Bright ideas and poor Islamabad

Whose bright idea was it in the first place to plant Paper Mulberry trees in Islamabad? Only to be cut down from time to time and leaving the city looking like the aftermath of an explosion.

Whose bright idea was it to cut down the beautiful 'Sumbul' trees in F-8? Why was it so easy for a 'VIP' not only to have a Sumbul tree in front of his house cut down, but also to make the CDA go on an absolute rampage and chop down every Sumbul tree in F-8 in 2002.

Just by collecting the signatures of about 30 people, this 'VIP' managed to get the CDA to carry out a massacre of these beautiful 25-year old trees. May God bless the principal of OPF College who opposed this insanity and protected the trees in front of her college.

Whose bright idea was it to plant the 'water guzzlers' Eucalyptus in the capital city? Very soon, they will be felled, too, after the realization in different circles that they actually lower the water table and damage the environment.

And now as if poor Islamabad has not suffered enough at the hands of some men with bright ideas, who came up with the brilliant idea of planting date palms in the city?

They might look nice in a desert, but not in lush green Islamabad? Are they enhancing the beauty of the capital? Are they a cheap and more economical option for the CDA? Why date palm when we have the option of planting beautiful flowering species of trees like Jacarandas, Amaltas or Kachnaar.

With these sickly date palms, we will have to live with this eyesore for the next few years until these plants have decided whether to live or die. Sumbul is an indigenous tree; there was no need of cutting them down; people have lived with them for years in Lahore.

I have lived and experienced the pain of dealing with allergies of my beloved son; I know it is a bad experience, but cutting down trees does not solve the problem.

There are many factors in the environment that cause allergies. The truth is that we have ceased to live with nature. It is easy to cut down trees than to plant them, let alone plant them intelligently.

And while this, cutting, chopping and hacking continues, I dread for the Jacaradas on the Ataturk Avenue or the absolutely beautiful 'Amaltas' trees with their stunning yellow flowers in spring, on Ravi Road in F-7. I just hope that no 'VIP' sneezes when passing by these trees or the very next day the CDA will chop them all down.

It will be devastating if someone else gets the bright idea of cutting down the beautiful historic Banyan tree in E-7, only because he/she collects 30 signatures, the CDA will go berserk and cut down all the Banyan trees in the area.

How can one teach children to respect trees when mostly they see in this city is the merciless cutting of trees? Islamabad was always beautiful and it still is; one only has to experience the spring here. What Islamabad really needs is no more bright ideas.

Most importantly, the city needs the improvement of the absolutely wretched conditions of the kutchi abadis, most deserving of all being Alipur Faraash. If there is so much money at the CDA's disposal, please kindly have the priorities right.

A private company is spending ostentatiously on the 'beautification' of the capital; why not spend this money in providing basic amenities to the residents of kutchi abadis.

If the CDA really wants to beautify this city, kindly continue with the good work and remove all the other eyesores of missile replicas and the poor abused mountain of Balochistan. That will not cost much, but will definitely enhance the beauty of Islamabad.

If the CDA is really very serious about the whole beautification business, then it will be a good idea if the high-ups take a nature walk in the city this spring; the delightful riot of colours of the flowering trees will convey the message of what the real beauty of Islamabad is.

God bless the individuals with bright ideas who planted those trees. I wish they had planted those flowering trees on the Jinnah Avenue and saved it from this disaster of 'date palms'.

Politics and American presidency

Is the United States about to enter a time of significant political change? As the campaign for the American presidency has moved to centre stage, that question hovers in the air.

Last summer, last fall, the most interesting political activity in the nation centred on the insurgent candidacy, for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, of Howard Dean, former governor of the small north-eastern state of Vermont.

Dr. Dean - he is a former physician - captured the imagination of the media, which placed his face on the cover of the major weekly news-magazines and gave him more television time than all his other competitors for the nomination combined.

Three aspects of Dr. Dean's candidacy fascinated the reporters covering the early stages of the nomination race. First, he - or, more appropriately his brilliant campaign manager, Joe Trippi - initiated a new approach to politicking the general public.

