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.’