A day of reflection

WHEN on this day last year an earthquake of gigantic proportions struck the entire Azad Kashmir and parts of the NWFP, the nation rose as one and rallied to reach out to the victims with a helping hand. Of course, the enormity of the destruction of life, property and infrastructure was much too staggering for the helping hand to measure up to, but in that time of its greatest tragedy the nation experienced its finest hour as it faced the challenge with epic resolve and extraordinary determination. Some were on the spot within hours of the disaster, digging out the dead and providing succour to the survivors. Despite the difficult terrain, despite the destruction of roads and bridges and despite the impossible heights at which many survivors were perched, every human and technological skill, international as well as local, was put to work to rescue victims and provide them with immediate relief. Those who were trained to cope with such situations, like the personnel of the armed forces, rose to the occasion and did their best. In that they were helped by many relief helicopters sent by Nato and other countries and by hundreds of doctors from foreign countries who joined our doctors to provide on-the-spot medical aid. Medicines of all kinds came in from all over the world free of cost and in plenty. There was no shortage of food, blankets and tents that were badly needed. The problem was to get these to the right places and in the right time. It was a gigantic challenge which was met to the best of the ability of all.

While one can look back with a great deal of satisfaction at the rescue and relief phase, though at times it appeared slow-moving and inadequate considering the enormity of the task at hand, the same cannot be said about the rehabilitation and reconstruction phase. In the first place, the donors have taken their own time in making the pledged funds available. Then there was this unnecessary confusion within the government on who would do what and how. No doubt, the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (Erra) was formed without much loss of time. But manning the organisation and framing the rules and regulations for its working took a long time. Erra is still not fully equipped to deal with the problems of delays and irregularities in payments of compensation or with the demands of uprightness and efficiency of management by individual donors who want to see their funds being used for the right purposes. Erra has a long list of difficulties it faces in the reconstruction work in the remote regions of Azad Kashmir. But then, it passes the blame for slow work in the devastated areas to the implementation agencies and, in the case of the NWFP, to the provincial government.

A highly respectable international NGO, Oxfam, has made charges of corruption against low-level officials. President Musharraf has refuted these allegations. One only hopes that Erra is aware of the crucial responsibility it bears for carrying forward the rehabilitation process and brings itself round to meeting the challenge with the required efficiency and integrity. The good news is that the earthquake did not adversely impact the national economy to any serious degree because the regions which were ravaged contributed very little to the GDP. What is more, the resources that are now available for rehabilitation and reconstruction, if used wisely, can turn these regions into highly productive areas.

Cricket at the crossroads

UNCERTAINTY is cricket’s defining trait. Sadly for Pakistan, this otherwise cherished quirk has been as much a feature of cricket administration as it is of the playing field. After two years of relative calm, boardroom and player intrigue appear to be reclaiming their place of prominence. This unfortunate return to past practice has, in the space of three days, seen a petulant Younis Khan publicly renouncing the captaincy, Mohammad Yousuf being appointed skipper in his place, Shaharyar Khan resigning as chairman of the PCB and, finally, Younis being reinstated by the new head of the board, Nasim Ashraf. For added measure, Mushtaq Ahmed was dismissed as assistant coach. Anyone who thought that the Oval chapter was closed can think again, for the seeds of the current chaos were doubtless sown on that portentous Sunday in August.

The Oval episode triggered accusations that the board — and particularly its chairman, who was present on the ground — had failed to handle the situation professionally. “I don’t think the Oval incident should have happened. But once it did we had to take a stand and back our players,” Shaharyar Khan said after announcing his resignation. He added, however, that the Younis Khan escapade “hurt me more than the Oval fiasco.” Shaharyar Khan was apparently asked to step down by President Musharraf, the patron of the PCB, and the man now at the helm is a Musharraf adviser who, until yesterday, served as a member of the board’s ad-hoc committee. The outgoing chairman is criticised by some for allowing too much leeway to the players, such as appointing Mushtaq as bowling coach on Inzamam’s insistence and failing to take a firm line with senior players who were not comfortable playing under Younis. The England board’s £800,000 compensation claim for revenues lost during the aborted Oval Test may have also been a factor. After all this turmoil, regrouping will be difficult, but an effort must be made. With Shaharyar Khan’s departure, Pakistan cricket has already lost a valuable asset. The need now is to ensure that the upheaval claims no more casualties, such as coach Bob Woolmer. With the World Cup just round the corner, his loss could be calamitous.

