Drawing the line on refugees

OURS is a country where, as one recent letter-to-the-editor puts it, “the freedom enjoyed by foreigners - from Afghans to Bangladeshis - to enter Pakistan without any restriction and legal documents” is “unthinkable anywhere else in the world.”

This freedom has earned us the reputation for being hospitable hosts to foreign refugees and asylum seekers. Last week, the UNHCR representative in Islamabad praised Pakistan for its humanitarianism and hospitality in hosting millions of Afghan refugees for over two decades and held up this act as an example for many rich countries.

But in earning international reputation for being hospitable hosts to those whom many other countries would term illegal immigrants, one wonders if we have not seriously compromised on the all important issue of internal security in the process.

The shooting and killing of two policemen by four armed Afghan scavengers in an incident in Rawalpindi two weeks ago in which one other policeman was injured, and the stabbing of another policeman by an Afghan national in Rawalpindi two days ago, cannot but underscore the importance of the need to tighten the laxity with which the authorities have so far been dealing with the Afghan refugees living in the twin cities.

Their number in the capital city alone is reported to be between 85,000 to 100,000, while there are believed to be about 50,000 to 60,000 of them living in Rawalpindi.

Over the years, the authorities have kept one eye closed over these Afghan refugees spilling out of the designated refugees camps in which they are supposed to be confined and their subsequent unauthorized squatting on unoccupied public and private lands in the twin cities, most prominently in the capital’s Sector I-11. Moreover, the authorities have also largely ignored the not-so-healthy activities of some of these refugees, activities which include theft, drug trafficking, and even murder.

The recent violent attacks by Afghan nationals on patrolling constables in Rawalpindi highlight the importance of the success of the repatriation programme jointly being carried out by UNHCR and Islamabad to move the Afghan refugees living in the twin cities back to Afghanistan. This is part of an overall UNHCR programme to repatriate all Afghan refugees living in Pakistan back to their homeland. Last week UNHCR claimed to have already repatriated over 500,000 Afghans so far under this programme which began on March 1, so much so that it has even had to revise its target figure of Afghan returnees this year from 400,000 to 850,000.

What needs to be ensured is that this repatriation programme is carried out whole-heartedly without any slippage. Half-hearted implementation of the programme that leaves thousands of illegal Afghans still roaming about the streets of the twin cities will not work. Reports about some of those supposedly repatriated finding their way back into the twin cities after taking the repatriation assistance of US$100 in cash plus 150 kg of wheat (per family of five) are gravely disturbing. There would be little for UNHCR to eventually celebrate about a figure of 850,000 Afghan refugees having returned home when who knows how many of these will have no problem in coming back through the porous Pak-Afghan border.

One hitch in the repatriation process that Islamabad will need to seriously address is the fact that the Pushtoons among the Afghan refugees are very reluctant to go back, as compared to the Uzbeks or Tajiks. This is natural since they fear they will be discriminated against by the current interim government in Kabul led by the Northern Alliance. The fact that the Pushtoons comprise the majority of the Afghan refugees (about 65 per cent of the refugees in the capital city are Pushtoons) means that there is every likelihood of the repatriation programme achieving very limited success if attention is not paid to this problem.

One solution calls for Islamabad to convince its counterpart in Kabul to make an announcement that would encourage all Afghan refugees irrespective of ethnicity to return home to take part in the reconstruction of their homeland. Both talent and labour are very much needed in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, but Kabul needs to make a special effort to assure Afghan refugees living in Pakistan that all, irrespective of ethnicity, are welcome home.

At the same time, what Islamabad also needs to do is to step up its drive against those who have entered the country illegally without the requisite travel documents. Those caught without legal travel papers should be deported instantly through their respective embassies rather than being sentenced to jail first.

Recently, a couple was sentenced by a court in Islamabad to one year imprisonment for illegally entering the country in January. Although the court order instructed the Islamabad administration to ensure that the convicted couple was deported after the term of their imprisonment expired, it would have made more sense if they had been deported immediately. Jailing them for as long a period as one year increases the chances of these illegal immigrants escaping deportation eventually, either through bribery or other means.

