Category Archives: Social Issues

Seizing the moment

Natural Disasters, Social Issues

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

HISTORY is replete with examples of societies having cleverly turned their adversity into a window of opportunity to achieve what they never would have in ‘normal’ times. Without a cataclysmic tragedy they often remain mired in retrogressive traditions that block their innate dynamism.

It is a well-established fact that people leading settled and stable lives are prone to resisting change in their conventional lifestyle and culture. Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, the architect of the Orangi Pilot Project and the epitome of worldly wisdom, had observed that migrants uprooted from their homes tended to be more enterprising.

In their research on the aftermath of the 1947 partition of India, the Indian feminist writers, Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon, discovered that many women who fled their hearths and homes found it easier to break away from the culture of servility they had been chained to for centuries. Many opted for education that changed their lives which would never have happened if events had not disturbed the social equilibrium. munshis.

In the 1970s, in the post-Bangladesh period when many workers from Pakistan went to the Gulf states to take up jobs, a silent revolution was initiated back home amongst their women. Zeba Zubair, the founder of Pavhna, an NGO working in Sindh, used to tell me about women joining literacy classes. They wanted to read the weekly letters their homesick spouses sent them without the intervention of intrusive Knowledge of reading and writing also helped them manage their own affairs independently.

I wonder if it is possible to show the way to the millions who have been displaced today by the devastating floods to seize this moment as an opportunity to change the direction of their lives. They can, if they are mobilised and motivated by community leaders and provided some support (financial, technical and moral) by those who understand their needs. In this way what is being branded as the “wrath of God” will become a godsend opportunity.

Why should not Pakistan rise from the ‘waters’ as New Orleans has done from Hurricane Katrina that struck in 2005? As rehabilitation and reconstruction of the flood-ravaged areas is undertaken, it would be a cheering thought if those who have come forward to extend a helping hand to the flood victims in their hour of crisis, do not pack their bags and go home once relief operations are over. Let them stay back for the rebuilding task as well.

Let the rebuilding efforts be spearheaded by those who have devoted their services primarily to education. Let reconstruction be school-centric with housing, healthcare, nutrition and economic activity revolving round education. The Pakistan Coalition for Education has reminded the government of the UN General Assembly resolution A/64/L58 (July 2010) that reaffirms the human right to education for all citizens and calls on governments to ensure access to education to all affected people in an emergency situation. It is the government’s job primarily to rebuild the schools that have been swept away and make them functional as soon as possible.

But will it? In normal times education has never been the government’s first priority. It will take its time to get its act together. Meanwhile the numerous NGOs and other institutions, which are already in the field having responded promptly when the floods came, should not be in a hurry to leave. Although the prime minister has made unkind remarks about NGOs they should not be discouraged. It is now time to turn to long-term plans for rehabilitation.

Some like the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler) and the Sindh Education Foundation have gone beyond their mandate to provide relief to flood victims. The first has been providing safe drinking water to nearly 10,000 IDPs who have been housed in Karachi. It has also opened a primary school and got volunteer teachers to teach the children while a medical camp has been set up with the help of the Pakistan Medical Association.

The Sindh Education Foundation has undertaken the responsibility of providing food, water, shelter and basic health services to the flood-affected people in Sindh. The foundation says it has also launched an emergency education programme for adults and children across all IDP camps in the province.

Meanwhile, the Layton Rehmatullah Benevolent Trust (LRBT), has provided medical relief to over 23,000 flood victims in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where its mobile teams started work on the ground within days of the flooding and has been treating cases of acute diarrhoea, respiratory ailments, skin problems and eye infections.

These are just a few I have named. What is significant about them is the public confidence they enjoy. They have raised donations to fund their projects. My mailbox is flooded with appeals for help from NGOs and I know they can be trusted, given their past performance.

This is the time to focus on education. Let the NGOs network and coordinate their efforts. Concentrating on schooling in this hour of crisis offers three advantages. First, it would allow the people the opportunity to organise their lives and get involved which would help them cope with their distress by getting control of their lives.

Second, it would create public interest in education especially when people realise that the school in their area could become the focus of the rehabilitation process.

Third, some innovative approaches could be tried now. The Sindh Education Foundation could encourage communities to organise their own schools without over-centralising the education system as has been the practice until now.

Of course guidance and learning material along with new ideas will have to be supplied. For instance why can’t shortwave radio transmissions be used to motivate teachers and help them upgrade their pedagogy and subject knowledge? (The power of radio can be gauged by Mullah Fazlullah’s transmissions to boost the Taliban’s following in Swat before the army cracked down.) If we wait for the education department to get round to conducting surveys to draw up their plans precious time would have been wasted and another generation would be lost.

The making of a terrorist

Social Issues, Terrorism and Violence

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

ANOTHER terrorist plot, described as ‘home-grown’, has been unearthed in Canada, belying conventional theories about what breeds militancy.

