| November 28, 2006 | Tuesday | Ziqa'ad 6, 1427 |
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Women’s bill and Musharraf
Disaster management strategy
Growing materialism
IDEAS 2006
Third world war
The great divide
Lest we forget
KGB spy
Tree plantation drive
Motor vehicle insurance
Free at last
Readers are requested to restrict their comments to a maximum of 400 words. We reserve the right to edit letters for reasons of clarity and space. Letters, including those by e-mail, should carry the complete postal address of the sender. The views expressed in these columns do not necessarily reflect the views of the newspaper.—Editor
DARFUR is a glaring example of the malignant hypocrisy eating the Muslim world from within. While we wax eloquent about the horrors being visited upon Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya and Palestine, nary a whisper is heard about the holocaust in Darfur. When it comes to Muslim killing Muslim, we appear to be deaf, blind and mute. At least 300,000 people have died and over two million have been driven from their homes and live in constant fear of rape and pillage.
The Darfur conflict is complex and has never been put in proper perspective. Western governments have portrayed it as genocide of the natives of Darfur by camel-herding Arabs backed by the Sudanese government while the Sudanese government claims there are no mass killings taking place and that the violence is caused by rebels backed by Chad and is beyond their control. The truth lies somewhere in between: starting with Muammar Qadhafi’s espousal of Arab supremacy in the 1960s and 70s and Arab and native African hostility gradually developed. Many conflicts were born out of this illogical rivalry, the latest being in Darfur.
With the start of the Second Sudanese Civil War and the failure of the May Agreement between the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Sudanese government, the rebels started using new tactics and won several big battles with the Sudanese army. Chad and Eritrea, who have long eyed Sudanese oil resources began funding and arming more rebel recruits. To counter this, the Sudanese government began arming the ‘Janjaweed’— camel-herding Arabs. The janjaweed fought and defeated the Sudanese rebels and even the Chad army in several skirmishes. With rebel support coming from within Darfur as well, the wrath of the Janjaweed began to turn towards Darfurians as well and unfortunately the violence became more and more indiscriminate and more and more brutal.
The need of the hour is that the OIC urge all the players in this conflict — the Sudanese government, the Sudanese rebels, Chad and Eritrea — to cease hostilities and start negotiations. The OIC should involve the African Union as well and the situation must be treated as an emergency.
If the Muslim world fails the Muslims of Darfur and leaves the responsibility that is theirs to America or Nato, they will have no right to criticise apathy and cruelty anywhere else and neither will they have any right to bemoan western interference in their own countries as they themselves invite it by their impotence and inaction.
KHWAJA KHUSRO TARIQ
Bellmore, USA
THE government and particularly Gen Musharraf have done well by pushing through the Women’s Bill in parliament. Many reforms are needed to protect Pakistan’s cruelly oppressed women. Although the Hudood laws need to be totally scrapped rather than reformed, nevertheless the present is a small step in the right direction.
This time the general insisted on making his will prevail. This is in sharp distinction to his previous retreats, such as on the blasphemy issue or on the matter of the religious column in Pakistani passports. One wishes that he had been equally firm on those matters because his every retreat emboldens the fanatics who wish to drag our society into the dark ages.
While the decision to make a stand this time is laudable, the general needs to know that he badly needs allies to fight the onslaught of Talibanic forces and an emergent fanatical orthodoxy in every part of Pakistan. This is an enormous task, especially in view of the dangerous global climate created by the American aggression in Iraq.
Therefore, he must overcome his visceral hatred for the PPP leaders who, in a sense, are his natural allies. Perhaps they do need to be taken to task, but the army does not have clean hands either. Accountability has become a joke, and the vast empires owned by army men are there for all to see.
Gen Musharraf must permit all political parties from every side of the spectrum to canvass freely before the general election of 2007. The absence of political mobilisation, which one can trace to the decades of military rule, has led to a frightening apathy among the people on every social and political issue.
Deprived of the right to collectively organise or to make themselves heard, thinking people have stopped taking interest in matters that vitally affect society. The vacuum has been filled by those who offer rewards in heaven and encourage ill-formed minds towards violence.
Pakistan’s most urgent need is to get its people involved again. For this, the ban on trade unions, student unions, and political activities must end. One hopes that the general is listening.
PERVEZ HOODBHOY
Quaid-i-Azam University
Islamabad
DOES not the provincial assembly’s proposal to create a ‘disaster management system’ (Dawn, Nov 7) imply that we already have in place a ‘normal life management system’?
To most citizens, the latter is not visible. Our utilities (water, electricity, sewerage) and our infrastructure (roads, transport, parks, playgrounds, schools, hospitals, beaches, police stations, fire-stations, government facilities, etc) and our governance systems (law and order, political institutions, etc.) in urban and rural areas are in a mess.
Many of our disasters are man-made: flooding of Karachi’s coastal areas (Clifton’s Bath Island, etc) owing to blocking of/construction on storm-drains and outfalls, severe smog in the air from industries and vehicles, reduction of fish and marine life breeding grounds by destruction of mangrove forests, pollution of the sea with 300 million gallons per day of sewage and occasional oil-spills, prospective collapse of illegal and poorly-constructed buildings during a moderate earthquake, blocking of roads with structurally poor billboards that collapse during storms, fires that break out in badly-electrified commercial/industrial buildings and the like.