Countries which have strict and tough immigration laws do so for a good reason: they do not want to compromise on internal security. In our case, we may well have earned the reputation for being hospitable hosts at the expense of our internal security. Where hospitality ends and where laxity in dealing with refugees and illegal immigrants begins is a fine line which Islamabad should now draw much more carefully. For it is a fine line which can make all the difference between living in security or living under terrorism and instability.

A beautiful mind may yet stall an ugly war

Were it not for the war clouds gathering ominously once again over the Sub-continent, a milestone meeting with Prof John Nash should have been the highlight of my visit to Princeton University last week.

His eccentric humour and razor-sharp wit belie the aging economic wizard’s agonizing tryst with schizophrenia.

Therefore, it was even more of that pure joy to stand with him in a small unpretentious corner of a sprawling historic campus, where Albert Einstein had once walked, watching him with awe and listening to his gentle, almost inaudible words.

And to observe how each measured word and sentence was tossed into the nippy air with the casual ease of a painter who is only too confident of eventually blending any unintended stains from the brush into the essential being of his canvass.

There was also a child-like impishness on Prof Nash’s frail but keen face as he strayed into a discussion that not many of his admirers would easily associate with the Nobel laureate.

So there he was, not holding forth on any acclaimed game theory the world celebrates him for, but sharing his amusement over the triviality of how a movie like the ridiculously fictitious “Spiderman” becomes more popular with American audiences than the delicate notion of “A Beautiful Mind”, even if the latter was based somewhat inaccurately on his own struggle with life’s highs and lows.

We must revert to Prof Nash and his game theories sometime soon, hopefully. But there were issues of more urgent importance being discussed too at the Princeton campus last week, which included the chilling subtext of some more meetings I had with other professors, mostly from India and Pakistan.

Now these are all fairly knowledgeable individuals who are keenly and perhaps somewhat helplessly watching the current state of play in the Sub-continent drift towards tragedy with each passing day.

These are individually and collectively a worried lot, what with the prospects of a shooting war breaking out in the region.

Tragically though, some seemed more prepared than others to accept the inevitability of what they know as mutually assured destruction or MAD.

As a matter of fact Prof Zia Mian, a ranking physicist from Pakistan, believes that a nuclear war is quite nearly inevitable, if not now then sometime soon, between the nuclear upstarts.

There was no confusion or any perceptible bias in this cold and hard assessment.

Mian has recently published an anti-nuclear primer for as wide a dissemination as he can muster, along with India’s Smitu Kothari, another well-regarded Princetonian.

Professors Gyan Prakash and Dilip Abreu, the latter a widely respected colleague of Prof Nash and himself an important game theorist, bring up the rear of the small coterie of teachers who meet occasionally, and exchange notes about the political and economic developments in their patch.

Their thoughts are often exchanged over Princeton’s celebrated brown-bag lunches during a mid-day break, for time is so scarce here.

The subjects of discussion during my stay varied from the bone-chilling possibility of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan to an equally bellicose drift towards militarism and religious extremism stoked and patronized by the establishments in both countries.

We inevitably discussed Zia Mian’s anti-nuclear TV documentary he made with Pervez Hoodbhoy, another leading science professor and peace activist from Pakistan.

Much of the focus unfortunately was on their inability so far to have found a TV channel that would show this realistic and well-made film about what they see as the arriving nuclear doom.

Naturally, all this was discussed in the context of the usual paucity of public domains for peace-related discussions as opposed to jingoism, which finds wider play in the electronic and text media in both the countries.

For a variety of bad reasons the terror of a nuclear war has eluded the political elite in India and Pakistan, which is exactly the opposite of the attitude of their American counterparts and other Western responses too.

For example, at the height of the Cold War the American phobia of a nuclear attack was on display in the form of a clutch of well-researched and well-made documentaries.

I am taking home a copy of The Day After, which I remember as a frightening depiction of a post-nuclear attack on the United States. There was another movie called Damnation Alley. If I remember correctly that too was a story about a nuclear attack that happened as part of an error of judgment.

