Artisans at work

Pakistani art and crafts industry feels the heat as the exports go down.

Craftsmen busy in their work to prepare wooden furniture

Workers busy in doing embroidery work on ladies wear as the wedding season is also at its peak

A craftswoman busy in making clay pots at her workplace

A Pakistani artisan works on a traditional handicraft

A Pakistani artisan buffs a traditional handicraft

Trouble in Karachi

The politicians, the city’s administrators, the law-enforcement agencies, the intelligence apparatus everyone must work to cool the political temperature in Karachi and stem a dangerous tide of violence.

Karachi is simmering again. The latest round of violence since the weekend has taken the lives of over a dozen members of the MQM and its bitter rival, MQM (Haqiqi), and more violence may well occur in the days ahead. Explaining the goings-on in Karachi’s murky world of politics is always diffi-cult, but there are some indications of what may have sparked the current round of what appear to be tit-for-tat killings.

Late last month, Afaq Ahmed and Aamir Khan, leaders of their respective factions of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement and con-sidered to be bitter enemies of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (the party which is part of the coalition government in Sindh and at the centre), were acquitted on charges of possessing illicit arms and explosives. With now only a few cases remaining against the two, they may soon be released from jail — raising the hackles of the MQM and fuelling its age-old suspicion that the PPP may have a soft corner for the Haqiqi group. Old wounds and new developments then may be what lie behind the latest round of violence. However, according to the MQM, the violence is part of a conspiracy aimed at the ‘Talibanisation’ of Karachi.

Be that as it may, the Sindh government and the law-enforcement agencies are clearly failing in their basic duty to the citizenry: ensuring law and order and protecting the lives and property of the people of Karachi. Preventing target killings is incredibly difficult for any agency; with literally thousands, if not tens of thousands, of potential targets and suspects, it is difficult to prevent any given person from entering any given person’s home or waylaying that person on the road and killing him. Having said that, the performance of the police and other law-enforcement agencies has been dismal when it comes to dispersing protesters and ensuring that groups of armed men do not go on the rampage in the city’s neighbourhoods.

What seems to be missing is a coherent plan to stem the violence. Surely it is not difficult to identify vulnerable neighbourhoods, step up patrolling, increase spot checks, cancel all but essential leave of law-enforcement personnel and work round the clock to not just clamp down on armed miscreants. These are dangerous days in Karachi and extraordinary times call for extraordinary vigilance and actions. It must also not be forgotten that with a full-fledged counter-insurgency underway in the northwest and a military operation perhaps imminent in South Waziristan, the possibility of retaliatory strikes in Karachi is high; the last thing the city needs is for another front to flare up in an al-ready combustible atmosphere. The politicians, the city’s administrators, the law-enforcement agencies, the intelligence apparatus — everyone must work to cool the political temperature in Karachi and stem a dangerous tide of violence.

Life as an IDP

Internally displaced families try to make it through the days and months in the make-shift refugee camps as fighting continues in Swat

Health care in Pakistan crumbles under refugee burden

The crisis has exhausted doctors, used up limited supplies of medicines and buried hospitals in a mountain of red tape as they try to get money and medicine.

She doesn't have a name yet. Born five weeks too early, she came into this world at the end of a painful six-hour drive on a creaky old bus that passed through a battlefield before arriving at the hospital. There was no electricity and not enough fuel for an incubator to feed oxygen into her tiny lungs.

Her mother, Zeenat, lay in a rusted steel bed, covered in a dirty blue blanket, the incision from her Cesarean section now septic.

Pakistan's rundown health care system is near collapse bringing yet more instability to a country already in turmoil. Hospitals have been overwhelmed by more than two million refugees from the mountainous northwest, where the army is battling Taliban insurgents. The crisis has exhausted doctors, used up limited supplies of medicines and buried hospitals in a mountain of red tape as they try to get money and medicine for the crisis.

‘In fact, to tell you honestly, health is not our national priority. It is very unfortunate,’ says Dr Arshad Khan, local doctor from Mardan, which is the epicentre of the refugee onslaught because it borders the battlezone.

And now, with this crisis, every smaller hospital is overloaded with displaced people and our district hospital in Mardan is collapsing.

The outpatient unit at 213-bed district hospital used to see 100 people a day before the anti-Taliban war. Now it is up to an average of 500 a day.

