Setting priorities right

WITH the relief operation in full swing in the earthquake-hit areas of Azad Kashmir and the NWFP, a semblance of order seems to be emerging from the medley of activities that was witnessed in the days immediately after the calamity struck. A relief commissioner has been appointed to coordinate the relief and rehabilitation efforts. With the Pakistan Army in the forefront of the massive operations that are underway, it is logical that an army officer should head the relief commission. In the absence of a crisis management body, the government had to fall back on the armed forces, the only institution with an organization that could rise to the challenge. In spite of its own losses, the army is doing a creditable job. True, there are still areas where relief aid has not reached —said to be about 20 per cent as of Monday — and there is a shortfall of tents that are needed to protect the homeless from the inclement weather, a lot is being done. In fact that has kept the humanitarian spirit of the public and the volunteers alive.

Now the prime minister has unveiled a 12-point reconstruction plan to involve all agencies in the relief, recovery and reconstruction process. This is a significant move. First it will involve the civil sector of the administration fully in the relief operations as should have been the case from the start had it been equipped with the capacity of undertaking a task of this nature and magnitude. But it is never too late to begin. Secondly, it is time not only to coordinate the efforts to avoid duplication and gaps, and to ensure the optimization of efforts and transparency at all levels. This is important because widespread compassion has brought in its wake humanitarian aid in the form of relief goods, funds and volunteers from inside and outside the country. These can be maximized if they are organized and the efforts strategized. If this is not done many areas will be flooded with assistance while others will be starved of all relief aid. According to the relief commissioner, four billion rupees has been collected in the president’s relief fund and foreign assistance to the tune of $528.2 million has been pledged. This must be used according to a plan and must be done transparently and with a sense of accountability.

The strategy defined by Mr Shaukat Aziz is logical and sensible. It takes into account the basic needs of the affected people — provide them temporary shelter and then move them to permanent settlements. There is also the plan to gear up medical/trauma treatment — the doctors’ response was the most spontaneous and overwhelming — and arrange for transitional schools and offices. There is also the need to attend to the problem of the numerous children who have been separated from their families or orphaned by the tragedy. The aim should be to normalize life as soon as possible. Let the reconstruction work be participatory since the people who are to be rehabilitated know their needs best. While all this is being done, the government should involve its statistical agencies to collect data on the population affected and assess the damage to property. With independent television channels making wild and exaggerated guesses, one has only a vague idea of the loss and the scale of the relief assistance needed.

The task before new nazim

EACH of the new nazims, sworn in on Monday, faces a daunting task of putting their cities in order, but perhaps none more so than Karachi’s new nazim, Mustafa Kamal. The young nazim inherits a city that has been a victim of continued neglect, whose civic infrastructure is in tatters and tends to fall apart with the first drop of rain, with its roads taking a terrible drubbing. Given Mr Kamal’s statements prior to being sworn in, it is obvious that he is aware of the monumental tasks ahead of him. Some credit should be given to Karachi’s previous nazim, Naimatuallah Khan, who, despite his administration’s faults, made significant headway with some development projects. He has extended his cooperation to the new nazim and one hopes that projects initiated by him will be completed. But building flyovers and underpasses some of which developed faults, starting new bus services that many could not afford to use or creating family-oriented parks were not the right solutions to Karachi’s myriad problems. The city’s sewerage system is archaic and the garbage disposal system is virtually non-existent. Arguably, the most pressing demand is to address the need for a mass transit system that goes beyond just reviving the Circular Railway, though that too must be done quickly. Mr Kamal has already addressed the burgeoning traffic problem by calling for the need to regulate its flow but he will have to take to task the traffic police for their failure in this regard.

While the new nazim has promised to help solve Karachi’s major civic problems, he must revamp the city’s infrastructure on a massive scale instead of doing so in bits and pieces. Here he can consult local NGOs with vast experience in development work. However, he has to first win the people’s confidence, for they are a beleaguered lot, tired of empty promises. His party failed to redress many civic problems during its two previous terms in power, so there is much apprehension about how it will fare this time round. Mr Kamal now has the opportunity to regain lost confidence and steer the city into a new direction, one which alleviates the miseries of its people.

