Waiting for Allah

[Zakk]

These three articles, are about fundamental wrongs in the way things are run in Pakistan. the NA areas used to be some of the most strongly patriotic areas, who unlike most places physically fought to join Pakistan. The other is about an old wrong in Pakistan, locals being deprived of the right over their own resources. The last is about good old sifarish, and how postings are being made purely on the basis of sifarish.

http://www.weeklyindependent.com/feature2.htm
NGOs have done nothing after two major tremors rendered the NA people helpless under open sky in sub-zero temperatures

_______________________________________by Ahsan Wali Khan

Look at the irony of fate. While the privileged people of Pakistan enjoy their holidays under the luxury of democratic governments in cosy environments, the deprived people of Gilgit Baltistan are experiencing earthquake jolts in sub-zero temperatures.
Two major tremors, one measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale within a span of a month, killed over 30 people mostly children, thousands rendered homeless with the loss of their lifetime savings and property. The constant ongoing tremors since November 3, 2002 have forced inhabitants to take shelter under open sky, on raw snow, in below minus ten degrees, in the remote mountainous valley of Astore, Diamer district, in close proximity of Nanga Parbat, famous as ‘the killer mountain’ which ranks as the ninth highest peak of the world and is the focal point of attraction for tourists and mountaineers alike.
The existing scanty road links are blocked due to the landslides caused by the earthquakes and the remoteness of the effected areas are obstructing the relief operations. Only heli-borne relief operations undertaken by the military are reaching the suffering people in the devastated areas. The heli-borne relief operations also face great difficulties in operating flights due to poor visibility caused by constant overcast conditions and the dust kicked up due to earthquakes in the vicinity of the affected area.
The entire region is experiencing tremors at frequent intervals for the last one-and-a-half month. People believe that Allah is the only hope to prevent further disaster. They are passing through constant state of uncertainty looming over their heads. It is felt that ongoing relief operations are not proportionate to the gravity of catastrophe. A two-pronged approach is needed with stepped up relief operations corresponding to the magnitude of the calamity on war footings. Priority one, to tackle the disaster-hit areas on occurrence followed as priority two; anticipatory measures catering for future eventualities.
Remoteness of the area supplemented by extreme weather conditions with fresh snow and the nature of unending tremors warrant that Astore region be declared a calamity-hit area and emergency should be declared. Relief goods inclusive of rations for both humans and animals need to be stored/dumped in forward areas as well as the five district headquarters to meet future crisis.
The recent blockade of the Karakoram Highway (KKH) for 10 days due to the earthquakes caused shortage of daily commodities and price hike. Teams of doctors with essential equipment and ample medicines should be placed in the area with availability of helicopters for quick access and response. Local administration should be prepared with contingency plans, to ensure damage assessment and timely evacuation from damaged houses likely to collapse in an event of another mild jerk.
So far the seriousness and steps taken by the federal fovernment, the donor agencies and the NGO’s are less than desired. There is a need to increase the PIA flights to Gilgit Baltistan supplemented by C-130 aircrafts for the people stranded in Rawalpindi in an event of blockage of KKH. On the political front the people of the area are controlling their anger and frustration which could erupt against the unjust deprivation of their political rights due to their undeterred love for Pakistan. God forbid if this suppressed volcano starts spewing out it might engulf a lot.
The Gilgit Baltistan case is extremely unique and the only of its kind where people insist on becoming part of the country (Pakistan) and the latter is hesitant. Unfortunately the outgoing military regime also like the previous governments passed the buck to the newly-elected government and nothing amazing is expected from the present civilian regime either.
Like the past practice the new Minister for KANA, Aftab Sherpao, elected from Charsadda is the chief executive of Gilgit Baltistan to pilot Northern Areas Legislative Council (NALC), the only elected representatives forum of the area. The senior most position for the elected NALC member will continue to be the deputy in yet another vague arrangement. How would Mr Sherpao react to a similar situation in NWFP? More interestingly Mr Sherpao preferred to take oath in Islamabad instead of Gilgit as the chief executive, NALC.
Apparent writings on the wall are loud and clear that the people are fed up with the political deprivation/uncertainty. The educated younger lot is becoming jittery and rapidly turning against Pakistan. Most of the student organisations openly propagate anti-Pakistan slogans. Previously non-existent nationalist elements are visibly gaining strength and leading the younger generation today.