Two years after the financial collapse of the dot-com companies, a new internet phenomenon emerged, conceived and guided by Trippi: the emergence of dot.com politics. Howard Dean launched a web site that attracted potential supporters.

In addition to the conventional paraphernalia of web sites - stands on the issues, a potted biography of the candidate, photographs - the Dean web site featured an enticing and appealing 'blog' (a term familiar to web regulars as a shortened version of web log).

This blog recounted the daily, even hourly, activities of the Dean campaign; it also allowed supporters across the country to report on what they were doing. Visitors to the web site felt that they were part of the campaign and its inner workings.

Second, the attractive web site with its blog encouraged supporters and potential supporters to attend local gatherings all over the nation, called "meet-ups," in which they would talk about the Dean candidacy and.

After meeting one another, plan out local organizing efforts on his behalf. It very much seemed like Dr. Dean had found a new way to involve the disaffected Americans in politics.

And, in a nation where a bare majority of eligible voters participate in presidential elections, and less than a third in Congressional elections, this seemed newsworthy.

So there were many who were attracted to ex-governor Dean, at first because he claimed he was the only (although in truth several other outsider candidates like himself fit this description as well) candidate who had opposed the American war on Iraq.

He presented himself as a man of courage, going against the mainstream of politicians in the country and even his party. He asserted that the record showed he was a man of foresight, able to see what his major opponents did not: that the president was about to engage in a war which would weaken America in the world rather than strengthen it. With forty per cent of the electorate opposed to the war, Dr. Dean found a ready constituency.

He solidified that constituency by claiming that he was running as the candidate of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." This was meant to emphasize his difference from many Democrats in Washington who, made timid by the popularity of President Bush and afraid of the mantle of patriotism and anti-terrorism with which he so successfully cloaked all his activities, shirked the role of stringently opposing Bush's policies.

For time and again some Democrats, although by no means all, voted with the president on tax cuts for the wealthy, restricting civil liberties, eliminating environmental protections, and supplanting aid for education with calls for testable educational 'standards'.

Third, money flowed into the Dean campaign, money given - in a coming of age of the computer generation - over the Internet. Dean far outraced his competitors, and the media, seeing (not without insight) that money fuels campaigns, decided that this made him the man to beat in the race to the Democratic nomination.

Thus, in December Howard Dean headed into the upcoming early votes with a strong lead in the polls, in fund-raising, and in media attention. Although he had been a conservative governor, he was the favourite of the left-wing of the Democratic party because of his opposition to the Iraq war; although a son of the upper class and a beneficiary of all the right 'connections,' he ran as an outsider determined to overthrow those Washington: not only the President, but the quiescent legislators of this own party.

As the front-runner, he faced questions about his record and his past statements: some came in the form of attacks by his opponents, some were raised by the media. (He would later blame the media, failing to recognize that a campaign like his that had depended so heavily on media attention - his had garnered far more coverage than any of his opponents - could not complain if a portion of that attention turned from adulation to questioning.)

The questions led to some slippage in his poll standings. Of more consequence was his decision to respond to negative advertising by his main opponent in Iowa, Representative Richard Gephardt of the neighbouring state of Missouri, with negative advertising of his own.

That, especially in retrospect, was a mistake.Voters, despite Dean's endless campaigning in the state, apparently did not like what they saw. Dean's anger at President Bush's policies was popular, but when it appeared that he was a candidate fuelled by anger, an angry man, his support slipped substantially.

Meanwhile, other political activity was occurring. There had been two early favourites for the Democratic nomination. One was Senator Joseph Lieberman, a right-wing, militarist Democrat who seemed to have an advantage because he had been the vice-presidential candidate with Al Gore, who narrowly lost (or maybe won: the election was decided by the courts, not the electorate) to the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000.

But as Dean showed, the majority of Democrats were angry: at President Bush and his Iraq war, at the extreme conservative bent of the country under the incumbent administration, at the policies of a president who rewarded privilege while seeming to ignore the massive financial scandals perpetrated by some of his strongest backers.

