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| April 05, 2008 | Saturday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 27, 1429 |
Little help for AIDS
School holidays out of the blue
New PM’s 100-day honeymoon
OTHER VOICES - Bangladesh Press
NOBODY can possibly envy the task facing the new prime minister, Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani, notwithstanding the unprecedented unanimous endorsement he received in parliament in perhaps the most difficult times for Pakistan since 1971.
AS the Balochistan assembly gets ready for its inaugural session scheduled for Monday, the new provincial government will confront a slew of problems that army action has made worse over the years. Even the prospect of democratic governance has brought no cheer to nationalist leaders like Attaullah Mengal and Talal Bugti whose parties stayed out of the electoral process. Their gloom is justified. Successive governments in Balochistan have brought little change to the province that continues to have some of the worst socio-economic indicators in the country. The feeling of economic deprivation has been heightened by the lack of local autonomy for a province that is rich in natural resources but, conversely, the poorest in terms of development. So deep-rooted is the people’s mistrust of the centre that even mega projects like the Gwadar port have given rise to suspicions in the local labour force that feels that jobs will be given to outsiders. Meanwhile, long years of army action, most recently under the Musharraf regime, have resulted in widespread resentment and an insurgency that the military has been unable to quell. The humanitarian crisis that military action has engendered and the killing and arrest of Baloch political leaders and activists — many of the latter are in the custody of intelligence agencies — have brought separatist sentiments to a boiling point. This is the first issue that must be addressed. The government must open a dialogue with the Baloch leaders — the nationalists who boycotted the elections as well as those who participated but are on the other side of the political divide. A ceasefire and a lowering of the military presence in the province is the need of the hour.
Considering the mammoth task before the new government that will have to work hard to assuage political and economic grievances, it is only fair that it is given a chance to prove its worth. Indications are that it will be a PPP-led government and if that is the case then it is more likely to work in tandem with its PPP-led counterpart at the centre. The PPP has already apologised to Balochistan for past excesses and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani has promised to abolish the concurrent list in the constitution to give provinces more control over their affairs, and to initiate a much-needed process of reconciliation. A blueprint for peace already exists in a report on Balochistan that was written and released by a parliamentary committee two years ago.
However, it is also up to the current lot of sardars — disgruntled or otherwise — of Balochistan to make the most of the situation. It is about time they too thought about Balochistan as a provincial entity with national moorings instead of a battleground for tribal disputes. Moreover, they have been as much to blame for the oppression of their people as the central government. They must discard their feudal mindset and embark on a progressive course of social uplift if they truly want the best for their people.
THE closure of the Prevention of Parents To Child Transmission (PPTCT) centre — an institute geared to counsel and screen pregnant women against the menace of HIV/AIDs — is a tragic development in an already dismal health environment. Alarmingly, this has happened in Sindh which is home to nearly 50 per cent of Pakistan’s HIV/AIDs patients, including port personnel, drug abusers, sex workers, sailors and long distance lorry drivers. Last year, some 202 women were tested for the virus at Karachi’s Civil Hospital (CHK). Of these one tested positive and many more were HIV carriers. According to a report in this newspaper, the newly inaugurated centre was virtually inoperative as Unicef had pulled the plug and withdrawn its support. Unicef, on the other end, maintains that CHK failed to fulfil one of its commitments towards the centre housed in the gynaecology department. Under the agreement, the hospital had agreed to provide the required exclusive space for PPTCT but did not keep its word.
As this blame game rages on, scores of lives may be hanging by a thread. Authorities such as the National AIDS Control Programme (NACP), relevant NGOs and the health department must see this as reason to raise their voice in an attempt to be heard. They must recognise that the institute caters to women — society’s most vulnerable segment, hostage to countless communal sanctions. Aside from the curse of illiteracy, factors such as biological structure, familial domination, immobility, poor hygiene, and limited access to health services, and a lack of say in safe-sex practices as wives of drug abusers and foreign labourers, make women a particularly high-risk segment. In the case of an infected woman who is pregnant, HIV/AIDS treatment has to be administered in the first trimester to prevent the transmission of the disease to the foetus. Also, the mother has to be educated about the perils involved in breast-feeding as well as future precautions for the wellbeing of her child. Needless to say, the patient’s personal emotional trauma cannot be brushed aside and has to be tackled through counselling. For these reasons, the institute is a crucial aspect of the strategy to combat the illness. Its closure will breed a generation of victims.