The government has allocated one million rupees for medicine for the refugees. But it will be months before the refugees see any because of bureaucratic hurdles attached to the money.

Pakistan's health care system is loaded with grim statistics, beginning with an annual budget of less than $150 million this year. The government says it plans a 56 per cent increase next year, bringing the budget to $300 million.

By contrast, Pakistan's defence budget last year came to $3.45 billion, and is expected to reach $3.65 billion next year.

More grim statistics: A new doctor to the government service is paid $120 a month, with an additional $16.50 housing allowance. There are only 12 doctors to every 10,000 people in Pakistan and 10 hospital beds to every 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). That compares to 22 doctors and more than 30 hospital beds in the United States.

International charities have provided medicines and field hospitals in refugee camps. But only about 20 per cent of the two million refugees are in camps.

The rest are scattered throughout the frontier province, as well as other provinces in Pakistan.

Even in the camps, there are 10 dog bites a day and no rabies vaccine. And the refugees from the camp still come to the district hospital looking for tests and X-rays, carrying their elderly and their children.

Most hospitals in the surrounding area where fighting still rages have been closed. That puts more strain on the Mardan District Hospital.

There, shadows lie on cement benches, or beneath on the floor, waiting for doctors. The only relief from the stifling heat comes from a half dozen ceiling fans. And even those don't work when the electricity is off, which is most of the day.

In the men's ward, 30 steel beds lie crammed together, with two-inch mattresses and no pillows. Pools of urine spread on the floor, and fresh blood stains the ripped bedding.

Beneath the bed of 10-year-old Abdul Hadi lie vomit and urine. His father stands by helpless.

‘He has had a high temperature for four days. No one has given him anything. They just say, take him to Peshawar,’ he says.

The father has covered the soiled brown plastic sheet on the boy's mattress with a bright red one from home. ‘We have nothing but how could I let him lie on this?’ he asks, picking up a bloodstained sheet.

Abdul Wadood, a refugee from Swat, watches his grandfather lying with his stomach tube unused.

‘They tried to insert it earlier but they couldn't, so they told me too to go to Peshawar,’ says Wadood, who is barely 24.

A technician at the laboratory, Etishan Khan, says the hospital now runs roughly 1,000 tests a day, compared to around 400 before the refugee influx. His department requested another two technicians and two lab assistants more than a year ago.

‘We have received nothing. We know that there is a problem here but what can we do?’

The steel grills between wards are closed in the morning to stop an influx of visitors. 

Early one morning a security guard with a stick beats back a few visitors who try to come through with medicines for family members.

Khan Zameen, wearing a red felt cap, is one of only two cleaning people on duty at the Mardan District Hospital during the 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. shift. He and his partner clean 10 wards, the blood bank and the X-ray department. He gets paid $50 a month, less than Pakistan's minimum wage of $82 a month.

The one bathroom for 30 patients stinks of urine and faeces. The toilets are overflowing, the door to one cement cubicle is falling off and a two-inch river of urine covers the cement floor. In one corner, garbage is piled high.

‘We're not animals. How can they treat us like this?’ he asks.

Things are not much better at Daggar Hospital, about 40 kilometres from Mardan.

Daggar was under siege for four weeks as the army tried to drive the Taliban from Buner, a mountainous district that bumps up against the Swat Valley.

Dr. Maqsood Ahmed, the senior health official for Buner, shut most of the 200-bed hospital because most of his staff fled when fighting broke out four weeks ago. Only 40 remained behind, including two surgeons. Now, the hospital is running just two wards and one operating theatre.

‘We are the only hospital in Malakand division (of which Swat and Buner are a part) that is functioning,’ says Ahmed. ‘It was very difficult for us. We slept here, but our families, they also stayed in Daggar, so we were afraid for them, afraid for our patients and afraid for ourselves.’

They begged for fuel from the military to run the generators. In the early days of the war they received 20 and 30 litres at regular intervals from the army, but the generator requires 90 litres a day on average. They had two ambulances but no fuel to run them.

‘We even buried two bodies in our yard. They died and it was curfew and the families could not get to them,’ Ahmed says.

When Daggar was cleared of Taliban a week ago, the International Committee for the Red Cross moved quickly to bring 1,200 litres of fuel and some medicines and evacuate two war-wounded.

As Ahmed walks the dark hallways, he apologises for the garbage under the beds and shoved into the corners. He says the cleaning staff left early in the war. In the one operating theatre, bloodied bandages stuff plastic garbage cans and an empty bottle is stuck beneath the two operating tables.

