul-Fitr. Life will not be the same for those who have been left bruised in body and soul. Thousands of children have been orphaned, women have been widowed. They are now the nation’s responsibility. We would have been better equipped to shoulder this burden if, even in normal times, we had been persuaded to lead less wasteful lives. Unfortunately, extravagance and profligacy have become an ingrained characteristic of our establishment classes. With it has come an arrogant belief in our own superiority and infallibility. Inevitably this has led to a weakening of our sense of social responsibility. We might now have been jolted into realizing how woefully we have ignored the needs of those who live forgotten lives in the hills and mountains that we project as alluring tourist destinations. Many of our district administrators and police chiefs, ensconced in their chairs at district headquarters, may not even have heard of, let alone visited, the villages and hamlets in their jurisdiction whose names have now surfaced in the news.

If governments had been more concerned about the welfare of the poorer sections of the community, the poverty-ridden hill people in particular, the suffering may have been less. Perhaps the past month may have taught us to be more caring and our rulers to be a little more modest in their claims of good governance.

In search of tents & medicines

REPORTS suggest that a significant proportion of the tents, especially those locally made, put up in the ‘tent cities’ are not only inadequate in terms of numbers but will not be able to stand up to the severe winter just round the corner. A relief worker who spent time in Balakot recently told a foreign newspaper that the tents used by quake victims were inadequate because they were not thick enough to provide protection against the severe winter and also that many were not made of water-proof material. With temperatures already falling well below the freezing point in the mountain villages, the relief commission will have to procure winterized tents made of water-proof heavy material quickly enough or risk thousands of deaths in the coming months.

On the medical front too, the situation does not seem very encouraging either. There is a shortage of some essential medicines and the relief commission has already made an urgent appeal for antibiotics, painkillers and operating beds. In addition to that, eyewitness accounts from some hospitals set up in the affected areas and even in Islamabad suggest that many of the injured whose wounds were initially dressed still have those old bandages, as a result of which their wounds are becoming infected. Also, a significant rise in the number of survivors with spinal injuries has been detected. The magnitude of the crisis can only be kept in check by proper coordination between the relief commission and those in a position to provide aid — be they donors, medics or student volunteers — as to what is needed to help the survivors. At the same time, the government needs to impress on foreign and local donors that while one disaster already occurred on Oct. 8, another of equal magnitude may well be in the making in the days ahead if relief and rehabilitation requirements, especially with regard to shelter and medical treatment, are not met well in time.

Pakistanis in Guantanamo

PAKISTAN may be an important ally of Washington in its war on terror, but surely officials in Islamabad should be demonstrating some concern for the welfare of Pakistani prisoners currently detained at America’s notorious prison camp for suspected Islamic militants at Guantanamo. According to reports, about 40 Pakistanis are still behind bars while 21 have been released. However, since the American authorities are loath to give out details, it is unclear how they are faring in prison, although the on-going hunger strike at Guantanamo and the recent suicide attempt by a prisoner indicate that conditions there remain oppressive. Only a handful of prisoners have been charged but the jail authorities have put restrictions on visits to Guantanamo by human rights activists and the media. In fact, some UN officials have declined an invitation to visit the premises saying that the bar on private interviews with prisoners would obstruct a factual assessment of the situation.

Washington holds that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to Guantanamo inmates as they were “unlawful combatants” and not prisoners-of-war. The fact remains that these prisoners have nationalities and the governments of the countries to which they belong should have access to information about them, especially since most have spent months and years in prison without trial or being formally charged. However, this is not going to happen unless these governments put pressure on the US to stop holding prisoners indefinitely, especially in the light of a US court decision last year that Guantanamo inmates could challenge their detention, a verdict that should have ended their being in legal limbo. But despite a pile of legal petitions, Washington remains reluctant to expedite the process of law, thus prolonging the prisoners’ suffering. It is time that the international community jointly opposed Washington’s blatant violation of rights of prisoners who do not belong to American soil.

Quake: the challenge ahead

GARHI DOPATTA used to be a bucolic village near Muzaffarabad where its simple mountain-folk lived by breeding livestock and growing subsistence grain. After October 8, this village has been transformed into a rubble-filled quake-pit, where the stench of disease, dust and death still hangs over the hamlet like a cloud.

Nearly four weeks later, the remnants of children’s vests, a woman’s bright shawl, still flap forlornly from the pyres of stone that turned into tombs for hundreds trapped in the debris of the earthquake that shook our world.

Yet in the midst of these valleys of death, the human will to survive and regenerate is as pervasive as the aid struggling to reach remote areas. Set in the dramatically beautiful Himalayan terrain like a small jewel of the Jhelum Valley, Garhi Dopatta is also one of the many sites for a field hospital, where the air is thick with the choppy staccato of helicopter rotors plying up and down from Islamabad to ferry patients on makeshift stretchers.

Old and young lie on the helipad having undergone first-aid and emergency operations by a team of doctors from Karachi and Lahore, mostly young women and men who work with speed and focus in the rudimentary theatres set up for them at the American field-hospital managed by the Pakistan army. Most of the patients are women and children with back or spinal injuries from falling structures. Others lie in unseeing shock or septicemia from wounds left to fester from the distances they have clambered to get to this helipad-hospital filled with MI-6 work-horse choppers and sturdy US Black Hawks.

Better facilities are available in Bagh, where a team of Jacobabad doctors have set up several medical wards in front of what used to be the Bagh Medical Centre. Like most other structures in these affected areas of Azad Kashmir, this building too is either uninhabitable, or a snarl of stone and steel on the ground. International and local medical teams at the helipad, tell a bleaker story.

The army colonel in charge says he needs more tents, but does not know where and when he will get them, conceding that he could never have managed without the relentless Dr Morgan and his colleagues from Humanity Aid in the UK. The medicines are well-stocked but they worry about scabies and measles spreading rapidly as everyone huddles together in the night in the cold.