CONSIDERING how utterly disorganised we are as a nation, it should come as no surprise that the government often declares a holiday for schools at the eleventh hour. Take Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death anniversary which for decades has not been an occasion for declaring a holiday. On Friday, unprepared parents and elated students woke up to the news that schools and colleges in Sindh were closed. Many who were not so informed must have actually gone to school to find the gates bolted. The authorities announced the holiday the previous night and caught the educational institutions unawares. Regrettably this is not something new. The authorities tend to treat academic schedules cavalierly and are known for not giving ample notice when declaring holidays or changing term timings. A similar approach was adopted on the occasion of Benazir Bhutto’s chehlum in February and earlier for her Oct 18 homecoming. Last August, too, Karachi’s city government, in a fit of religious zeal, closed schools for Shab-i-Barat without giving prior notice. Such an ad hoc attitude only causes parents, teachers and children — delighted though the latter may be at the prospect of no homework — much inconvenience.
More efficient planning by the education department is needed so that school administrations are informed about the dates when educational institutions will be closed. Such planning would also bring to the notice of the school authorities how short our school calendar year is becoming. This is no doubt affecting the standard of education. Many holidays — especially those given on the religious occasions — might be felt to be mandatory. But cannot other occasions be observed in other ways without closing down educational institutions altogether. If schools are instructed to devote an hour or so in the morning to talks, debates or even a play or a tableau to highlight the significance of the person or occasion that is being honoured, children would certainly find this more instructive than a day off from school when many students do not even know why they have been gifted a day for rest and recreation.
The complex web of alliances that Mr Zardari and Mr Nawaz Sharif have weaved for the new prime minister in order to ward off any conceivable ambush by those still chafing under their election defeat leave him with little room to manoeuvre in pulling together a team not entirely his own.
While a cabinet minister holds his office at the pleasure of the prime minister, Mr Gilani’s fate will be in the hands of two masters, neither of whom is a member of parliament. While it is cynical even to entertain such thoughts so soon after the avoidance of far worse scenarios — although some are still lurking in the realm of possibility — Mr Gilani must be wishing he was a bit of his own man.
Perhaps he will be given unstinted support during the next 100 days which will test his mettle and the efficacy of the programme he has proposed, with only small-scale sniping from any side. The firm, if somewhat divergent, stance the coalition partners articulated on the Taliban issue in their meetings with Negroponte and Boucher who came on a fishing trip in Pakistan’s troubled waters has been impressive and should dissipate fears about an early derailment of the train of democracy now moving jerkily forward.
The only serious landmine Mr Gilani may encounter during the next 100 days is the implementation of the Bhurban declaration on the restoration of the judiciary and the resistance, in covert or overt form, from the dissipating if recalcitrant Musharraf presidency. April could be the do-or-die month for Pakistan’s democratic forces and the presidential camp. Once that hurdle is crossed — and its importance can hardly be underestimated — Mr Gilani is likely to have relatively smooth sailing well beyond the 100 days and possibly the completion of the five-year term, which at present reckoning looks like a pie in the sky.
It must be said that Mr Gilani has already earned a good deal of respect and goodwill from his coalition partners and has instilled some hope in the general public, despite the bitter experience of such promises made on such occasions in the past. His 100-day programme covering a large number of political and economic measures may not be inspiring but it has been welcomed, with varying degree of endorsement on different issues and from different quarters. The programme has obviously been hurriedly put together with many half-baked ideas which need further homework by the backroom advisers of the coalition.
For the poor, the promised relief, if delivered with due diligence, honesty and avoidance of leakages to the non-poor, could ease the burden from which they suffer due to the steep increase in food and energy prices in the last few months. The immediate problem is to ensure that the entitlement to essential commodities at fair prices is extended to all families earning less than Rs10,000 per month (on the basis of a dollar-a-day poverty line for a five-person-one-earner household).
However, there is likely to be a huge administrative problem in ensuring that the deserving poor get the protection they need. Hence innovative measures, such as associating NGOs to ensure transparency, equity and minimisation of hassles to the deserving, should be given urgent consideration. The Utility Stores department is ridden with an inefficient and unimaginative bureaucracy and the creation of more of them in a short period may accentuate the problems unless supplemented by other proactive efforts.
The belated initial steps towards an employment guarantee scheme for at least one member of the poorest families covering half of the country’s villages is greatly to be welcomed, although it needs to be fleshed out in greater detail. It is, however, regrettable that the programme does not address the deplorable state of the earthquake victims who seem to have receded from the national consciousness.
The more significant parts of the PM’s programme are likely to take well beyond 100 days to yield significant results. But a journey to correct the errors and omissions of the past six decades must begin somewhere. The prime minister’s emphasis on strengthening the country’s institutions is most timely and of the essence.