More recently, a book based on the American military’s preparedness for a nuclear war has been doing the rounds among analysts.

“Apocalypse made easy —- A top-secret US government scenario for the aftermath of nuclear war reveals something truly scary — cockeyed optimism.” So goes the blurb for “The Doomsday Scenario: How America Ends” by Douglas L. Keeney.

Some of its revelations could be instructive for the gung-ho leaderships that dominate our lives or possible doom in South Asia.

In a gist, if the forecasting skills of the United States military are to be trusted, only half of Americans will survive a full nuclear attack— a decrease in population almost certainly sufficient to offset losses in goods and services.

This is how the US military regarded the apocalyptic scenario in 1958. For decades after that, journalists heard rumours of an official government “doomsday scenario,” yet it wasn’t until 1998 that the document was briefly, inadvertently, declassified. Innocuously titled “The Emergency Plans Book,” the elusive memorandum was turned over to the National Archives — together with scores of other previously secret files released by the office of the Secretary of the Air Force in a routine housecleaning — where military historian L. Douglas Keeney discovered it and had it xeroxed for future reference.

When he returned to the archives a year later, he saw that the original was gone; a colonel had ordered it reclassified, and thereafter it was available only to those with top-secret clearance. Keeney found himself with the only copy in civilian hands. Naturally, he decided to publish it.

Keeney believes that “The Emergency Plans Book” is still in use, at least in part, judging from the government’s response to the crisis on Sept. 11. He cites, for example, the flight of George W. Bush to Offutt Air Force Base — where a Cold War-era shelter remains operational — shortly after the terrorist strikes.

And had the attack been nuclear, perhaps far more of the scenario would have been implemented: For example, to save the maximum number of lives, conserving the necessary supplies to do so most effectively, doctors might have had to let so-called hopeless cases die without even the ease of anesthesia.

Other vignettes from the book could be an eyeopener for those of us still looking at the India-Pakistan standoff like as a cricket match.

Going by an online opinion poll as many as 92 percent people want India to attack “terrorist camps” across the LoC.

There are more worrying thoughts in the book as it scans the approximate responses of a doomsday scenario.

“Air Defence operations in North America and overseas have destroyed a substantial portion of the attacking aircraft, but half of those destroyed had reached the bomb release lines and had released their weapons ... Severe firestorms have occurred in heavily built-up cities and many rural fires were started involving growing crops and forests ... The general level of casualties throughout the United States is extremely serious.

“The attack has caused an almost complete paralysis in the functioning of the economic system in all of its aspects ... Governmental control is seriously jeopardized and central federal direction is virtually non-existent ... Health resources, including physicians, nurses, and other manpower, hospitals and other medical care facilities, and health supplies and equipment, are in a critical state.

“There are some reports of outbreaks of yellow fever and other tropical diseases in the South and of the plague, cholera, and typhus in coastal cities ... Bartering, unorganized confiscation, and looting are in evidence and threaten further the restoration of any orderly degree of economic activity ... Severe disruption of transportation service exists in all attacked and contaminated areas.”

Elsewhere the book mocks the gloating bumbledom that sees in the catastrophic loss of life a clerical advantage.

For example, it says: “In spite of the magnitude of the catastrophe that has struck the nation and the possibility of additional, but lighter attacks, more than 100 million people and tremendous material resources remain ... Salvable food stocks in the contaminated areas will particularly meet immediate needs since requirements have been reduced by heavy loss of life ... The non-military requirements for fuel in the post-attack period will be much smaller than pre-attack requirements, since millions of fuel-consuming units — particularly residences, commercial buildings, electric power and generating plants, and factories — have disappeared in the bombing.

“The utilized labour force is engaged in large numbers in disposing the dead, taking care of surviving injured, decontaminating and cleaning up bombed areas, returning public works and utilities to operation, and other activities related to the direct and immediate effects of the attacks ... After the more pressing of the survival needs of the damaged economy have been met, the reconstruction period will start.

“The gradual return of workers to their places of employment sets in motion a slow recovery cycle, manifesting itself first in scattered, undamaged, nonfallout areas ... It will take months to determine the bottlenecks and dislocations, and many more months to overcome shortages and imbalances.”

