LAHORE, Feb 17: No-one from the provincial or the district governments has visited the establishments burnt on The Mall during Tuesday’s riots and their owners and workers are sitting on the rubble waiting for any official rebuilding assistance.
“We cannot rebuild our premises and resume work on our own because the losses we suffered run into millions of rupees. We need official assistance but it is not yet coming,” a majority of the affected contacted by Dawn said on Friday.
Four buildings near Regal Cinema along with a restaurant in the nearby Dyal Singh Mansion were burnt and looted during the demonstration against the blasphemous caricatures on Tuesday.
Except for the premises of the restaurant all other buildings are privately owned. The restaurant is a part of the Dyal Singh Mansion which is owned by the government.
The buildings housed an outlet of a multi-national food chain, offices of a multi-national store, two banks and several private offices, including that of some lawyers.
The offices of the banks have been shifted temporarily to some nearby locations and are operating there. But staff and owners of other establishments have been left with nothing but worries about their future.
Some employees of the restaurant sitting on the stairs of an adjacent shop said they were guarding their gutted source of income and did not know who would re-build it.
They said some of the employees were working on a daily basis and were not sure about the continuation of their employment at least in near future.
Some people gathered in front of the burnt buildings on The Mall said they had submitted applications for registration of cases against those who went on the rampage but the Civil Lines SHO was not ready to register the cases.
Noorul Hasan Sabri, an advocate, said his office was burnt along with several others in the building and he suffered a loss to the tune of around Rs 5 million.
“We had immediately informed the firebrigade about the fire but they reached there after six hours and by that time the entire building was in flames. The area nazim visited the place in the evening but he did not do anything to help us,” he said.
“Around 300 people work in offices in our building and they all have been rendered jobless. We cannot rebuild the building without any official support and the government is not even registering the FIR of the happening,” he said.
Mr Sabri blamed police and administration for giving a free hand to the protesters. “There was none to protect the people and their property. There was total anarchy,” he said.
Adnan, the son of the owner of Naveed Publications housed in the same building, said the arsoning had deprived us and several others of their only means of livelihood.
“We pleaded to police and firebrigade to save our offices but no help was forthcoming,” he said.
Muhammad Javaid, the caretaker of an art gallery in a nearby building which also houses the KFC and is now burnt too, complained of a lack of official response during and after the riots.
He said the building was owned by the Pakistan Writers Cooperative Society and its main portion was rented out to the restaurant without any advance. “We had placed 35 paintings of different artistes in the restaurant which too were burnt along with the entire building,” he said.
He said the organization had little means of income, wondering as to how it would be able to rebuild the premises. It was the responsibility of the government to protect the life and property of the people and to help them in trouble, he said.
An official of the Punjab government said the government under the special premises act could only make the owners of the buildings on The Mall to maintain their original facade. “Any rebuilding was their (owners’) headache,” he said.
Officials in the district government said there was no plan as yet to compensate the owners of the buildings or offices damaged during the violence.