‘Getting the institutions right’ is the latest mantra in the discourse on the sustainability of the development process. Unfortunately, the institution-building agenda in Pakistan has been hijacked by the international donors/lenders who are obsessed with making one-size-fits-all institutions that primarily promote their own global interests. It is, therefore, refreshing to note that the current government is trying to take a more holistic view of institution-building by calling for a ‘change of the system’. However, ‘the system’ needs to be defined more clearly.
The first among its ingredients requiring change is the flip-flopping between civilian and military rule which has occurred with predictable regularity in the past six decades and on which the nation has given its verdict. The expediting of the return of military officers from civilian jobs, earlier announced by the COAS, is also a welcome indicator. However, more comprehensive legislation and strong complementary measures need to be undertaken to prevent its recurrence.While the need for balance among different pillars of the state has consensus, there is also need for the executive to be more responsive to public fora, civil society including the lawyers, academia, the media, think tanks and the activist NGOs, making them an integral part of the collective process of policymaking rather than a means for letting off steam.
Rhetoric alone, however, will not ‘change the system’. If the government is serious, it must set up an institutional reforms commission which should review the entire structure and sequencing of institutions in the country and recommend how it can be reformed to meet the major challenges of economic development, dignified livelihood, human rights and other national goals.
Piecemeal creation of institutions and ‘second-generation reforms’ at the behest of international organisations — like the creation of regulatory bodies and ‘world class’ educational institutions dreamt up by the HEC bureaucrats — without due regard to prerequisites and to ensuring their transparency, sequencing, robustness and autonomy will only serve to promote vested interests and elite groups in the society.Nevertheless, the creation of some ad hoc institutions such as the employment commission (which could also include poverty reduction in its mandate) and the madressah reforms commission, whose opposition by Maulana Fazlur Rehman could be softened by including in its mandate the problem of access to education and the dualism of the educational system, are to be welcomed.
Also worthy of acclaim are the proposals to abolish NAB and Pemra and to lift the ban on student and trade unions after almost three decades. The ban on these bodies had stalled our democratic development.
It would indeed be a pity if the first-100-days transition does not become the precursor of the hoped for basic transformation in the political, economic and social structure of Pakistan.
smnaseem@gmail.com
Calls for war-crimes trial
Samokal
BANGLADESH is likely to seek help from the United Nations in any trial of ‘war criminals’, a possibility that emerged after Foreign Affairs Adviser Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury met with UN chief Ban Ki-moon.
The UN secretary general was informed about the growing calls in Bangladesh for the government to put on trial those who had allegedly been involved in the 1971 war crimes…. The issue has been on the back burner since independence from Pakistan in 1971 but was dragged under the spotlight after the caretaker government came to power….
Speeches by some opponents of the war-crimes trials are littered with references to the pardon of ‘war criminals’ by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. It is true that the independence leader pardoned some people who collaborated with the Pakistan Army and were involved in minor crimes in 1971. But he never pardoned those who were engaged in mindless killing, rape, torture, arson and plunder.
Things changed after Mujib was assassinated. Ziaur Rahman, an army officer, who became president, altered the constitution and removed provisions for any trial of war criminals. The result: those who had been involved in war crimes got off the hook. The country became a safe haven for them.
We emphasise that war criminals must be tried to rid the nation of its old guilt and to clean up politics. The government can start the trial with the help of the UN. The people will stand by it. — (April 3)
Loans raise questions
Sangbad
THE government has decided to borrow $520m from Standard Chartered and the IMF to finance oil imports and the budget deficit. The IMF will provide $220m in soft loans and Standard Chartered will give $300 million in hard-term loans. This plan is being questioned by the people.
The IMF generally provides loans to steady transactions in member countries affected by natural disasters and other causes. The lending agency last provided such ‘emergency loans’ in the wake of the 1998 floods. Similarly, the past coalition government had borrowed from Standard Chartered to help the finance oil import. The government seems to be running short of funds. Huge spending on rehabilitation in the aftermath of the twin floods and Cyclone Sidr seems to have depleted government funds. Subsidies on oil increased as crude prices rose in the international market.
It appears that the military-backed government will not tighten its belt any time soon. In fact, government spending is climbing. Generally the government borrows from local banks but there is a risk: higher inflation. This is part of the reason why the government chose a foreign bank. Moreover, local banks do not want to sign loans for BPC.
The spending plan is set to weigh on the next budget and the next administration will bear the brunt. A question lingers: was the decision wise? — (April 3)
— Selected and translated by Arun Devnath.