Last week the police arrested three men in Ottawa and London (Ontario) accused of “taking part in a domestic terrorist plot and possessing plans and materials to create makeshift bombs”. The police are tight-lipped about the details saying that the matter is still under investigation. According to them the suspects had allegedly selected specific targets for attacks.

This is the fourth case of people being charged for terrorism in Canada after 9/11. The three men picked up last week were all professionals — an engineer, a doctor and an X-ray technician — and, from what neighbours had to say, well integrated in Canadian society.

The arrests caused quite a stir as they shook the public out of its complacency. Since the men charged were Muslim, a wave of concern ran through the 600,000-strong Muslim community which, as is inevitable, becomes apprehensive of a backlash on such occasions.

The question being asked is: ‘why’? That is a question that even we in Pakistan have been seeking to answer with reference to our own terrorists. In our case it is often said that the terrorists are desperate men resorting to extremism, who are impoverished and have nothing to lose when they indulge in acts of violence that cost them their lives.

Another factor is said to be the intense sense of injustice — denial of a decent livelihood, education and healthcare — that drives people to the edge to give vent to their anger and inflict vengeance randomly. Others speak of religious indoctrination by the fundamentalists.

This can’t, however, be said about the alleged terrorists arrested in Canada. All of them were born and educated in this country and enjoyed economic security and the advantages of living in a highly developed country with an integrated multicultural society where racism is hardly a problem.

It was Haroon Siddiqui, a veteran journalist writing for Toronto Star , who pointed out the connection between the “the wars we wage and the terrorist mayhem that they trigger there and here”. He links the rise of the home-grown, self-radicalised terrorists in Canada (and also the US and Britain) to the West’s attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq and the tendency to hold Islam responsible for this phenomenon.

This argument follows the same line advanced by many of our own analysts who insist that were the drone attacks in Fata to cease the suicide bombings would also halt. But we know that this may not be entirely true. Since militants — be they Pakistan’s or Canada’s — find the only outlet for their anger in acts of terrorism, they will discover other provocations to fuel their militancy when Nato pulls out its forces from Afghanistan.

True, wars are not good for the mental health of the people and create more problems than they solve, and it would certainly help if governments stopped taking recourse to them. But the militants would not disappear.

Conversely, one can ask why most people in similarly adverse conditions nursing anger against perceived injustices do not adopt the route of militancy. Why do many of them seek out more constructive avenues to drive home their point such as organising themselves into advocacy groups or becoming community activists rather than taking human lives? Why is only a minuscule minority radicalised?

A few years ago, the Pakistan Association of Mental Health held a seminar in Karachi debating the phenomenon of suicide bombing. There were some psychiatrists who believed that those who committed suicide bombings were people suffering from mental illness.

In the debate that has followed the disclosure of the alleged plots in Canada last week, one psychology researcher echoed a similar line of thinking when he said with reference to home-grown terrorists, “There seems to be a personality characteristic that predisposes people to radicalise — and that is sensation seeking.”

This seems to be a logical explanation. If the majority in similar circumstances is not radicalised it is because it does not have that abnormal trait. One may also add that some possessing a personality prone to radicalisation do not become militants because their circumstances do not encourage this tendency.

It is basically the age-old ‘nature versus nurture’ debate. We now know that it is a combination of personality and an atmosphere conducive to radicalisation that helps mould the terrorist psyche. In the West the Internet has facilitated such individuals for whom group activity is essential. They derive the sense of belonging needed to spur them into action from numerous websites promoting jihadi literature.

Now YouTube, which brings live images with sound to any computer user, provides the environment to radicalise an individual prone to extremism. The Internet also allows people to communicate on a global scale for strategy planning. Muslims have become vulnerable because all manner of militants ranging from the Taliban to the various lashkars in Pakistan and Afghanistan provide a ready training ground to would-be terrorists.

Such globalised facilities have not been available to extremists who are not fighting for an Islamic cause, whether it was Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma in 1995, or the gunman who recently went on a killing spree in Cumbria, England.

In a society like Canada, a person with exaggerated notions of self-aggrandisement stuck in a job that offers little satisfaction to his ego could turn to violence for the sake of sensationalism. In Pakistan a person with extremist traits might end up in a madressah environment where he receives military training or he might be a university student who is seduced by a religious party that radicalises him.

The need is to correct this aberration. Unfortunately, the media has not been very helpful. No one denies that the right to information is a basic human right and should not be suppressed. But reporting an event — even a horrific one like a suicide bombing or target killing — in a factual way is devoid of all interpretative (mostly speculative) frills is different from sensationalising it.

Cashing in on the floods

Natural Disasters, Social Issues

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

WHEN natural disaster strikes, it can affect the rich and the poor, but not alike. Calamities such as floods and earthquakes hit the poor harder.