War threat and the world community

COMMENTING on the recent tension in the sub-continent, Ibrat writes that India’s provocative attitude on the pretext of the Jammu incident shows that it is trying not only to malign Pakistan but is also heading towards an extremist course of action. On the other hand, Pakistan has appealed to the world community to take notice of the Indian provocative statements and come forward for the solution of the Kashmir dispute. It is a very sensitive situation since it pertains to the fate of 1.25 billion populace of the two traditionally rival countries possessing deadly atomic arsenals.

Under these critical conditions, Pakistan, instead of replying to India in the same tone, has wisely appealed the international community to take notice of irritating Indian statements and play an effective role for the solution of the Kashmir problem. The conflicts world faces today cannot be resolved unless the international community adopts an impartial and proactive role. Particularly the crises of Palestine and Kashmir need international community’s urgent attention.

The continuation of these disputes’ lingering on for over half the century adequately proves that these two historical problems cannot be settled without the intervention of the world community.

Unfortunately the world community and its representative institutions including the United Nations have failed to play the required role in this respect. In fact the agencies representing the international community can help resolve the two crises only when they stop playing in the hands of the super powers. Otherwise they will not be able to influence the conflicting parties and regain their lost reputation. Meanwhile it must be remembered that the conflicts between different countries/nations not only affect regional politics and economy but also tend to have a larger impact for the world.

Following the 9/11 tragedy, India has been striving hard to defame Pakistan in the world community and push it to a defensive position by taking advantage of the changed world scenario. The BJP government’s latest strategy is also a part of this game. Despite Pakistan’s rational reaction, the Indian provocative attitude can lead to a war between the two atomic powers. Unfortunately, South Asia seems to lack the politically careful and reasonable attitude expected from atomic powers. Particularly, Indian attitude is too provocative and prejudicial. Pakistan has shown restraint by calling for the international intervention. Now ball is in the court of the world community. If it fails to take this issue seriously and do something to avert the danger of war, it will share the responsibility of any ensuing untoward situation.

Tameer-i-Sindh has deplored that despite the reduction in the prices of petroleum products in the international market, oil prices have been increased in Pakistan, which may lead the transporters to increase the fares of public transport. Whenever the prices of essential commodities are raised, the government officials claim that the decision will not affect common people. However, as expected the ground reality is always different from government claims. Similarly, the rise in the oil prices is bound to add to the woes of the people who are already suffering from the severe cut in their purchasing power. Taking advantage of the rise in oil prices, it seems, the transporters will raise the fares unilaterally and force the government to endorse the raise by threatening to observe strike. Similarly, the prices of basic commodities may also increase with the raise in transport charges. Thus it will again be the masses who will have to bear the burden of the increase in oil prices.

Referring to the women’s protest rallies against shortage of drinking water in Sanghar and Daharki, Kawish points out that though water protests have become a daily affair in Sindh, these two processions have a difference. Usually the women of Sindh are confined to their homes and their taking to streets suggests that the water crisis has reached its peak. And even in Daharki which lies on the border with Punjab. There was no political group behind the women’s rallies which means that the silent majority of Sindh has also been compelled to raise their voice for one of the most essential commodity of life. Has the time not come to provide water to the thirsty province.

Awami Awaz crticizes the government decision to transfer Sindh’s antiquities and rare books to Punjab. The daily writes that Sindh has already been deprived of the control on its resources and now even its artefacts and rare books are being snatched. This decision will only add to the already found sense of deprivation among the people of Sindh who are very proud of the remains of their rich past. The authorities concerned should tack back this decision and refrain from hurting the cultural sensibilities of Sindh.

Sindhu laments the recent armed attack on a sleeping family in the kutcha area of Khairpur in which four persons including a girl child were brutally killed. It also condemns the police failure to arrest the culprits. On the one hand violence has increased to an unmatched proportion in the rural society of Sindh and on the other police as usual is unable to control this tragic phenomenon. This situation demands a complete overhauling of the police department.