Senator Lieberman offered not an alternative but a pale imitation of Bush, and so he started sliding in the polls. He would garner barely any support in the early primaries, and soon dropped out of the contest altogether.

The other early favourite was Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Tall, with the gravity of a statesman, he had served for many years in the United States Senate.

A veteran of the armed forces, he had a liberal political record, but without particular distinction. What lent him distinction was his history: a wounded veteran of the Vietnam war, he returned to the United States and helped lead the activist group Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

But his early campaign efforts foundered: his vote to support giving war-making authority to President Bush in the Iraq situation, a vote similar to most Senate Democrats, did not endear him to a Democratic constituency deeply unhappy with the war.

Nor did his early and sometimes confused attempts to explain that he intended to give the President bargaining power, not to approve of going into a 'pre-emptive' war with a minimum of international support, resound well with Democratic voters. He was leaden in his self-presentation, ponderous and given to long-winded speeches.

But as Dr. Dean's early lead quavered, two signal forces reshaped the Kerry candidacy. One was the candidate himself: suddenly, when he appeared on television or before live audiences, he seemed more casual, more like a person than a political automaton.

His positions were often spelled out with more clarity than his rivals for the nomination. And, with the Dean example in front of him - Dr. Dean totally transformed the entire race for the Democratic nomination in this regard - he began attacking the president for his failed economic policies (more than 15 per cent of the nation's manufacturing jobs have been lost in the past three years, a budget deficit this year of over $500 billion), for his neglect of public education, for his callousness towards the preservation of environmental quality.

Things have not gone well for the many millions of Americans who served in the armed forces. Those who fought in Vietnam came home feeling vaguely dishonoured; those who fought in later wars felt unappreciated. The growing quagmire of Iraq, which is stretching America's military forces more than is acknowledged; meanwhile a continuing current of daily casualties seems purposeless to many military men.

Thus, there has been among veterans and the military a growing discontent with the leadership of President Bush, a discontent fanned into flames by the single most stupid mistake of the Bush presidency.

For while the president was giving hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the very wealthiest Americans, he was cutting back funding on the health services which had been promised to the veterans.

It is possible - this is the dirty secret of American politics - to buy elections, not by paying voters directly, but by mounting a barrage of expensive television ads attacking one's opponent and boosting one's own media-created persona.

No one viewing the current scene expects the president to back away from huge media expenses, or from using the media to exploit wedge issues, which are usually lumped under the heading 'defending family values,' a code phrase which refers to mustering attacks on the poor, on people of colour, on immigrants, on women and on homosexuals.

The writer is professor of English at the University of Vermont, USA.

Unanswered questions about avian flu

The recent death of 22 people caused by avian flu in the Far East created more scare here than the death of three million birds in the local poultry farms. We know too little about the epidemic that left the poultry industry devastated in and around Karachi, and few of us are aware that different strains of viruses were responsible for the epidemics occurring at the two different geographical locations.

The reason: the local poultry associations and the authorities concerned have not been very forthcoming about the strains of viruses that hit our poultry farms recently. We were told only that two strains of virus - one of the H7 type and another of the H9 type - were involved.

No one cared to inform the consumers about the N-subtypes or the N numbers involved. In the absence of this information, it is simply impossible to specify the viruses responsible for the outbreaks in the country.

In contrast, the media informed us that the 'bird flu' in Vietnam and Thailand was caused by a virus whose H number (type) is 5, and the N number (subtype) is 1. But why should we know the subtypes too? Well, because 80 cases of avian influenza were reported from The Netherlands last year, and that involved a strain of the H7 type - H7N7 to be precise.

Most of the patients suffered from conjunctivitis, inflammation of the outer casing of the eye and the inner lining of the eyelids. Some also complained of respiratory problems. A veterinarian, who believed that no protection was required while visiting a farm, actually died.

In the H9 types of strains, too, there is at least one which can cause diseases among humans. In Hong Kong, two boys fell sick in 1999 after being infected with H9N2, which was supposed to affect poultry and not humans. These boys had to be hospitalized but recovered. Several similar cases were reported from mainland China as well.