Being the children of lesser gods, the poor are more vulnerable. As such they need more help and for them recovery becomes a massive challenge.

In times of such crises, the temptation to cash in on their misery and play politics becomes irresistible for the rich and the powerful who have traditionally prospered from this inequitable equation.

This is being amply demonstrated in the testing times that Pakistan is currently going through, when floods are wreaking havoc on people who have already fallen victim to other tragedies that were essentially man-made. Many had suffered at the hands of terrorists. Others had seen dislocation and violence caused by the war that terrorism had invited. There were many more whose hardships were compounded by a dysfunctional and apathetic government not famous for its integrity.

Hence when the rains described by the Met Office as “once in a century” descended on the country, the devastation caused was stupendous. One should be wary of giving figures because the range of the numbers being quoted in the media and by leaders is mind-boggling. We are told that over 1,600 people have drowned, 13 million have been displaced, 252,000 homes have been washed away and infrastructure in large areas has been totally destroyed. The National Disaster Management Authority’s website gives the update for Aug 8 as 1,203 deaths, 1,317 injured and 288,170 houses damaged. The country was in a state of shock — or should have been — given the scale of the destruction.

Natural calamities are unavoidable. But their impact can be minimised by careful and shrewd planning, and effective and prompt disaster management. Accurate forecasting and early warning, where possible, also reduce damage. In this context, we do not know how unpredictable the deluge really was and whether the loss of life could have been lower.

What was painful was the experience of watching different sectors of society vying to politicise the crisis to their own advantage. The reaction of different people spoke volumes for their perception of the crisis. The prime minister described the floods as the “worst in Pakistan’s history” and went on to launch a flood relief fund while also making an appeal for international humanitarian assistance. Many countries were quick to respond — the US pledged $35m and Britain £15m.

True, the enormity of the damage called for intensive official intervention and the government’s resources are limited. But its failure to make even a token gesture of demonstrating a spirit of self-reliance evoked cynicism. One did not hear of Islamabad tightening its belt to generate funds for flood relief. In fact, President Zardari’s visit to France and Britain was even embarrassing because it displayed brazen insensitivity at a time when he should have been with his people. Besides, can one justify appeals for donations when the head of a government is ostensibly on a spending spree? The president tried to justify his visit in the context of the flood by saying that it helped him raise donations.

But was it just a coincidence that only a day before, his son Bilawal had launched a fund-raising drive, and the UK’s Charity Commission, the independent charity regulator, issued a warning titled “Be aware of possible Pakistan appeal scams”. It warned the public against “criminals who try to take advantage of the public’s generosity” through fictitious appeals.

The commission stated “the public’s support is crucial to enable charities to deliver desperately needed aid to Pakistan but it is vital that donations go to a genuine charity so that they reach those in need”. Pakistani expatriates are usually known to donate generously whenever natural disaster strikes.

While political elements exploited the situation, the religious extremists were not to be left behind. Before the floods, the Taliban had no qualms about inflicting their brand of violence on innocent people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. They had also been hand in glove with the timber mafia in denuding forested regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Deforestation, it is admitted, has exacerbated the tempo of the flood.

Adopting a carrot and stick strategy, a spokesman for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan announced at a time when the flood was at its peak that his organisation was suspending attacks in the flood-hit areas of the country. Of course the temporary respite never came. The day following this announcement the chief of the Frontier Constabulary was killed by a teenaged suicide bomber in Peshawar.

The Taliban saw the floods as an occasion to preach their own ideological doctrines and seize upon the people’s misery to bring them to heel. A purported representative of the Taliban, as quoted by Channel 4 news, claimed that the flood was an opportunity for the people “to seek forgiveness” and “pledge support to the Mujahideen and Islam”. According to him the calamity was a punishment inflicted on the people who had “desecrated Sharia and insulted the Mujahideen and sought help from the infidels”.

After pointing out the flawed character of the population, the militants could not let go of this chance to impress on the people their “humanitarian spirit”. The religious parties went into action to set up relief camps for the flood victims in a show of sympathy for them.

In the lead was the Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation — relief wing of the Jamaatud Dawa thought to be the public face of the Lashkar-i-Taiba which has been accused of masterminding the Mumbai attacks in 2008. With the government and the army’s rescue operations failing to neutralise the impact of the fury of the rivers, the Islamist charities stood a good chance of winning the public’s heart.

We will have to wait and see who wins in this strange battle for hearts and minds that is shaping up in Pakistan.

Economic worth of a woman

Economy, Social Issues, Women

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

FOR long it has been debated by women`s rights activists and economists arguing for social justice that if the value of women`s unpaid labour — read housework — were calculated the GDP of a country would shoot up.

According to studies done by various international groups, it is estimated that in some developing countries the contribution of women`s unpaid labour accounts for nearly a third of GDP.
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