Sectarian clashes in Orakzai

THE mindless clashes between rival sects over the ‘ownership’ of a shrine in the Orakzai tribal area of the Frontier comes yet again as a reminder that ours remains a society divided, and in transition — from the tribal/feudal mould to a liberal, democratic one. The fighting in which heavy mortar was used by both sides left 23 dead and 30 injured in the last five days. Paramilitary troops had to be called in to disengage the heavily armed warring tribes. The clashes erupted when clerics from both sides stoked the fire of hatred, trying to “cleanse” the shrine of an 18th century mystic revered equally by both sides. This is simply abhorring. The political agent of the area and the governor of the Frontier have called for a jirga of tribal elders to resolve the matter. This, they say, is necessary to avoid the violence from spilling over into the neighbouring Kurram Agency which has a history of being a hotbed of sectarian conflict.

The large quantities of firearms found in the tribal areas are responsible for the heavy death tolls that tribal clashes invariably result in. Firearms are not seen anymore as part of cultural adornment but they are hoarded with an aim to use them against rivals at the slightest of provocations. Once triggered, the cycle of violence acquires a momentum and intensity of its own with no holds barred. Like its predecessors, the multisect representative MMA’s Frontier government, too, has failed to rein in sectarianism. The only long-term solution lies in working towards phasing out the anomaly of autonomous tribal administrations and paving the way for the eventual political integration of the tribal areas with the rest of the country. This needs a sustained effort and the engagement of all concerned.

Things fall apart

‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The Falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’

— W.B. Yeats,

“The Second Coming”

IT IS desolate here; fissures in the earth mark the landscape like the lacerations of unhealed wounds. The remains of a once vibrant town lie scattered on the broken jaw of this lost kingdom, and silence slips quietly into the dark crevices of memory, pulling the mind’s eye shut.

This is Balakot, one year after the terrible devastation wrought by the earthquake which struck this part of our beloved country. This was the epicentre of that destruction, the boiling core of the tragedy which spilled unchecked from the belly of the earth to its rivers and its valleys and its many pristine peaks.

Here one saw the total annihilation of an urban centre; it was here that the earth registered its strongest protest. It is here that things fell apart, and it is here that we can learn our lessons, if only we could insert sanity through the many fissures which mark the rot eating into our lives, into the hearts of our people.

A year has passed, and many promises have remained unfulfilled. Children still grapple with the ghosts of dead parents; parents still hear the cries of dying children. At ground zero in Islamabad, relatives of the dead shall mourn for them while others shall insist that the discourse on urban safety be made loud and clear.

In the valley of Maira, amputees fitted with prosthesis in Havana, Cuba, shall huddle together around the evening fire and talk about the doctors who came from a little island in an ocean of killer sharks to save their limbs and their lives. In Battagram, the child who was born amidst despair and devastation shall celebrate its first birthday, and in Lodhiabad a father shall cherish the few remaining bits of his daughters’ lives snuffed out in an instant.

In the distance, the hollow sound of promises is just a faint echo ricocheting against the crumbling sides of mountains split apart in anger. Otherwise there is only silence here — silence and the rustle of dead leaves as autumn slips into winter and hope gives way to the deepest despair. A year has passed, and things around the country continue to fall apart. In Murree, ugly multi-storied buildings continue to rise and fall, burying their owners as well as common sense beneath the debris. In Lahore’s walled city, concrete monstrosities continue to loom over the remaining vestiges of a past cynically ignored. Along the canal, thousands of trees sheltering citizens from the sun and the toxins which are pumped into the air relentlessly face the chopping block. Evacuee Trust Property left behind by philanthropists who gave us our hospitals and schools and libraries have been earmarked for obscene edifices which shall emerge on the horizon like a pestilence.

In Nathiagali colonial era rest houses are to be replaced by some architectural wonder which keeps neither the ecology of the area in view nor the vista itself. In Abbottabad, the last remnants of a colonial heritage are pulled down, making way for steel and chrome plazas which will house the dreams of merchants intent on cashing in on a rapidly consumerised society.

Across the country, these merchants have joined hands with the powerful in turning our landscape into a bizarre semblance of a nightmare from which there seems to be no awakening. The unholy collusion of tinker, tailor, beggar man and thief has stitched up our fate with the thread of avarice guiding them on their diabolical path. Real estate, including state land, has been bought and then sold to the highest bidder, the blue-print of some bewildered notion of development etching itself across the eyelids of the greedy and the unscrupulous.