These disasters would be much reduced if Sindh’s and Karachi’s ‘normal life management systems’ were in order.
May we suggest that before we develop workable tactics for ‘disasters’, we implement a strategy for ‘normal life’: proper town and country planning, safe building construction, adequate utilities and physical/social infrastructure, strict law and order implementation? If these can be made to work properly, the scope of government agencies and private institutions can then be expanded to plan and strategise for emergencies and disasters.
ROLAND DESOUZA
Karachi
THIS is to call the public’s attention to a matter which seems trivial in our everyday lives but whose long-term repercussions can be devastating. In a world where economic growth is taking place at a staggering rate, everyone is becoming materialistic with the passage of each day. Consumption patterns have immensely changed and there’s an increasing demand for more and more goods.
Why don’t we realise that this planet’s resources are limited and that they cannot meet endless human wants?
As humans, we owe a responsibility to nature which not only includes natural resources but also animals and other living species. But what are we doing?
We feel pride in consuming leather products made out of animal skins, we clear large forests every year to make way for industries which quench our insatiable thirst for products, we spend millions of rupees each year on imported luxury items which are often nothing more than white elephants — the list is endless.
Oil spills, unruly pollution, and so forth are all manifestations of the self-indulgent and egocentric human activities that greatly disturb the ecosystem. We ignore the fact that as a result of all this, eventually it is the human race that will suffer the most. Global warming and hurricanes like Katrina are some examples.
The wave of globalisation is to a large extent responsible for this. Multinational corporations (MNC) through advertising and other marketing tactics have promoted a culture whereby consumers spend crazily. I am not against MNCs but the culture that these seem to foster.
What is needed is a sense of responsibility on the part of each one of us so that ‘Mother Earth’ isn’t harmed by our activities. Economic development should be sustainable and environment friendly so that the coming generations can live at ease.
ALEENA AMIR
Lahore
THIS refers to the arms for peace exhibition called IDEAS 2006. Pakistan should continue such events as would certainly help build a soft image of Pakistan and the megacity of Karachi.
However, the location of the Expo Centre at the roundabout of Hasan Square is not appropriate for such events where top class security is mandatory.
This exhibition, along with its arrangements, causes great discomfort to public since Hasan Square is a hub of residential and commercial buildings.
I would suggest that new exhibition halls be built in the premises of PAF Museum on Karsaz Road. This would be the appropriate place for VIP movement, security arrangement, etc.
But until such time that an alternative place is decided for such mega events, we Pakistanis are ready to undergo difficulties and problems for the greater national interest.
However, may we request the authorities concerned to keep the general public updated on how much worth of orders we received and how much foreign exchange would be added to the country’s poor foreign exchange reserve?
DR HASAN THARANI
Karachi
THE British prime minister says that the Iraq war is a disaster. Gen Richard Dannat recommends that British troops should leave Iraq soon, as their presence was worsening the situation as “moral vacuum at home breeds Islamic extremism”, while US Gen Abizaid claims that the “rise of Islamic militancy will lead to the third world war”, thus justifying the stay of US forces in Iraq “till the region acquires more resilience”. Apparently, he wants more bloodshed while siphoning more Iraqi oil to retrieve some war expenses.
He is unaware that the third world war is already going on since 2001, claiming millions of Muslim lives, for the self-created and totally imaginary justification of responsibility for 9/11 and WMDs.
Honest people in Britain and the US have lost patience due to such tremendous loss of human lives, including thousands of US and British lives, and have rightly voted for a way to get out of the quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Perhaps the earlier policy was for marking time to acquire whatever possible oil advantage out of Iraq and possible oil pipeline through Afghanistan. It is now clear that both these western interests are not possible to achieve through military operations and bloodshed, leading to reconciliation and inter-faith dialogue with the main parties in both the countries, through Iran, Syria, OIC or Pakistan.
Pakistan had earlier tried to offer advice, through the clerics, who had helped the Taliban in their education in Pakistani madressahs during Soviet invasion, which did not succeed, leading to the devastating war. Perhaps now it might be more difficult to convince the Taliban through the present set-up.
However, diplomacy has no dead ends. Maybe some way could still be found for such a reconciliation in Iraq and Afghanistan, through some change of policy to end this third world war through reconciliation and direct dialogue with the real leaders of all such parties and not through the pro-US leaders, who have no roots amongst the people.
It is, therefore, hoped that as a first step the media war and misperceptions against Muslims and Islam be stopped and positive efforts made to end the vast human rights violations going on against Muslims in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya and Kashmir, as the 21st century Christian or Judiac holy war, to achieve reconciliation through dialogue sponsored by some reliable and sincere intermediaries, coupled with interfaith dialogue.
S.M.H.Rizvi
Karachi
COLUMNIST Irfan Husain writes (Nov 25): “Few of those who today call themselves Deobandis would know that according to the Leiden Encyclopaedia of Islam, the name is a possible corruption of ‘Devi-ban’ or ‘forest of the goddess”.