The writer is a freelance columnist belonging to Northern Areas

[Zakk]

He deserves a gun-salute
http://www.weeklyindependent.com/opinion4.htm

by Dr Tarique Niazi

Dera Bugti is the energy capital of Pakistan. It sits on the immense wealth of hydrocarbon reserves that make it Pakistan’s Middle East. Its fossils have been the major driver of Pakistan’s industrial machine, accounting for 15% of the country’s energy needs. Our economy is so beholden to Dera Bugti’s natural gas reserves that it can be alternatively measured in cubic feet and cubic meters. The area’s riches of resources, however, exclusively belong to its natives, who should have what in legalese is called ‘eminent domain’ -commanding right to appropriation – over its surface and subsurface resources.
According to natural scheme of things, we all should have the first claim to what is beneath our feet, over our heads, and around us, as we are embodied and embedded in our natural environment that forms our lifeline. Nature commands us to live by its ‘laws of distribution’. Before it prescribes such laws, nature also distributes its life-affirming, life-sustaining resources justly and fairly. We in Pakistan see this ‘natural distribution of resources’ at its best --Punjab and Sindh have fertile soils, the Pakhtoonkhaw, hydraulic resources, and Balochistan metallic and fossil fuel reserves. If we are smart enough to see inter-linkages between these gifts of nature to Pakistan - soil, aqua, and fuel - our nationhood seems to be bounded by nature. So, ‘naturism’ should be our ‘nationalism’. Also, we should, thus, hold nature in utmost reverence, as it builds and binds us into a nation.
Unfortunately, the relationship between natural and social communities (i.e. human communities) has always been filled with competitive tensions. Over time, though, social communities resolve these tensions as they learn to customise their needs to the dictates of nature. No society or economy can survive without its native force of life in land, water, coal, gas, oil, wind, and sun, to which human communities make contested claims. National movements of the 1950s and 1960s were nothing but an articulation of nativists’ claim to natural resources. The 18th and 19th century colonialism was just as much a quest for natural resources. The Indo-Pak subcontinent was a prime site of such claims and quest, where our foremothers and forefathers drove out the British raj to reclaim their birthright to appropriate their resources according to their genius.
Balochistan, although indigenously autonomous in use of its resources, was a leading player in the creation of Pakistan. So were all other minority provinces -Bengal, Pakhtoonkhaw, and Sindh, - except Punjab where Muslim League was defeated. Nawab Akbar Bugti was the youngest leader of All India Muslim League that fought for Pakistan. So was Mir Ghaus Bux Bazinjo.
Once Pakistan was born, they were all, one after another, blackballed as ‘traitors’ for their refusal to live off their servitude to the industrial-bureaucratic machine of first West Pakistan and then Islamabad. Nine of their leaders, the foremost being Sardar Nauroz Khan, were hanged to death in the fifties for standing up to then military dictator General Ayub. Nawab Bugti was not behind in being shadowed by death for his defiance of the Ayub dictatorship that led to his deposition as ‘Sardar’ of his tribe. The scheming minds of the central bureaucratic machine conceived of his replacement with a pliable Bugti, who happened to be his uncle. The scheme ended up in tragic failure as Bugti tribesmen, instead of swearing in the officially blessed substitute as their Sardar, sent him to his grave.
This was, however, a trap laid for Nawab Bugti, who was subsequently charged with the murder of his uncle to face death on the gallows. Yet he did not blink; nor did he swap his conscience for his life. The amount of pressure brought in the process to bear on him would have crushed Chiltan, but the Nawab stood as tall as he is. The price he paid for his defiance was seven years in jail. He patiently served time in the most notorious prisons of Pakistan, including but not limited to Montgomery (now Sahiwal), Muchh, and Mianwali. At the end of the day, it was he who walked away alive and free to see instead his tormentor, Ayub, leave ill-gotten power in utter disgrace. Ayub’s groggy replacement in General Yahyah was no relief for him either, but Yahyah’s stint was short-lived, whose divisive politics brought the Nawab on the wrong side of his. He allied himself with the marginalized people of East Pakistan and threw his youthful support behind their demands for greater autonomy. Islamabad was then too ‘drunk,’ both literally and metaphorically, to see the future strike at the very heart of the country’s unity. Indeed, it took a tragedy of the nation’s dismemberment to prove the ‘traitors’ of Pakistan -from Bolan to Chitral to Dacca - ‘right.’