Like Bagh, and other desolate towns in the valley, Muzaffarabad, the capital of AK, is a symptom of all that is right and wrong with the relief effort. More than any other foreign workers, the Turks are everywhere, with their tents, para-medics and relief goods. American hardware and manpower on the field mingles with British expertise in rescue work, while the Germans, Canadians, Japanese, Chinese, Qatari, French and UAE units can be seen struggling in sub-human conditions alongside aid workers from 120 other nations, all toiling without worry for their own comfort.

Political parties, NGOs and individuals set up their own distribution life-lines, but all equally warn against the onset of winter. The army’s aviation units fly endless sorties to evacuate patients to Islamabad and bring in relief supplies to the frontlines of this battle against time, but hordes of their land-based colleagues seem lacking a direction when it comes to distributing the aid piling up at the army base-camps.

The good news is that in the middle of this epic disaster, the human capacity to regenerate is legion and stories of courage, hope and philanthropy outweigh the looting, the greed and the cupidity that mars this narrative. There is no clash of civilizations in this valley of death and every nationality is putting humanity before race, religion or ethnicity. The bad news, of course, is that thousands remain outside the official relief loop and many are victims of the calamity as well as poor planning.

The government is struggling against daunting odds, with no finger on how many dead or even injured. Field workers and international organizations pitch the chilling figure between 100,000 and 150,000. The UN reckons at over 10,000 children orphaned, while larger numbers are estimated dead.

The ILO has found 1.1 million unemployed and 3.5 million are homeless. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan begs donors to step up to the plate because he only has a fraction of the $12 billion needed to rebuild what the earthquake destroyed in a few minutes. As it stands, the government only knows where 45 per cent of the funding is coming from, with $4 billion dollars still part of a pledge-drive and a vague announcement of generating $8 billion from the private sector.

The Geneva appeal generated $580 million while earlier international pledges were said to be at $620 million. There is clearly a fiscal resource-gap between money available or pledged and the amounts required to rehabilitate and rebuild. Even if essential infrastructure, oil, gas, power and water reservoirs remain unaffected, as does the manufacturing and agricultural base of the country, it would be short-sighted to assume that the public sector development programme will not be affected, or that a fiscal deficit won’t arise.

With no cap on domestic oil prices and inflation on the rise again, Pakistan is between a rock and a hard place in more ways than one. Once the ballast goes out of the story as an international news flashpoint, replaced already by other disasters like hurricane Wilma and implosion in Iraq, global interest will dry up faster than we can say ‘donor fatigue’. Yet the government has still not announced a post-disaster mini-budget to the National Assembly, nor any national austerity drive in tandem with the fund-appeal.

By now the National Economic Council (NEC) should have been convened and its recommendations due by early November. The Planning Commission should have been involved with detailed directives to involve communities and stakeholders in rebuilding plans. Subsidised loans should have been mobilized through micro-credit organizations and the House Building Finance Corporation to be provided to individuals and communities in a one-window operation to rebuild homes.

Cash grants for rebuilding businesses or buildings can begin with World Bank and ADB assistance available on the ground. Zakat funds, too, can be more effectively utilized and generated if the Earthquake Rehabilitation Authority’s funds are placed under a bi-partisan parliamentary commission headed by a retired senior judge, not a general. Fiscal space for rebuilding can still be created by jettisoning all the CM’s discretionary and other plans, as well as by scrapping all other overlapping provincial developing plans for NWFP at least.

The first fat-trimming measures the government can take is to announce an immediate freeze on wasteful spending such as laudatory media supplements, non-essential foreign trips for government functionaries and ministers and the 14 per cent defence outlay increase announced in the last budget. Ten per cent cuts can be instituted in every department except health and education. When a large part of the country is affected the government has no business spending millions of rupees on international seminars highlighting the General’s ‘enlightened moderation’ policies or building a new GHQ. The National Assembly of Pakistan, which is being run for barely six-seven hours a week for the last two months, should be paying its members only for those hours, costing the country an average of five full working days when in session.

General Musharraf, who occupies COAS House should take the lead in vacating the President’s House for which the nation’s taxpayers dish out Rs 700 million a year, to convert it into a medical camp and rehabilitation centre for the orphaned and the destitute.

The second challenge Pakistan is facing is more difficult to confront. An earthquake is a natural calamity that cannot be predicted. It, therefore requires a society built on shared ground rules and meticulous planning. Given that Pakistan’s major cities and towns, are located on more than one global faultline, it would be suicidal to ignore existing building codes and to institute new ones according to the seismic zoning of the area.

The military government has to allow civilian parliaments and its local government counterparts to make an example of violating contractors and building mafias. Sincerity of purpose can easily be demonstrated by issuing FIRs against all the contractors who were involved in the construction of the innumerable government buildings, schools and hospitals that collapsed like a house of cards. Corrupt officials who sanctioned such structures, irrespective of their political protection or partisan pedigree, should be accorded the same exemplary justice.

A National Disaster Management plan urgently needs to be put in place, but can only have meaning if it reflects the voices of all political and non-partisan stakeholders. If General Musharraf is indeed committed to healing the wounds of a traumatized nation, he will allow the leaders of all political parties to sit at the table when he asks for an APC on relief and rehabilitation. No one individual’s personal animus should be allowed to narrow the mobilizational options of the Pakistani people in the face of such a tragedy. If he wants all political parties to do more than assist in relief work on the ground, he should not just invite, but ensure the safe return of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

Time is running out for the cold, hungry and destitute in the mountains. Let us see if the general can put Pakistan before personal likes and dislikes.

The writer is a member of the Kashmir Committee in the National Assembly.

sherryrehman@gmail.com