Times of terror

AT a time of considerable tension between India and Pakistan following the Mumbai attacks, the government has acted sensibly in calling for an all-party conference rather than assuming a unilateral posture in dealing with the crisis. By reaching out to and garnering the support of a number of politicians including opposition chief Nawaz Sharif, who cautioned New Delhi against drawing hasty conclusions, the government can ensure unity within political ranks on a serious bilateral issue. Indeed, this kind of exercise should become the norm when faced with external threats or internal challenges. No doubt the opposition is meant to act as a check on governance. Nevertheless, a cohesive stand on factors that are pulling the country down — such as the economy or threats from external sources — is essential. But for this to happen, apart from seeking the support of various political parties in times of crises, what is also needed is an attempt to tackle internal disarray — a prime example of which was the announcement of the ISI chief’s visit to New Delhi to assuage suspicions which the government was later forced to retract. Only then will it be able to come up with consistent and measured responses, which are what it needs in the backdrop of the Mumbai attacks with the Indian government and media gunning for Pakistan, linking the country to the recent act of terrorism.

Although there is reason to hope that the crisis will not escalate, especially as no troop movement along the borders has been detected or declared and New Delhi has refrained from directly implicating Islamabad in the attack, the Indo-Pakistan peace process has received a serious blow. For this New Delhi and the Indian media must shoulder most of the blame. Within hours of the attack and without giving concrete evidence, New Delhi was announcing a Pakistani link. No doubt, the ongoing state elections and its own intelligence lapse were responsible for its haste in passing the buck. But what cannot be condoned is the behaviour of the Indian media, that taking its cue from the politicians — and from a culture of nationalism that is especially apparent where Islamabad is concerned — came down hard on Pakistan, often conjuring up fantastical descriptions of the way the siege of Mumbai was laid. Not only does this put pressure on the Indian government to keep up its accusations and resist moves for a cooperative stance, it also damages people-to-people ties, for after all, the media is meant to speak for the common man. The postures of aggression and defensiveness must then be abandoned. India and Pakistan face a common threat — Pakistan more so than India — and unless the two countries adopt all means to cooperate with one another, the costs for the billion-plus people of South Asia will be high in these times of terror.

Bloodshed once more

KARACHI is still not normal. The violence has been checked, but scare and rumours still haunt the citizens of the nation’s biggest city. Rioting on Monday pushed the death toll in three days of violence to over 30, the number of the wounded has crossed 150, while more than 60 vehicles have been torched. Even though the level of violence isn’t the same, this is the worst ethnic rioting to have rocked Karachi in two decades. However, some positive aspects upon which all sides could build need to be noted. First, the violence remained confined to a few localities. Two, there were no battles, as in the past, and those who fell victim to rioting were mostly caught in street violence. This should serve to dispel the impression that the bloodshed was the result of some long-term plan or conspiracy. Three, given the gravity of the situation, ‘shoot at sight’ orders by the provincial government may also have helped contain the spread of the rioting. Four, the three parties — the MQM, PPP and ANP — which represent large segments of Karachi’s population appeared aware of their responsibility and met at Azizabad to work for peace.

In the aftermath of the carnage one can see that the MQM chief’s issuing repeated warnings about Karachi’s possible Talibanisation wasn’t exactly the right thing to do. Besides creating mistrust among various ethnic groups, the warnings served no purpose. There is no doubt one reason behind Altaf Hussain’s warnings could be the migration to Karachi of a large number of people affected by the fighting in Fata. But there is no evidence that all of them are coming to Karachi or that none of them intends to return home when the military operations end. If at all he had any concerns on this score, his party could have taken up the issue with its coalition partners without going public with it.

The vast majority of the people of Karachi, despite the multilingual character of its population, want to live in peace. They have put the horrors of the ethnic violence of the eighties behind them and have worked jointly to restore peace to the city. It goes to their credit that Karachi is today witnessing an unprecedented commercial and housing boom. It is time the political leadership on all sides kept an eye on those who may be using ethnicity to advance their petty interests.

Slow poisoning

WE are killing the planet and ourselves in the process. Citing a 2006 World Bank study, the Sindh environment minister said at a seminar in Karachi on Saturday that pollution is causing some 25,000 deaths a year in Pakistan and costing the country roughly six per cent of its GDP. Needless to say, it is the poorest of the poor that are hit hardest by this toxic assault on our day-to-day lives. It is the poor who are forced to live in areas that nobody else finds desirable, where factories discharge fumes and effluent that would make people of a more genteel upbringing recoil. And within the ranks of the poor it is young children and women, who don’t get the lion’s share of the daily meal and are exposed to the pollution for almost 24 hours a day, who are most at risk of falling ill. It boggles the mind that successive governments have failed so abysmally in enforcing laws that exist on the books but are flouted at will.

