November 18, 2006	Saturday	Shawwal 25, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, Nov 17: CDA demolition squads are out in the city pulling down kiosks and roadside tea stalls serving the poor of the city to make it secure for its VVIPs. So far 13 kiosks and seven tea stalls have been levelled in the first phase of the campaign, starting from Sector I-8 and to be carried through to I-12.

There are 387 kiosks and 192 tea stalls on its hit list.

In effect, the present administrators of “Islamabad the Beautiful” will be destroying what their predecessors had built some 14 years ago.

CDA managers had decided to set up these facilities in 1992, perhaps with the needs of the construction workers building the ever expanding city in their mind.

The facilities were rented out to people from low-income group but the then political government is said to have waived off the rent in 1994 “on the quiet”. These eating places provided not only cheap food to the labourers and lower middle class salaried people but also jobs to the same class.

Even some graduates are found among the estimated 5,500- strong Khoka workforce, trying to supplement the incomes from their low-paid regular jobs.

“CDA’s demolition campaign will demolish the lives of all these people,” President Islamabad Khoka Association Abdul Aziz Abbasi told Dawn.

“We are being uprooted and deprived of our means of livelihood in the name of security,” he said, asking: “How do we become a security risk after all these years of untroubled business?”

If the CDA was piqued at losing its rent, the matter can be negotiated as our members are ready to revive it,” said Mr Abbasi.

He appealed to President Pervez Musharraf to intervene “for the sake of job security of thousands of families”.

If the kiosks and roadside tea stalls had to be demolished being “really a security risk”, he said their owners should be provided alternative places of business.

A Khoka owner, Riasat Abbasi thought it “strange that the government is eliminating the source of earning of the poor in the name of eliminating terrorism”.