Covering the quake

THE media has done a reasonably good job of covering the earthquake and its aftermath. However, there have been some avoidable lapses, especially in the case of the electronic media where the fine line separating the public’s need to know and the scenes that are better out has often been ignored. Similarly, emotionalism has sometimes clouded judgment. Part of the reason for that may be intense competition in a still-growing industry and possibly a lack of commitment to ethics. For instance, some TV reporters have seen nothing wrong in walking around dead bodies of schoolchildren and going up to survivors only to ask them facetious questions like: “So how do you come to be in this situation?” One TV anchor in the early days of the tragedy was shown barging into a government hospital and demanding that doctors — already stretched to the limit — explain why patients were not being treated promptly. More recently, one channel showed a woman in a village dying before the camera while a male relative spoke to the reporter.

Those covering the tragedy need to know where to draw the line. For instance, simply repeating the same footage over and over again can give a misleading picture to viewers because it ignores new developments in an otherwise fluid situation. Also, showing a maimed child or scores of dead bodies lying about, accompanied by a mournful voice singing an elegy, can only compound the bleakness of feeling that most viewers would be experiencing. There also seems to be an obsession with the death toll. Tens of thousands are dead and more could die in the days to come and in that context, it does not matter much if some experts think it is incredibly low. The exact toll can always come later and ascertaining it should not be as great a priority as helping the survivors.

Dogmatic versions of faith

A FEW days ago, a letter to the editor in this newspaper, from a correspondent in Colorado Springs, wanted to know whether all those Muslims who had suggested that hurricanes Katrina and Rita were a manifestation of divine wrath against the United States, felt the same way about the earthquake in Pakistan.

It’s a valid question, although the writer betrays a streak of gung-ho patriotism in the next sentence by taking a swipe at “all the self-appointed Muslim apologists whose knee-jerk reaction to all that happens in the world is to blame America”.

First of all, much like apologists for American imperialism, apologists for militant Islamism (which presumably is the category the letter writer, Steve Elisha, is aiming for) do not need to be appointed by anyone, including themselves. Secondly, he may be surprised to find that critiques of US foreign policy (which is what the inaccurate phrase “knee-jerk anti-Americanism” invariably implies) are not restricted to the Muslim world: they can effortlessly be harvested by the truckload on the streets of Latin America and through much of Europe.

He may be even more surprised to find that many of those who foolishly attributed the destruction wreaked by Katrina to divine retribution would be inclined to interpret the catastrophe in Pakistan — at least 40 times as lethal as the New Orleans disaster — in remarkably similar terms. How it could possibly make sense for a benevolent deity of any description to punish primarily the poor and the powerless is beyond me. But then, blind faith boasts a built-in defence mechanism: it intrinsically defies rationalization.

However, it should be pointed out to the likes of Elisha that fundamentalism of this variety isn’t by any means restricted to Islam. The preacher Pat Robertson, for instance, implied post-Katrina that the inability of Americans “to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster” could be “connected in some way” to the fact that “we have killed over 40 million unborn babies in America”. His friend Jerry Falwell came up with equally outlandish theories in the aftermath of 9/11.

Nonsense of this variety isn’t too hard to dismiss, no matter where it is spouted. It’s a more serious concern, however, when the most powerful individual in the world shows signs of being delusional. In Ronald Reagan’s case, the affliction was restricted to his inability to readily make a distinction between movies and real life. In George W. Bush’s case, the symptoms are even more serious.

“The disturbed individual who believes himself to .... receive messages from God is something of a cliche in our society,” writes Robert Winston in his new book, The Story of God. Does that make Bush the most powerful cliche in history?

In a three-part documentary on the Middle East peace process currently being televised by the BBC, former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath recounts his delegation’s encounter with Bush at the June 2003 Israeli-Palestinian summit in Sharm El Sheikh: “President Bush said to all of us, ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq ... And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East. And by God I’m gonna do it.’”

Shaath says he and his colleagues did not take the president’s words literally. Which may have been a mistake (although it must be noted that George has been rather lackadaisical about the Palestinian state part of the injunction). But more remarkable than anything else has been the White House’s response to Shaath’s recollections. Spokesman Scott McLellan described them as absurd, adding: “(The president has) never made such comments.”

It is extremely unlikely that the episode is a figment of Shaath’s imagination, not only because it would serve little purpose, from his point of view, to make up such a tale, but also because there have been several reports over the past few years of Bush making pretty much the same claim — and not one of them elicited an official denial. Last year, for instance, he was reported to have told an Amish group in Pennsylvania: “I trust God speaks through me. Without that I couldn’t do my job.”