In cities where there are no roads worth the name, high rises and luxury housing emerge along the edges, defying logic and denying reality. In a country where there is hardly any semblance of competent management and no vision for a sustainable and healthy future, we are rapidly turning over our workforce to international hoteliers who shall rejoice at the vast number of unemployed men and women, all resigned to serve as butlers and chambermaids.

In a land where forests stand depleted to a mere three per cent of the total land mass, cities sprawl like unchecked epidemics, children die for want of clean drinking water, and the timber mafia fattens itself on its malevolent harvest.

A year ago, standing at the edge of the devastation of Balakot and the valleys beyond, we pronounced in our infinite wisdom that we shall turn tragedy into opportunity. Before the dust settled, we saw visions of Swiss Chalets and Alpine ski slopes dotting the scarred landscape of Kashmir and the Frontier. We saw moderation and enlightenment, those twins separated at birth, walk side by side along tarred roads, we saw social justice emerge out of the abyss, bringing to our people access to the political process — access to justice, to meaningful livelihoods, to basic services, to human rights. And when we turned our backs to celebrate this technicoloured vision, we did not see the pallor on the faces of the children whose lives had broken apart like the rocks on which their homes had stood. We did not see the hopelessness on the faces of mothers whose children never returned from the schools which became their graves, and we did not see the grief in the eyes of the men whose bodies were cleaved in half, leaving them to live half-lives with amputated limbs as a constant reminder of the time death nearly claimed them.

Much has happened since then, much that should have woken us up to the catastrophe which is unfolding before our eyes. Perhaps the detentions, deaths and disappearances of countless journalists across the country should have served as a wake-up call to reassess our claims to having liberated the media. Perhaps the brutal, wilful elimination of political opponents replacing the painstaking process of political dialogue should have jolted us out of our slumber. Or maybe the images of cities drowning in effluence while the custodians of governance renegotiate power in the capital should have made us read the writing on the wall.

Perhaps the death of the young son of a former judge of the Shariat Court at the hands of gun-wielding bandits could have gotten us to sit up and take note of the disarray of our cities, our lives. Perhaps the games played out in parliament to protect and alternately vilify women should have warned us that all was not well, that all was not as we were being made to believe.

But perhaps none of this shall impact our lives. We are, after all, a nation with a short memory and shorter attention span. We who disregard the past have no inclination or talent to foresee the future. We, in our collective state of inaction, are responsible for the decay and the degradation of our cities and our lives. We are responsible for the deforestation which most certainly led to the unimaginable destruction of the earthquake hit zones of Kashmir and the Frontier. We are responsible for the piles of refuse and the heaps of garbage strewn liberally outside our homes. We are responsible for the lack of accountability when powerful people sell our dreams and make a fat profit.

We are accountable for the humiliation and brutalisation of our daughters and mothers. We are the ones who have allowed our sons to wander the streets in search of jobs. We are the ones who have subverted the judicial process; we are the ones who support the tyrants, who applaud the corrupt, who honour those who have manipulated the truth. We are the ones who have created an uncertain future for our children, and we are the ones who shall be remembered for what we did not do when we should have.

A year has passed since the quake disaster of October 8. Many truths have been undone, many untruths have done us in. We, who gloat at what we consider are our successes, have been blinded by the mote in our own eyes. The children of Balakot and Battagram still stand on the edge of a precipice, while we, in our comfort, lull ourselves to sleep with recollections of a glory which is not ours to claim. And for those of us who have dared, who have defied notions of acceptability, there will be no laurels, even if we have put ourselves in the line of fire, earning the wrath of powers who have forgotten that nothing shall last, not even the myths we choose to create with words which are not our own.

Digital economy

IN the same way that the modern technology which promised the paperless office actually produces reams of print-outs, so it is an odd quirk that the frictionless, weightless digital economy has turned out to be a boon for people who want to buy and sell actual stuff.

The auction website eBay is a prime example, creating an industry that has sprung from a giant car boot sale, the full impact of which is still underestimated. Another example, almost as unlikely, is the roaring trade in secondhand books spawned by the web.

This is thanks in large part to the success of Abebooks, the company founded by two Canadians a decade ago, which brings together thousands of independent second-hand booksellers around the world, liberating their stock from dusty bookshelves and offering it to anyone with an internet connection. This week the site announced that it now has an inventory of 100 million books for sale — a 1991 first edition of A Checklist of the Vertebrate Animals of Kansas being the hundred-millionth title.

— The Guardian, London