In what seemed like a small gesture to normalcy, Ahmed takes rubber slippers from a blackened wooden shelf and insisted they be worn instead of street shoes into the operating theatre. Yet the floor is littered with old bottles, needles and plastic wrappings.

It was at Daggar Hospital that Zeenat and her baby arrived. But Ahmed couldn't even vaccinate the baby because he had no vaccines. He had to ship them all to Mardan because he lost electricity for most of the day.

Ahmed has now put the mother on antibiotics. And so far, the baby was alive.

School life in Mardan

Children belonging to internally displaced families attend a make-shift school in Mardan. The schools have been set-up by Unicef.

The Unnecessary War

Somehow, our history has gone astray. We were such good people when we set out on the road to Pakistan. What happened? 

Marx once said: “Neither a nation nor a woman is forgiven for an unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who comes along can sweep them off their feet and possess them”. October 7, 1958 was our unguarded hour when democracy was expunged from the politics of Pakistan, perhaps forever, with scarcely a protest. The result is the mess we are in today.

“Liberty once lost”, Adams famously told his countrymen, “is perhaps lost forever”. We Pakistanis lost our liberties and all our democratic institutions in October 1999. Sadly, Pakistan also lost her honour and became a ‘rentier state’ on General Musharraf’s watch when he capitulated, said yes to all the seven demands presented to him at gunpoint by Secretary Colin Powell and joined the “Coalition of the coerced”. Regrettably, this situation remains unchanged even though the country is now under a democratic dispensation!

A lesson to be drawn from the works of Gibbon is that Rome’s enemies lay not outside her borders but within her bosom, and they paved the way for the empire’s decline and fall – first to relentless barbarian invaders from the north, and then, a thousand years later, to the Turks. Many early symptoms that heralded the Roman decline may be seen in our own nation today: concentration of power in one person without responsibility and accountability, contempt for the constitution and political institutions, absence of the rule of law, high-level corruption and greed and last but not least, periodic military intervention in the affairs of state and prolonged military rule. When the history of Pakistan comes to be written, the verdict of history will almost certainly be that military rule, more than anything else, destroyed Pakistan. 

If you want to know what happens to a country when unbridled ambition of its rulers flourishes without proper restraint, when absolute power enables the ruler to run the country arbitrarily and idiosyncratically, when none of the obstacles that restrain and thwart democratic rulers stand in his way, when parliament is cowed, timid, a virtual paralytic, well: visit Pakistan. Today it is like a severely blinkered cart horse painfully pulling a heavy wagon on a preordained track to nowhere. 

All the philosophers tell the people they are the strongest, and that if they are sent to the slaughterhouse, it is because they have let themselves be led there. Authoritarianism is retreating everywhere except in Pakistan. Why? In other countries there are men and women who love liberty more than they fear persecution. Not in Pakistan. Here the elite who owe everything to this poor country do not think in terms of Pakistan and her honour but of their jobs, their business interests and their seats in a rubber-stamp parliament. Surrender rather than sacrifice is the theme of their thoughts and conversations. To such as these talk of resisting autocracy is as embarrassing as finding yourself in the wrong clothes at the wrong party, as tactless as a challenge to run to a legless man, as out of place as a bugle call in a mortuary. 

How can you have authentic democracy in a country where de facto sovereignty – highest power over citizens unrestricted by law – resides neither in parliament, nor the executive, nor the judiciary, nor even the constitution which has superiority over all the institutions it creates? It resides, if it resides anywhere at all, where the coercive power resides. It is the ‘puvois occult’ which decides when to abrogate the constitution, when to dismiss the elected government, when to go to war and when to restore sham democracy.

Are people anxious? Dejected? Fearful? Angry? Why wouldn’t they be, considering the daily barrage of rotten news assaulting them from every direction? We live in a country that is terribly wrong and politically off course. What is worse, it is no longer a sovereign or independent country. It is a lackey of the United States. When will this tormented country be whole again? When will this sad country be normal again? The engine is broken. Somebody has got to get under the hood and fix it. President Zardari is so swathed in his inner circle that he has completely lost touch with the people and wanders around among small knots of persons who agree with him. The country is in deep, deep trouble. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait. Eventually, the cup of endurance runs over and the citizen cries out, “I can take it no longer”. A day will soon come when words will give way to deeds. History will not always be written with a pen. 