The etymology of Deoband is quite different. ‘Deo’ in north Indian languages means god or divine. This comes from Sanskrit ‘deva’. It is cognate with Latin/English and other Indo-European languages with the word ‘divine’.
‘Band’ comes from Sanskrit bandhayati — ‘to bind’ from which also comes ‘bandhu’— friend, as well as to shut down as in shopkeepers observing a ‘bandh day’ in the subcontinent. This is also cognate with words in different Indo-European languages for example English ‘to bind’ or to ‘bond’ or ‘bund’ in German. Deoband does not come from ‘Devi van’
V.C. VIJAYARAGHAVAN
London, UK
APROPOS of Ardeshir Cowasjee’s column ‘Lest we forget’ (Nov 26), Professor Abdus Salam was indeed, as Cowasjee says, a “great human being and by far one of the greatest men Pakistan has produced”. The writer also says that Prof Salam was a “humble and devout Muslim”.
That he may have been, but what Cowasjee neglected to mention was that Dr Salam was a great patriot. He could have lived in and acquired the nationality of any country in the world and it would be proud of having him as one of its citizens, yet Salam retained his Pakistani passport to the end of his life.
We should have his statue erected in the biggest squares of the country. Instead, there isn’t even a measly road named after him in the provincial town he came from.
To add insult to injury, his body was flown into the country at the dead of night and buried secretly like a criminal’s.
A few years ago a notable man from the literary establishment in London said to me that he hoped Pakistan produced hundreds of geniuses, “but I hazard a guess,” he said, “that not one of them shall be awarded the Nobel Prize seeing the dreadful treatment it gave to its first Laureate, which was an insult to the Prize, the Nobel Committee, the people of Sweden and their king and much of the rest of the civilised world”.
ABDULLAH HUSSEIN
Lahore
THIS refers to Ardeshir Cowasjee’s column about the life and achievements of Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, Dr Abdus Salam.
He extols the great physicist as the only Muslim to have won the Nobel prize: “ So far the sole Muslim to have won this award of great merit.”
This is incorrect; Dr Naguib Mahfooz, the Arab Muslim writer and intellectual won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.
And did Mr Cowasjee write the column before the trail-blazing Bangladeshi Muslim banker Dr Mohammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize only some weeks ago? We expect Mr Cowasjee to be accurate in order to be convincing
MAZHAR M. CHINOY
Lahore
THE suspected poisoning of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive material is very significant.
If confirmed, let us hope the world will not forget that this first step in using radioactive material for terrorism/political purposes has not been taken by Tamil Tigers, Naxalites, the Al Qaeda or any other Arab or Muslim organisation but rather by a Christian country in the developed world.
MAJID
Cambridge, UK
THE United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in partnership with countries around the globe, initially in the African continent, has targeted to plant one billion trees, beginning from 30 million trees in Africa, to offset the impact of carbon dioxide.
They believe that the successful plantation of billion trees would soak up some 250 million tones of carbon dioxide at present warming the atmosphere.
Pakistan, which is lagging far behind even in Asia in case of size of its forests and keeping in view the lukewarm attitude, specially of the Karachi city government, it appears that we will never be able to achieve even half of the target of plantation.
It is a general observation that weather in Pakistan has changed to a great extent during the last decade and most of the time of the year remains hot and humid.
It is matter of great concern that instead of encouraging people to plant a maximum number of plants to offset the impact of carbon dioxide, hundreds of fully grown-up trees have been chopped down in Karachi.
Also hundreds of precious trees (Sheesham) spread over 7,500 acres of land acquired from the Punjab government near Khanewal for the purpose of building ammunition depot were chopped down and sold without realising the importance of trees.
The provincial minister at the floor of the assembly tried to protect the misdeed by saying that these trees were infected.
SYED ALI AHMAD ALVI
Karachi
IN Ramazan my car had an accident and the very next day it was reported to the insurance company for repairing job procedures.
From that, different sorts of troubles started taking place, such as disapproval of repair estimate, arguments with surveyor, fake promises of providing the parts of vehicle by the surveyor, repair started after Eid and is still under way and 40 per cent depreciation of the newly-registered, reconditioned vehicle.
My vehicle of model 2002, reconditioned and registered in January 2006 was insured by EFU, under comprehensive terms. But after the accident, at the time of survey it was said that I have to pay 40 per cent amount of parts.
Can anybody tell me why is it written in the policy comprehensive and deductible nil?
I request the relevant authorities to look into the matter. At the time of insurance they ask for charges and make several promises regarding insurance of the vehicle and finally fail to fulfil any of them.
SHAHBAZ SIDDIQUI
Karachi
The president deserves a ‘well done’ from every justice-loving Pakistani. His compassion and muscle both seem to have stood him in good stead as he has ended the torment of Mirza Tahir by commuting his death sentence and nudged the parliament into finally removing the oppressive, almost savage aspects of the Hudood laws.
All I can add to the kudos is that he ought to think of the gargantuan lurking issues that need free use of these attributes and build on the respect and admiration this has brought him.
WASIF M. KHAN
Lahore
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