Greed comes into it but that is hardly the full story. More to blame is a callous disregard for human welfare and the assumption that the poor can make do with circumstances that the rich wouldn’t wish on their worst enemies. Adopting environment-friendly practices would cost an industrialist a negligible fraction of his overall profits. Yet he doesn’t do so. Why? Because he doesn’t care. The factory owner is also secure in the knowledge that officials of the provincial environmental protection agencies can be threatened or bribed into submission. Fertiliser companies owned by the armed forces have violated environmental laws in Sindh on more than one occasion but the incidents have been brushed aside and the cases never taken to their logical conclusion. Fines, even on the rare occasion when they are applied, are so absurdly low that an industrialist could pay them 20 times a year without really feeling the pinch. It doesn’t take rocket science to deduce that the productivity of a workforce that inhales toxic fumes, lacks basic sanitation and drinks contaminated water can never be optimal. Our healthcare system is cash-strapped as it is. It can do with fewer patients.

Taking politics out of water

THE Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington has taken considerable interest in policymaking in Pakistan. The centre serves as a living memorial to President Woodrow Wilson who served the US when it was consolidating its position as an emerging global power.

Rather than erect a concrete structure on the Mall as the Americans had been doing for their beloved presidents, the US Congress decided to set up a public-policy institution in his memory.

Lee Hamilton, a former and influential Congressman presides over the institution. He was one of the two authors of the Iraq Study Group (James Baker, secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush was the other). Under Hamilton’s leadership Pakistan is among the centre’s focus countries.

Over the last several months the centre has organised a series of workshops on some of the more important economic and social issues Pakistan needs to resolve if it is to make progress. To date conferences have been held on education, trade and energy. The seminar proceedings are published as short books by the centre. They have become instant ‘best-sellers’ (the books are distributed free of charge) in the policy community that constitutes the think tanks in Washington and Boston and the university towns in between as well as on the West Coast.

The most recent workshop of the Pakistani series was held on Nov 20 and the subject for discussion was water — how the availability of this precious resource was now under strain; how small changes in personal behaviour and big actions by the government could ease the growing constraint on supply; why misguided policies adopted by the state in the past had misallocated water to users that did not benefit society or the economy; how important it was to recognise that the way water was collected, stored and used affected women’s economic and social lives; and how pervasive corruption among the officials responsible for managing water supply and apportioning its use among different users was hurting the poor in the countryside and in towns and cities.

The key note at the workshop was given by Karachi’s Simi Kamal. It was a wide-ranging presentation in which all issues that were of concern to the speakers and the attendees were well articulated. Two things impressed me with the way Ms Kamal handled her assignment. She was of the view that Pakistani society was now handling the issue of water in many small ways. This was generating new ideas about efficient use and conservation.

For instance, it was becoming popular to capture Karachi’s humidity as water, thus compensating for the city’s lack of rain. These approaches were forcing governments at different levels — at the level of the districts, the provinces and the federation — to incorporate some of these ideas into public policy. Grass-roots organisations had entered the area where action was stymied by provincial politics.

The quarrel over claims to water on the part of the provinces figured prominently in many of the presentations. Water politics had prevented the adoption of efficient policies for conserving and using water, a subject to which I will return near the end of this article.

I chaired one of the four sessions at the conference. Three speakers presented papers. They discussed the way water was being used in the countryside; how water-sparing technologies such as drip irrigation could optimise the use of this scarce resource in the sector of agriculture; and how the lives of women were being affected in the country’s mountainous areas by forest degradation and climate change.

The discussion at the workshop raised two issues in which economics could play a role to clarify one problem and possibly solve the other. I will begin with the continuing debate in the country about the capacity of the people to pay for water.

Feisal Khan in his presentation provided some interesting data on how the government’s inability to charge the farmers the real price of water meant a progressive deterioration in the quality of the irrigation system that took hundreds of years to build. He provided data that showed that the amount of money the government collected by levying a water charge (abiana) had progressively declined.

The decline was precipitous in the 1970s when Islamabad, Punjab and Sindh were governed by popularly elected governments. At the same time corruption had increased and, according to him, top jobs in the departments of irrigation were being sold to the highest bidders for large sums of money. He knew of some fieldwork according to which corruption cost the farmer Rs30,000 per year while the abiana had declined to only Rs160 per hectare.

What this shows is that the poor farmer is willing to pay but what he pays goes into the pockets of the corrupt officials rather than to the government exchequer. Since the rich are politically well-connected, it would be hard to collect money from them. In other words, corruption works as a regressive tax, by burdening the poor while generally sparing the rich. There is one other economic consequence of the impact of corruption. Since the corrupt officials work and live in towns and cities, water-sector corruption results in transferring incomes from the rural to the urban areas.