In the backdrop of this gloom and doom, President Zardari, under American pressure, unleashed the hounds of war, turning the beautiful valley of Swat into a vale of tears. As a result of army action, millions of innocent people, men, women and children, young and old, were uprooted, rendered homeless and forced to flee. Was army action unavoidable? Was it absolutely necessary? Did the people of Swat have to pay this terrible price? And what for? All these questions remain unanswered. 

“One day”, Churchill wrote, “President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what World War II should be called. I said at once ‘the Unnecessary War’”. Today Pakistan is at war with itself. The country is tearing itself apart. Why? One thing is clear. There never was a more unnecessary war, a war more easy to stop, a war more easy to prevent, a war more difficult to justify and harder to win than that which has wrecked Swat. 

Let me state clearly that the war in Swat, like the war in FATA, is not our war. It’s a proxy war imposed on us by our corrupt rulers who owe everything to Washington. It is perceived in the Pakhtun belt as genocide, part of a sinister American plan for the mass extermination of Pakhtuns on both sides of the Durand Line. 

With temperature rising, living conditions in the camps and elsewhere, fast deteriorating, the army operation has morphed into a war that is hard to win and harder to justify to the people affected by it. One thing is clear. While the Pakistan army wields a large hammer, not every problem is a nail. The lesson of history is: never fight a proxy war, never deploy military means in pursuit of indeterminate ends and never use your army against your own people. 

No army, no matter how strong, has ever rescued a country from internal disorder, social upheaval and chaos. Army action can never quash the insurgency in Malakand division or FATA. It can only be managed until a political solution is found. No one can be bombed into moderation. This is a false and dangerous notion. The Taliban can be deterred militarily for a time but tanks, gunships and jet aircraft cannot defeat deeply felt belief. 

President Zardari is playing with fire and acting like Conrad’s puffing gunboat in Heart of Darkness, shelling indiscriminately at the opaque darkness. The enemy is nebulous and the battlefield is everywhere. He has no address and no flag, wears no uniform, stages no parades, marches to his own martial music. He requires no tanks or submarines or air force. He does not fear death. As the Soviets found in Afghanistan, the enemy doesn’t fight in conventional ways, but from behind big boulders and from concealments. He doesn’t have to win. He just has to keep fighting. Asymmetrical warfare is what they call it now.

The war’s end remains far out of sight but the battle for the hearts and minds of the people seems to have gone awry. If you want to know how the displaced persons feel, go to Mardan and listen to the wretched of the earth. You will hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger.

‘Refugees in our own land’

With 24 hours to evacuate, the people of the war-torn Swat valley employed whatever little means they could to flee.

‘People were desperate,’ narrates Ayesha, a staff nurse at Saidu Hospital, ‘and a good number left with only the clothes they wore.’

Ayesha and her family count themselves lucky to be able to afford a bus ticket, the rest, she claims, were left to trudge across the rugged terrain either on foot or on donkey carts.

‘We were treated like cattle, left to our own devices. The government ordered us to move out, ‘how’ and ‘where’ was not their concern,’ she states.

It is believed that the current military operation in Swat and its adjoining areas has displaced three million people from their homes. These people have been scattered all across Pakistan in camps with little or no help from the government.

‘We were lucky to have relatives in Karachi,’ says Zahira, who comes from Shamozai and has been to Karachi a number of times.

‘But this,’ she stresses, ‘was a journey like no other.’

Thirty hours is the maximum time needed to travel from Swat to Karachi, but the immense traffic (owing to the mass exodus from, and the influx of military contingents into, Swat) made this impossible.

‘We reached Karachi in five days,’ recalls Zahira. ‘The children were ill and fatigued due to the heat’.

According to most accounts, just reaching the Kohat Tunnel from Malakand via the Indus Highway took people more than nine hours. A journey which otherwise, according to Zahira, takes less than half that time. This delay led to the tunnel’s closure, which, according to them, ‘added to their troubles’.

Now, in addition to the quest for safety, the IDPs faced the humungous task of looking for a place to spend the night too.

‘We stayed at a small hotel, but were extremely stressed as we knew that the day ahead would throw new challenges at us,’ says Zahira. ‘If only the tunnel gates had been kept open a while longer, reaching our destinations would’ve been much easier,’ she adds.