In the 1970s, Nawab Bugti unrolled a welcome mat for the first-ever democratically elected government and its leader, late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He accepted to become the foremost federal authority in the province as its governor. Long after he fell out with Mr Bhutto, he still had his picture with him framed and hung in the living room of his modest house on Ainuddin Street in Quetta. The framed portrait depicts him lighting Mr Bhutto’s cigar with his hands cupped around a flaming stick of match. Each time I see this depiction, it reminds me of the Baloch tradition of ‘trial by fire’ that never ended for the Nawab. He sat out the following eleven years of Zia dictatorship, whom he never dignified with a personal call.
General Zia bribed his way to his family to cut him loose from it. He successfully lured his stepbrother, Ahmed Nawaz Bugti, with a cabinet post. His secret services sowed divisions within the Bugti tribe to follow the time-tested colonial power practice of ‘divide and rule.’ Such practices are success if you are Indonesians in East Timor, or Mainland Chinese in Tibet, or Hindu Indians in Kashmir, or British officers in India. They are just as much tragic failure if you are arrayed against your own people, as we saw in the former East Pakistan. Even if Nawab Bugti was conspiratorially eliminated, his replacement, no matter how pliant under the circumstances, would turn out to be just as defiant.
The Industrial-bureaucratic complex does not have the vision to see beyond the scheming ways of divide and rule. Part of the reason is its insularity from the same Balochs on whose resources it lives. A case in point is the major players in Big Oil and Big Gas such as the Ministry of Petroleum, the Oil and Gas Development Corporation, the Northern Sui Company, and the Southern Sui Company that stay cleansed of any Baloch in their top echelons. As a result, all they do is smell ‘conspiracies’ and ‘ethnic wars’ even in workaday problems of labour-management disputes. Since the fifties, they see the Nawab’s side infested with the “corrupt, traitor and the terrorist.”
It is interesting to note that Wapda, an equally strategically sensitive energy agency, is logged with a 20,000-strong surplus labour that has zero utility to the organisation. A trimming of this most inefficient organisation will save the nation $1.5 billion a year in lost revenues. Yet the stiff resistance to this thinking by labour leaders persuaded even the all-powerful General Musharaf and his colleagues to back off such reforms. Yet no one sees in this resistance a masked challenge to ‘federal authority;’ or call Mr Khurshid Ahmed a “blackmailer a traitor, or a terrorist”.
The Nawab or his tribesmen do not have to be blackmailers to assert their ownership rights to what is theirs - natural gas reserves. Those who call them names could themselves be seen as robber barons. They are running loss-making industrial and commercial concerns and yet making huge profits just because they pay below-market price for energy. Their industry’s resource efficiency (input-output ratio) is one-fifth of India’s, which would have long since collapsed but for the gas fields of Bugti tribesmen. If allowed to use the proceeds from natural gas, even at the current below-market price level, the annual revenue for Balochistan, and not just Dera Bugti, will rise ten-fold. When the Nawab or his people cry foul, they are tarred as ‘traitors’. Are they? Just look at the name of The Jamhori Watan Party (i.e. Democratic National Party) that Nawab Bugti leads. It is the only party that is neutral of any parochial taint in a province that is swamped with nations, parties, and movements of Balochs, Pakhtoons, and Hazaras.
Nawab’s symbolic embrace of race-neutrality matches its substance. Of the six senators that his party elected, three were non-Balochs: one Punjabi and two Pakhtoons.
Is their Nawab a terrorist? Just look at his lifetime record to investigate this charge. During the five-year insurgency (1973-77) in Balochistan, Nawab Bugti was the only Baloch leader who broke with his life-long friends in the National Awami Party (NAP), and chose democratic politics over warfare in the mountains. According to Tariq Ali, 22,000 people got killed in that insurgency, of which 7,000 were Pakistani troops. Despite being a patriarch in a centuries-old traditional order, the Nawab stays as democrat as one can find. In almost thirty years of military dictatorship in Pakistan, he never shook the hand of a military despot. While our rulers conspire their way to power, Nawab Bugti is among those rare politicians who resigned from his traditional leadership as tribal chief to make room for his democratically elected replacement. A man of such integrity deserves a ‘gun salute’, not ‘gun fire’.