And Tony Evans of Dallas, who was among the evangelists who counselled Bush during his gubernatorial stint in Texas, recalls: “One of the impetuses for his considering running for president was biblical teaching. He feels God is talking to him.” Juan Stam wrote in the US weekly The Nation two years ago that when Bush decided to seek the presidency, “he described his decision in terms evangelicals would understand as a divine mandate: He had been ‘called’, a phrase that evoked the prophetic commissions of the Hebrew scriptures. He summoned to the governor’s mansion all the leading pastors of the region to carry out a ritual of ‘laying on of hands’, a practice that corresponds above all to ministerial ordination.”

Back in 2003, Bush is said to have surprised Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan by telling him, “You believe in the Almighty, and I believe in the Almighty. That’s why we’ll be great partners.” He may have tried the same line on other foreign heads such as Pervez Musharraf. However, in the days when Bush the elder was vice-president, the evangelist Billy Graham (who was instrumental in kick-starting the younger Bush’s born-again phase) was once summoned to the White House to settle a debate between father and son. George W. considered it unthinkable that there could be a place in heaven for those who had not accepted Jesus Christ as their saviour. Graham pronounced him correct.

In the Muslim world, such deeply doctrinaire versions of faith find an echo not among Bush’s supposed friends but among his purported enemies, who also appear to share the US president’s Manichean worldview. It is hardly surprising that the neo-conservatives, who had long seen evangelical Christianity as an ideal partner, fixated on Dubya, deeming a Bush presidency to be the likeliest means of fulfilling their fantasies. They weren’t far wrong: the obstacles they have faced sprang from their distorted vision of reality, rather than from their reliance on a faith-based presidency. (Incidentally, a fascinating account of the similarities — and indeed symbiosis — between the neo-cons and the strain of political Islam that led to Al Qaeda is offered by Adam Curtis in the documentary “The Power of Nightmares”, which was shown on the BBC last year and can now be downloaded or streamed from the Internet Archive website, www.archive.org.)

Meanwhile, let us not be too quick in jumping to the conclusion that the shipwreck in Iraq or Bush’s sharply declining popularity ratings at home will necessarily deter further neo-con misadventures, with or without divine sanction. Amid mounting pressure on Iran, there comes the revelation that in a telephone conversation with Tony Blair in January 2003, Bush suggested a few other targets he had on his mind: not only North Korea, but also Saudi Arabia. And Pakistan.

Given the bleak state of the world, it is only natural to revel in occasional bursts of sunshine, and last week this took the shape of Harold Pinter being named, quite unexpectedly, as the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The 75-year-old British playwright (who announced earlier this year that he won’t be writing any more plays) was honoured chiefly on account of his widely appreciated contributions to the theatre, but the Nobel committee could not conceivably have been unaware that Pinter is a vociferous critic of US and British foreign policy who has described Bush as a mass murderer and called Blair a “deluded idiot”.

In November 2002, in a speech at an award ceremony in Turin, where he was presented with an honorary degree, Pinter spoke about a recent cancer operation and then said: “I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare — the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence...

“The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their dictator.”

A couple of months later, in an eviscerating poem titled “God Bless America”, he conjured up an equally prescient vision of the horrors that lay ahead: “The gutters are clogged with the dead / The ones who couldn’t join in / The others refusing to sing / The ones who are losing their voice / The ones who’ve forgotten the tune.

“The riders have whips which cut./ Your head rolls onto the sand/ Your head is a pool in the dirt/ Your head is a stain in the dust/ Your eyes have gone out and your nose/ Sniffs only the pong of the dead/ And all the dead air is alive/ With the smell of America’s god.”

Not surprisingly, there are a few long faces in the US over the Nobel committee’s choice, including the increasingly unpleasant visage of born-again Bush acolyte Christopher Hitchens. They’ll be longer still when Pinter delivers a 45-minute speech (“the longest .... I will ever have made”) at the award ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, because he intends “to say whatever it is I think. I may well address the state of the world.”

It’s unlikely to be featured on CNN or Fox News, but in the unlikely event of the BBC mustering the courage to broadcast it live, the oration should be well worth staying up for.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com