As day dawned, people resumed their journey; some went to camps in Peshawar and Rawalpindi, while others with relatives in Karachi and Lahore, headed there.’The immense heat and shortage of food and water made the journey more tedious,’ says Zahira. According to most, the public was their only source of help.

‘As we sat in buses passers-by, who were moved by our plight, handed our thirsty children juice packs,’ says Ayesha, who was travelling with her in-laws.

‘My sister in-law Nadia, due to a medical condition, is in a semi-conscious state,’ she points to a young girl lying on the charpoy. ‘This journey worsened her condition.’

Nadia, who is 17, is entirely immobile. Ayesha says that since her husband is abroad and her father in-law is too old to carry her, the family was compelled to employ the help of various other people to move Nadia into the bus. ‘Never in our life could we imagine a na-mehram touching our women, but now this military operation has left us nowhere.’

As displaced persons reached Karachi, some may have expected to find much-needed respite. But the extreme ‘Taliban-phobia’ that they encountered here left them further alienated.

‘I have never felt this helpless in my life,’ says Khan (real name withheld on request), who holds a masters degree in Political Science and was running a girls school in Swat.

‘This is the last five hundred rupees I have,’ he says as he holds up the commissary note.

Khan has been looking for a job and is willing to take up any menial chore to support his wife and four children, yet he is unable to find one.

‘Everywhere I go, people treat me like a terrorist,’ he says. ‘Employers who at first seem interested in my credentials and qualifications back off as soon as they hear the words ‘from Swat’.’

Referring to young men being shot at by the army for violating the curfew and being tortured by the Taliban for failing to follow their version of Islam, Khan says: ‘We have suffered both at the hands of the Taliban and the army. We were the ones who were forced to leave our homes; being a refugee in our own land seems strange, but when we look at ourselves, this is what we’ve become.’

Khan isn’t the only one who believes this. Feelings of isolation abound most IDPs in Karachi.

‘We feel estranged here,’ says Ayesha.

‘The Pathans have contributed greatly to the development of Pakistan. We have given our lives for our homeland, yet today when the Pathans need support and help, their Pakistani brethren deem them terrorists.’

Where there is Smoke?

'World No Tobacco Day' has been marked here, as it has been around the world. NGOs forming a coalition against tobacco have staged a walk; at seminars the dangers of the substance have been highlighted and Pakistan Railways has taken a big leap forward by banning smoking on its trains. But is the battle against tobacco really being won? Statistics indicate that smoking is growing in Third World countries even as levels drop in the developed world. The reasons are linked to the fact that awareness campaigns mean people in the west are less likely than before to take up the habit. This means that for giant companies who earn profits at the cost of health, the parts of the world where people have less access to information now offers the most lucrative markets.

Has enough been done in our country to discourage tobacco? The fact is that while laws have come in, restricting sales to juveniles or smoking in public places, implementation has been very poor. There is also a need for more aggressive effort to drive home the message about tobacco. Cigarettes and the 'sheesha' which has arrived over the last decade remain something of a fashion statement for the young and trendy. Health of course is rarely an issue teenagers think deeply about. There is also a growing rate of smoking among young women. Somewhere, despite the warnings on cigarette packets and the other efforts made, there has not been as much success as we would like to see. Surveys show people remain willing to ignore warnings. The WHO campaign for pictures as well as words on the warning labels is one we need to take up, given the high rate of illiteracy – and the fact that often, quite literally, pictures drive home messages where sentences fail. We also need to focus on spreading the 'no tobacco' message among children. They after all are the smokers of the future; in many cases they also have been able to dissuade parents who smoke. This then is a group that needs to be targeted in a more focalized manner, so that in the coming years we can have a society where tobacco is less commonplace than what is currently the case. 

Sad Story of IDPs - IV

A young girl in a bright blue dress breaks the line as men wait in a long queue leading to a distribution point at Sheikh Shehzad camp near Mardan.

Carrying bundles of pots, pans and straw matting, a young girl sets off back to her family's tent after a distribution of non-food items at Sheikh Shezhad

Volunteers cook vats of rice at a temporary roadside feeding centre in Katlang. The centre, funded by donations from local villagers, is feeding more than 4,000 people every day.

Four-year-old Habiba from Mingora has licked her plate of porridge clean at the temporary home that her family found at the government school in Pohan Colony, Mardan

During a special Friday prayer session for the displaced from Swat and Buner districts, Zubida leads a group of children from Baghdada in Mardan. In a ritual known as "Hatam Shareef", a thousand prayers are said as the children count out almonds while wishing for Peace.

