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| December 19, 2007 | Wednesday | Zilhaj 8, 1428 |
Avoidable road accidents
Wheat flour shortage
OTHER VOICES - European Press
FOR the second time in a decade and a half, the international community has promised billions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority but with no signs that an independent Palestinian state will come into being even in the distant future. In 1993, after Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed the Declaration of Principles (DoP), the rich nations pledged billions of dollars to reconstruct Palestine. However, Israel never tried to faithfully implement the withdrawal timetable, and a solemn agreement that expected the final settlement to be in place in April 1999 went up in smoke. On Saturday, international donors meeting in Paris promised an aid package of $7.4bn to the Palestinian Authority in a move that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the “last hope” to save President Mahmoud Abbas’s government from bankruptcy. Strange, however, should be the word for French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner’s view that “the real winner is the Palestinian state”. Where is the Palestinian state?
One can now clearly see a pattern in how the US-led “international community” circumvents an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and, thus, pre-empts the emergence of an independent Palestinian state. The basic strategy is to focus on other questions to divert attention from the core issue — Palestinian self-determination. In the ’90s and the early part of this decade, the US and Israel focussed on PA reform as a precondition for reviving the peace process, insisting on Arafat having a prime minister. This was done, but Ariel Sharon responded by tearing up the DoP and reoccupying the West Bank and Gaza without any American censure. Last year, the US, the EU and Israel froze all non-humanitarian assistance to the PA to destroy the elected Hamas government.
Last month, the 44-nation conference at Annapolis, called at President George Bush’s initiative, pledged to create a Palestinian state by the end of next year. Within a week, Israel had sabotaged it, saying Tel Aviv was not bound by the Annapolis deadline. Monday’s Paris pledge is part of the continuing farce which aims at obfuscating the real issue, and the real issue is undoing one of the 20th century’s greatest acts of injustice, allowing the Palestinian refugees to return home and creating a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. The money pledged at Paris is not only not going to create a Palestinian state, its efficacy is doubtful, and humanitarian agencies are questioning the utility of such a massive aid package. According to Oxfam, aid efforts already in place are being hampered by Israel’s restrictions on movement and the blockade of the Gaza Strip. This is all part of the pattern designed to hide the Palestinian tragedy. Israel wants, and manages to get, time to continue building and expanding settlements, confiscate more Palestinian land and destroy the native people’s sources of livelihood, and thus alter the territories’ Arab-Islamic character to destroy the very idea of a Palestinian state.
ACCORDING to a joint study, a staggering 33,000 road accidents occurred in Karachi over a one-year period in 2006-2007. This is a sad comment on the manner in which our traffic woes have multiplied. Most of the 780 fatalities resulting from the accidents could have been avoided with better road planning, implementation of the rules and less carelessness by pedestrians. It is plain that the traffic police have also failed to check hazardous driving practices. Bribes and connections with influential people or organisations often provide an escape route for violators of road rules. In such an atmosphere of corruption and partisan attitudes it is no surprise that traffic laws are violated with such frequency and impunity. Thanks to the car leasing schemes that have unleashed thousands of more cars on the roads and the failure of the government to provide the city with a mass transit scheme the situation is steadily becoming worse. In addition, many accident victims — and these include, by and large, pedestrians and motorcyclists — are careless and do not observe safety rules such as wearing helmets or crossing the road when the signal is red for cars. Schoolchildren, whose schools are located in heavily congested areas, are particularly vulnerable.
But even if the authorities set about correcting these deficiencies by imposing heavy penalties on rash drivers, holding lectures on road safety in schools and ensuring that traffic police are always around to help children cross the road, there would still be the problem of poor traffic engineering. Of late, the work undertaken for the construction of flyovers and underpasses has led to alternative routes being planned that are not really suited to heavy vehicular traffic. In addition, the creation of signal-free roads without ensuring an adequate number of pedestrian bridges or zebra crossings has resulted in numerous people getting hit by cars that would previously stop before a red signal. This state of affairs is exacerbated by encroachments as well as seasonal rains which make large portions of the road impassable and leave potholes in their wake. In these circumstances, it is the duty of the city government and other relevant departments to work in close coordination with the traffic engineering bureau so that safety standards can be observed. If such cooperation is late in coming, the number of traffic accidents in the city will continue to multiply.
THERE seems to be nothing that the government can do to ensure that every morsel that we eat is not costlier than the one that we had before it. The rate of increase in the price of wheat flour is phenomenal and can easily match the speed at which we receive official pronouncements that much is being done to buck the trend. Only three days ago, the local government in Lahore revealed that it was flooding the market with hundreds of thousands of extra bags of wheat to be sold at subsidised rates so as to keep flour prices in check. A day earlier, the same government had announced that it was keeping a vigilant eye on the movement of wheat flour out of Lahore so that enough of it remained available for the residents of the city. Yet news reports about the supply and price trends at the local Sunday bazaars say there were not enough flour bags to go around the entire city. Almost half of these bazaars are reported to have no bags at all and at the other half where they were available their number was so small that people had to wait in long queues before being able to get their hands on a flour bag.
On other days of the week, the supply situation of the commodity remains equally murky to keep its prices spiralling. The local government found in a recent survey of Lahore’s markets that wheat flour was not available at 1,000 sale points out of 2,500 points surveyed. This is despite the fact that the local authorities have convinced the provincial government to provide subsidised wheat to local flour millers not on the basis of the number of flour mills in Lahore, as is the normal practice, but on the basis of the number of people living in the city. By all indications, this hopeless situation will persist for long. With the next wheat crop still some months away from harvesting, people in Lahore should be well advised to keep sufficient money at hand to buy enough flour for two square meals a day.
No surprises
WHAT usually comes as a stressful and dreaded vote in parliament — the state budget — appeared to be an easy hand-lifting exercise … Prime Minister Robert Fico’s cabinet had the budget for 2008 sail through parliament with an ease atypical of the Slovak political arena.
But that did not necessarily mean that the opposition was so impressed with the state coffer plans that its deputies could not resist voting for it.
In fact, the opposition showered amendments on the Fico team … Finance Minister Ján Pociatek hopes that his budget will make history for its exemplarily low government deficit, while Fico remarked that “this budget does not waste money.”
There is much superfluous pathos in all that…. But Fico kept acting like a victor…. His team managed to bind a pathetic confidence vote in his government to the vote on the state budget…. Fico also said the vote proved that parliament backs his cabinet in its desire to serve the nation.
But the nation already knew that every single coalition hand would press the ‘yes’ button when the speaker of parliament invited them to vote…. And the nation knew even before the vote that the opposition simply does not have enough votes to challenge Fico.
The truth is that the budget-confidence hybrid vote cannot wash the bad taste from the mouths of people who still have some faith in political principles. The way Robert Fico has been acting only proves that politicians still talk the political purity talk, but do not walk the walk….
The opposition has made a rather toothless attempt to have Fico sacked for his co-responsibility for the land scandal. It is also criticising the prime minister for his reluctance to prove how he obtained a vineyard in a Bratislava suburb, Nové Mesto. The vineyard will earn Fico a profit of Sk6m …
Toothless non-confidence motions and theoretical discourses have always been a part of the political game…. But elections are over and journalists just have to get used to it. — (Dec 10)