This is confirmed by the World Health Organization, the New Scientist magazine, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States, and the Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System, which is a subsidiary of the US Defence Department.

The people must know what the N-subtypes involved in the recent bird influenza outbreak were, because if the real culprits were the H7N7 and H9N2 virus strains, then the authorities and poultry associations should not have claimed that humans were not at any risk.

Though the two strains mentioned above are not as deadly as H5N1, they could, and perhaps did, cause disease in people had they come in direct contact with a diseased bird.

It is also true that properly cooked chicken meat (at 70 degrees Centigrade or above for more than 10 minutes) is fit for consumption. But this is scant comfort for poultry workers who come in direct contact, day in and day out, with the birds.

If a single poultry worker falls sick of avian influenza, the stage is set for mutation of the virus involved.

Do we know when was the last time that such an outbreak hit our poultry farms? In other words, how frequently do our poultry farmers have to contend with avian influenza?

This question, too, is a vital one because if avian influenza had hit our poultry farms in the past, mutation or reassortment of the virus may already be under way, given the unhygienic conditions under which our poultry workers function and the chickens sold.

The New Scientist magazine (March 2003) had this to say about it: "The infections themselves are mild. But the virologists are concerned that, with the Dutch human flu season just starting, the bird virus could encounter the human influenza virus and cross-breed to form a nasty new human pathogen. People with flu symptoms have been barred from working with sick chickens".

International agencies and the Pakistani authorities both advocate mass culling of the diseased poultry birds but in view of the statements that well-cooked chicken is safe for human consumption, we don't know if the poultry farmers are destroying diseased chickens or selling them to the public.

In this context, a poultry farmer told Dawn: "No farmer in his right mind will kill his own chickens; one bird is worth Rs200." The government has refused to give compensation to the affected farmers, making matters worse.

In the public interest, we must raise these and other pertinent questions more vigorously in the media; and poultry farmers and the authorities concerned must answer them as honestly as possible.

'Adding insult to injury'

Kawish deplores that the process of recruitment in Sindh government departments has begun with unemployed youths being humiliated at the banks entrusted with the task of issuing job application forms.

Thousands of candidates thronged the banks at every district headquarters in the province only to find a limited number of forms. The situation led to protests by the frustrated youths who were baton-charged and even arrested by the police.

The daily terms it ironic that instead of publishing form specimen in newspapers and on the internet, the government chose to sell the forms through banks. This opened the doors to corruption as candidates were made to pay more than the prescribed cost at several places.

On the other hand, the forms were issued in a limited number though the earlier recruitment in the police force had already indicated that a massive number of candidates would apply.

The paper says that the government should not insult job-seekers who are already leading a humiliating life due to unemployment. It advises the government to extend the date for submitting the forms and provide banks with the required number of forms before the next phase of recruitment.

Awami Awaz writes that the oil spill from the Tasman Spirit has brought an environmental disaster to the 10-kilometre-long coastal belt of Karachi, the impact of which will continue for five years.

According to a report submitted to the minister for environmental affairs, the oil spill has caused irreparable damage to marine life as well as mangroves. The paper calls on the authorities to chalk out a comprehensive strategy to revive the mangroves which play a vital role in maintaining the coastal ecology.

Ibrat points out that a murder accused was recently made to walk on embers to prove his innocence in the Jacobabad area. The daily says that the mediaeval ritual is practised in those areas of Sindh and Balochistan where tribalism holds sway.

The continuation of this tradition and others like Karo-kari and jirga indicate the failure of the administration and police to establish the writ of law in the tribal areas, according to Ibrat.

Halchal laments that the social fabric of Sindh has been shattered while the attention of the enlightened sections in the province is focused only on political affairs.

Every now and then, a news report confirms that the people of Sindh are abandoning their culture. As a result, the girl child who was seen as a symbol of sanctity in Sindhi society, has fallen prey to inhuman atrocities.

Taking the signatures of a minor girl and her father on a nikahnama on the pretext of providing them zakat by a madressa teacher and then his insistence that the girl should be handed over to him as she was his wife is a glaring example in this regard. The paper urges political parties and social welfare organizations to take notice of the social decline.