Sad Story of IDPs - III

A brother and sister sleep side-by-side on the floor of a packed classroom at a primary school in Baghdada, Mardan. After the camps in Mardan reached capacity, thousands of fleeing families found shelter with locals and in the 

town's schools.

A father helps his two children to collect water from a newly installed pump at the Sheikh Shehzad IDP camp near Mardan

A young boy walks through clouds of smoke as the Sheikh Shehzad camp is fumigated against mosquitoes at dusk. The camp on the outskirts of Mardan is now home to thousands of families fleeing Swat and Buner

Children queue to fill plastic buckets at a newly constructed water tap in Jalala Camp

Carrying heavy sacks of wheat on their shoulders, local labourers help transport emergency food aid from the WFP warehouse in Mardan to waiting new arrivals from Swat and Buner

Sad Story of IDPs - II

A woman from Mingora is registered and given her refugee card in the female section of the UNHCR reception centre in Mardan

Watching her children spend their fifth night sleeping on the floor of a primary school in Baghdada, in Mardan, Raham fingers her prayer beads. She and 16 family members walked across the mountains to escape shelling in their village. "We came only in our clothes just to save our children.

Volunteers at a UNHCR-run reception centre in Mardan fill out forms for temporary ID cards for new arrivals

A crowd of newly arrived women and children wait to show their temporary ID cards at a distribution of rice and oil in an old cigarette factory near Mardan

With her young son in her arms and clutching a precious ration card, a woman from Swat collects sacks of emergency food aid at a World Food Programme (WFP) warehouse in Mardan

Sad Story of IDPs - I

An exhausted mother from Swat, Rawasia, watches over her children as they sleep on the floor of a classroom at a primary school in Baghdada, Mardan. Rawazia and her extended family fled from their village with only the clothes on their backs when their home was damaged in a mortar attack

With the camps full to capacity, newly arrived refugees are sometimes forced to drive from site to site in search of shelter. Many find places in public buildings.

Packed tightly into the back of a pick-up truck, women and children arrive at a reception centre in Katland village. Many people fleeing Swat must break the military curfew in order to escape. During the hours people are permitted to leave, heavy traffic often prevents them from going anywhere.

Row upon row of white tents make up Sheikh Shehzad camp, home to thousands of displaced families fleeing the violence in Swat and Buner

After seeing her neighbours killed in a mortar attack on Mingora, a mother of five fled to Jalala camp where she rests along with her extended family.

No escape from Hell

Despite the clear indications of the oncoming crisis of mass exodus, which was but a logical result of a full-scale military operation in Malakand Division and adjoining areas, the government, as always, had the most sluggish response for any preparedness in its wake. The now exposed National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) had nothing but empty words to offer and tried to underplay the crisis. The redundant Authority had four years to organise themselves, not to mention millions of dollars, but it is a great mystery as to why they still have a handful of staff, mostly clerical, and no real organisational or operational capacity. They have not been able to establish either the provincial or district disaster-management authorities they were supposed to set up and make them functional to form a viable and effective disaster-management system in the country. In a country like Pakistan, facing many challenges like conflicts, violence, extremism, natural disasters and mass exodus of people from conflict zones this inertia from NDMA is inexcusable.

As an obvious result of the lethargy of the governments the IDPs started pouring in at an alarming rate in Mardan, Swabi, Peshawar, Nowshera and other districts before anyone was remotely prepared to receive them. The rest is the same story of ad hoc administration, piecemeal solutions and very inadequate management regarding the IDPs, both in camp and off camp. The Provincial Relief Commissioners and the DCOs were given the task of managing the IDPs, setting up camps with the help of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and handling the relief goods arriving from different sources. This task turned out to be way beyond their limited capacities and understandably resulted in chaos and eventual rifts between the DCOs and the District Nazims mainly on distribution of relief items. 

After the poor response of the NDMA the prime minister constituted a Special Support Group to manage the operation regarding the IDPs headed by Gen Nadeem Ahmed. Later the minister for information and broadcasting was made the focal person by the government to steer the process of IDP management and coordinate its various aspects, as well as the working of the various actors involved in crisis-management, including international aid agencies and the UN.