The writer teaches environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin, EC, USA

[Zakk]

Have a link, will rule!
http://www.weeklyindependent.com/column1.htm
Posting to key bureaucratic slots has always been through personal links and so is it now, especially in Punjab

by Maqsood Butt

Sitting authoritatively in a room at Punjab chief minister’s secretariat, this tall man is wearing an expressionless face. But his tone turns haughty when he talks to somebody on the phone. “The chief minister wants this done,” or “the chief minister wants compliance of this order”, the man says in arrogance. On the other end must be some government official who may be senior to him. But he does not bother for he is Chief Minister Pervaiz Elahi’s man. Muhammad Khan Bhatti is a deputy secretary here. He has hopped from one slot to another courtesy the Chaudharys of Gujrat always going up.
Hailing from Mandi Bahauddin, Bhatti joined the local government department in fifth pay scale. Later, Chaudhary brothers had him installed as an estate officer in the Punjab Assembly and promoted to grade 18. People say he once asked the assembly secretary to propose his installation as Gujrat’s deputy commissioner since he was in grade 18. Chaudharys advised him against such a move for he could become a laughing stock in the civil service. Now he is pulling the Punjab strings under chief minister’s shrewd principal secretary G M Sikandar who has served in the secretariat for a good period of time under different chief ministers, especially Shehbaz Sharif.
Insiders say Muhammad Khan Bhatti’s appointment in the chief minister’s secretariat is akin to those of Qamaruzzaman as Lahore Development Authority director-general and Ejaaz Gillani as a deputy secretary in the chief minister’s secretariat. Qamaruzzaman was a grade-5 clerk in the anti-malaria campaign of the health department before Nawaz Sharif made him the LDA boss while Ejaz Gillani was rewarded by Shahbaz Sharif for serving him at home.
Now over to Islamabad where Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali has appointed his friend Khawaja Nasiruddin as his principal secretary, a post several top government officials eyed. In the run were bureaucrat Mirza Qamar Beg and Police Group of Pakistan’s ‘liberal and worldly’ official Iftikhar Rasheed, who is a close relative of film star Nisho fame former inspector-general of police Haji Habib-ur-Rehman and a cousin of policeman Tariq Pervez who does not carry good reputation. Despite his having these references, Iftikhar Rasheed has been hired on a two-year contract after his retirement as communications secretary.
The military regime has not only posted retired and serving military officials on key civilian post, but also given retired civil servants an extension in service or rehired them on contract. Establishment Division Secretary Tariq Saeed Haroon, retained on the post on a two-year extension, has been employed on a five-year contract as a member of the Public Service Commission. Haroon is known to be an official who only sees the official files and does not process them. During his last days in the service, he reportedly let hell lose on the officials facing the government wrath.
Also in the run was former Punjab inspector-general of police Malik Asif Hayat. Hayat had Jamali’s blessings and so was sure the Punjab chief minister would not replace him. Hayat was inducted into the police from the army. A police officer senior to him says Hayat would have retired as colonel had he been in the army. He bossed the police of the largest province of the country though he had no professional capability to do so. His brother General Arif Hayat will ensure his posting to some important slot.
Though Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi is in the provincial saddle, holding the reins are Chief Secretary Hafeez Akhtar Randhawa and Home Secretary Brig (retd) Ejaz Hussain Shah. Many members of the provincial assembly grunt that these two ‘civil servants’, especially the chief secretary, hamper directives from the chief minister’s secretariat from going through. Since IG Asif Hayat and Headquarters DIG Tariq Khosa’s transfer over the issue of police ordinance, the chief secretary and home secretary have been gaining ground. However, at the same time, there are reports that the home secretary is on his way out, likely to be replaced by Hassan Waseem Afzal. Criticising Randhawa and Shah at a function at a judge’s house recently, an industrialist questioned how these officials would sleep in peace. To it, a senior bureaucrat quipped: “Would those who implement their orders?”
Police people say Malik Asif Hayat’s own team, mainly Tariq Khosa, led him to ouster. Tariq Khosa is known as a big-headed police official. People also link him to a former chief minister through some family connection. Tariq’s brother Nasir Khosa has been made joint secretary in the prime minister’s secretariat for having served for long in Balochistan. Premier Jamali considers him honest. Khosa brothers have been favourite in every government courtesy some of their family members.
New Punjab IG Masood Shah, whose name had been placed on the Exit Control List by the National Accountability Bureau before being given the prized post, belongs to the North-Western Frontier Province. He has played an important role in overthrowing Sabir Shah’s government in the NWFP. Shah is a close friend of former NWFP chief minister and federal minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao. He is also supported by National Security Council Secretary and General Pervez Musharraf’s top aide Tariq Aziz Warraich, who is a friend of Shah’s brother-in-law. Some say Masood Shah’s sectarian connection with a top notch in the CM secretariat helped him a lot in making it to the top slot. Have a link, will rule!