The other issue where economics could come to the rescue of the state is in contributing to the solution of the inter-provincial rivalry concerning water rights and the distribution of water. I would suggest that the federal government determine the total value of water that flows through the river system. This amount should be apportioned among the provinces on the basis of their current use. This would establish a benchmark. Deviations from these will need to be compensated.

The provinces should pay for withdrawing additional water from the system. Trading should be allowed among the provinces. If there are departures from the current use, those who add to their use should pay those who would lose since the amount of water in the system is essentially finite.

For instance, putting a value on water will result in a different kind of discourse among the provinces. Sindh may wish to pay a considerable amount of money to re-establish fishing in the Indus delta and to regenerate the mangrove forests. Punjab would begin to see that the cultivation of sugarcane does not make economic and financial sense for the province. Punjab may want to sell some of its water rights to Sindh reflecting the value the two provinces would put on its use.

Soldiers’ violence

IN a significant setback to Robert Mugabe’s regime, uniformed soldiers have for the first time rioted in the centre of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, after trying to withdraw cash from a bank that had run out of money.

Emerging details of the riots will embolden Zimbabweans ahead of protests planned for Wednesday by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions against a government policy that stops people from drawing more than 500,000 Zimbabwe dollars (18p) from banks per day. The rioting marks the first time the low morale of the rank-and-file has exploded into public violence.

Witnesses said about 70 soldiers, believed to be from Harare’s main KG6 barracks, turned violent after spending Thursday queuing at the main branch of the Zimbabwe Allied Banking Group. ‘They stayed in the banking hall at closing time,’ a staff member said. ‘At about 4.30pm we told them there would be no money, and they ran amok. They insulted the staff, then went outside and smashed the windows.’

The group moved on to Roodepoort bus station, a few blocks away, where they assaulted black-market currency dealers and robbed them.

A soldier, who declined to be identified, told a local reporter: ‘We have no food in the barracks. There is no medication in military hospitals, and we cannot access our money in the banks. Even if people are to riot, there would be no enthusiasm to stop them.’

Zimbabwe’s soldiers and police are paid in local currency. A police officer, who declined to be named, said: ‘The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has a facility for us to collect money, but senior officers are looting all of it and asking us to go to get ours from the banks.’

Defence analyst Michael Quintana said the violence might signal the beginning of the end for the Mugabe regime. ‘The army is down in strength from nearly 40,000 to about 26,000. There have been thousands of desertions. Barracks have stopped feeding all but senior officers, and soldiers depend on corruption and theft for incomes. If the time has come when they are ready to revolt, then the game will soon be up for Mugabe.’

Zimbabwe’s official inflation annual rate is estimated at 231 million per cent, but independent economists cite the inflation rate in the billions of per cent. The 18p maximum account withdrawal buys a quarter of a loaf of bread and thousands of people spend their days in bank queues.

— The Guardian, London

OTHER VOICES - Sindhi Press

Violence in Karachi

Ibrat

VIOLENCE erupted between the Urdu- and Pashtu-speaking populations in Karachi on Saturday…. Markets in many places were forced to pull down their shutters as life came to a halt.

Dangerous tensions … between these two ethnic groups simmer constantly in the mega city…. They increased in recent weeks when the MQM raised the issue of Talibanisation….

The holding of a joint press conference by Home Minister Zulfiqar Mirza and leaders of the MQM and ANP was an encouraging step taken by the Sindh government. Coalition partners categorically said that no one would be allowed to disturb the city’s peace.

Karachi is braving an unchecked inflow of people which is creating a serious problem in Pakistan’s business capital. A large population of Afghans has settled in thickly populated areas. No registration is carried out and the government does not have details as to why they have come and what they are doing here. A large number of illegal aliens … coming into this city … were getting national identity cards … and no one was looking into the matter. This situation has created many fears and apprehensions about law and order. The increase in crime in the city is a manifestation of the same trend.

In fact no serious attempt was made to register the Afghans and recover arms.…The law and order situation in Karachi is a very serious issue as coalition partners have big political stakes in this regard. It was their duty to observe restraint as Saturday’s violence has once again given the impression that it is easy to disturb the law and order of this huge metropolis. But it is very difficult to establish some kind of lasting harmony…. This can only be achieved when coalition partners who are direct stakeholders in this city rise above party politics.

People too deserve a safer living environment. To restore peace in Karachi, there is an urgent need to conduct an operation without resorting to any discrimination to recover arms and flush out Afghan and other illegal migrants. Karachi’s political players need to play a role. All parties without any political considerations should extend their cooperation so that this business hub can be made into an arms-free zone. There should be no political expediency on the question of flushing out illegal immigrants and recovering arms which is the root cause of the disturbed law and order and … the eruption of violence…. This should be made clear to the people … as it is the only solution to Karachi’s unfortunate tendency to erupt into violence unexpectedly. — (Nov 30)

— Selected and translated by Sohail Sangi.