So now there are a variety of departments, organisations and agencies working for IDP management. There is the SSG, the ministry of information and broadcasting, the ministry of states and frontier regions, the UNHCR, the WEF, UNICEF, the provincial governments, district governments and the Emergency Response Units set up by the NWFP government's Provincial Relief Commissionerate. 

The task of registration of the IDPs is also being done by four different agencies. In the NWFP the ministry of social welfare is doing the registration of off-camp IDPs and the Afghan Commissionerate is doing the registration of in-camp IDPs with the assistance of the UNHR.

In Punjab the UNHCR is doing the registration of off-camp IDPs through partner organisations which are local NGOs, namely, SACH and SHARP. SACH is doing registration in Rawalpindi and Attock and SHARP is doing it in Lahore and other districts. Other than the UNHCR the Punjab government is doing its own registration of IDPs through the Special Branch and the Police. (Needless to say, the data collected by the two sources does not tally at all.) According to UNHCR officials they are registering IDPs who came after July 2008, but there is no definitive mechanism to ensure that. NADRA (National Database and Registration Authority) is doing the verification of the registration to prevent duplication and triplication.

Other than all these agencies the interior ministry and the home departments of the provincial governments are dealing with the security issues arising out of the mass influx in various districts.

The federal government is yet to announce the policy regarding the IDPs or to come up with any proposed plan for the three phases of disaster management. Federal information minister Qamar-uz-Zaman Kaira has announced Rs25,000 per family but has not given any date for the commencement of actual distribution. As for the policy decisions, there have been conflicting statements of various federal ministers regarding the movement, registration and camp facilities for the internally displaced people. Interior Minister Rehman Malik has announced that the IDPs outside the NWFP will not be part of the relief package announced by the government in the short or medium term, but the minister of information and broadcasting has encouraged the IDPs to travel across the country and accommodate themselves wherever they please. It is a very important that the IDPs should be given clear and precise message and a single policy be adopted to be applied uniformly.

The WFP is the lead agency responsible for food procurement and distribution both on- and off-camp to the IDPs, but as of now there is no food being prepared in the camps because community kitchens have not been set up by the UNHCR. The food given in the camps is being catered by private contractors and the bills footed by the NWFP government. The wheat flour and other food items being sent by Punjab government are not yet being used for cooking in the camps. 

The UNHCR is the lead agency for camp setting and distribution of non food items, NFIs both in and off camps. They have set up twenty three camps in NWFP which are now being managed by the NWFP government. The non-food items have been distributed to camp residents including jerry cans, utensils, mats, buckets and soap, but it has not started distribution of these NFIs to the larger off-camp IDP population. (The standard package contains the items needed by camp residents, but one wonders if the off-camp families need the same things on priority. All the items are locally purchased.) The UNHCR representative informed that the reason the distribution has not started for off-camp IDPs was that they had to have a critical mass of items before starting actual distribution which now they have and will start distribution soon. 

There is very little coordination among the various agencies and provincial governments working for the IDPs. There is still a huge shortfall of the items actually required by the IDPs, especially those off-camp and their host families, but no one seems to have any exact data regarding that. There is some estimation from the Emergency Response Unit in Peshawar which they have posted on their website, but as that is not regularly updated there is no way of knowing the met requirements and the remaining shortfall. The Punjab government received a request for 10,000 pedestal fans but after dispatching 7,000 of them it again received the request after a week. This is an indicator of mismanagement and lack of coordination.

The UN aid agencies had requested $500 million from the international community in their donors' conference but as yet they have received around $24 million. The federal government has also announced a sum of RsI0 billion for the IDPs but it is yet not clear as to where and how this money is going to be spent. There is also no information as to how much of that fund is already been spent if any and who exactly is authorised for the disbursement of that fund. There is also no planning for the actual spending.

One of the much neglected areas is the special needs of the newborn babies in the camps and their mothers. Temperatures in the camps is rising beyond 43 degree Celsius and it is heartbreaking that infants are forced to stay in appalling conditions unbearable even for adults. The government should pay urgent attention to the special needs of mothers and children, immediately shift them to better accommodation and provide them special care until they are able to return to their homes. UNICEF is the lead agency for mother-and-child healthcare and they should do better than this.

The response from the general public has remained lukewarm for a number of reasons but for people who want to help there is no information regarding the prioritised needs of IDPs. An awareness raising and educational campaign is urgently required for sending the right message to the public regarding relief.