Tsunami: lessons to learn

THIS week the world marked the first anniversary of the catastrophic tsunami that devastated large areas of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives. The east coast of Africa was also affected but in a minor fashion. The disaster claimed more than 230,000 lives, the largest loss of life being in Indonesia’s Aceh province where more than 131,000 people died.

Millions were left homeless, and to compound the problem of the survivors, many belonging to fishing communities, not only became fearful of the sea that had caused so much damage but also lost their boats and nets, making it impossible for them to return to their traditional employment.

The tsunami, striking as it did the day after Christmas and affecting not only the people of the region but large numbers of foreign tourists as well, attracted an unprecedented amount of physical and financial support. Ships, helicopters, cargo planes relief workers from various UN organizations and private philanthropic agencies converged on the area providing immediate relief and the medical care needed not only for the injured but for preventing the outbreak of disease among the survivors. The effort was an outstanding success. The injured were cared for and no epidemic occurred despite poor sanitary conditions and in many areas stagnant pools of water — save breeding grounds for disease.

In terms of financial resources besides two billion dollars worth of debt relief, outsiders pledged upward of six billion dollars to rebuild in Indonesia while Sri Lanka received pledges worth $2.8 billion of which $2.1 billion have been translated into firm commitments. For the area, the challenge became how to spend the money rather than how to raise it. Having been inundated with donations in the first week after the tsunami, the disaster-response charity, Doctors Without Borders appealed to its supporters not to send more contributions, while the charity, Oxfam, acknowledged in a recent report that its tsunami fundraising effort was the largest in its history — a total of 188 million pounds, with 90 per cent given directly by the public.

Reconstruction efforts have been held back not by the lack of funds but by the lack of skilled manpower and equipment needed for the task. Oxfam, for example, spent 73 million pounds on tsunami relief this year, with 56 million planned for 2006, and the rest spread over the following two years. So far, about 25,000 houses have been built in Aceh, but at least 60,000 people are still living in tents and perhaps five times that many are living with relatives. The World Bank projects that 18 months will pass before enough permanent homes are ready for everybody.

What has caused the delay in Indonesia? First, the government rightly sought input from the people whose region had been devastated, consulting them on building design and location and attempting to clarify disputes over land title before construction went ahead. Second, Indonesia has had to coordinate the efforts of 124 international non-governmental organizations and more than 40 governments, multilateral banks and UN agencies. Such coordination has taken time but in the long run will avoid a duplication of effort and ensure that all monies are judiciously spent.

Much has been made, and rightly so, of the fact that the tsunami yielded a peace dividend in so far as it brought to an end the civil war that had raged in Aceh for the past three decades. On Aug 15, the Indonesian government and the leaders of the rebel Free Aceh Movement signed an agreement ending the conflict. Now, according to experts in the region, it is necessary if the peace is to be maintained that aid for the tsunami affected areas should also be used to repair the damage done by conflict in areas further inland. However, donor agencies have in many cases imposed restrictions on the spending of their funds on any activity not related to the tsunami affected areas. Clearly, Indonesia is going to have to seek a relaxation of these conditions.

In Sri Lanka, a report prepared by the government and international donors, says that an estimated 98,000 houses were destroyed by the tsunami, rendering thousands internally displaced. The government estimated that some 60,000 transitional shelters would be needed to house those among the displaced who had no social network of relatives or friends to fall back on. By November, more than 54,000 such shelters had been created and the programme was hailed as a major success.

The story on permanent houses, however, was entirely different. Such construction was initially held up because of a decision that construction would be banned in a 100-to 200-metre band along the coastline apparently for fear that such housing would again be destroyed if another tidal wave or tsunami hit the region. Most of the 98,000 houses that were destroyed by the tsunami had, however, been built in this band and the inhabitants both because of their emotional ties to the land and because as fishermen they desired proximity to the sea, resisted the government proposal.

The government has now agreed to reduce the band and to commence construction at sites where the destroyed houses originally stood. The government optimistically estimates that permanent housing will be ready by the end of 2006 even while acknowledging that the restoration of the infrastructure — roads, bridges etc — will take two or three years more.

The fact, however, is that there is an acute shortage of skilled labour and an anticipated shortage of construction material. There is also the problem of too many organizations having been created to handle the task of post-tsunami rehabilitation. The newly-elected President Mahinda Rajapakse intends to create a reconstruction and development authority that will serve as the nodal agency for development. He also has a ministry of skills development to train the skilled manpower needed for reconstruction. It is felt that with more than 800,000 unemployed persons in Sri Lanka this ministry will have little difficulty in finding recruits for its training programmes.

The end-product of the various delays has, however, been that of the $2.1 billion committed by the international community only $ 0.6 billion have so far been disbursed.

Initial hopes that the disaster and the immediate response of the Sri Lankan people to help their compatriots would bring peace between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have been belied. The sad fact is that if the LTTE continues to resist the calls by the international community for the resumption of talks on the continuance of the ceasefire and engages in further attacks on government troops rehabilitation efforts will go into reverse gear.

Both in Indonesia and in Sri Lanka there has been an urgent demand from victims for the reconstruction and smooth functioning of schools. The problem has been that far too many of the teachers were lost in the tsunami and there are too few replacements available.

The pace of reconstruction in both countries has brought complaints from aid donors and victims. While some of this criticism is valid it should be viewed in perspective. In 1995, an earthquake destroyed Kobe in Japan. The Japanese, with typical efficiency and with the large fund allocations that the world’s second largest economy could afford, immediately commenced the task of reconstruction. And yet it was only earlier this year, some 10 years after the catastrophe, that the last of the displaced persons were moved from temporary shelters to permanent housing. The United States, certainly the world’s richest country, is still struggling with the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and it will be many years before all those affected will be able to resume normal lives.

What are the lessons for Pakistan as it works on repairing the damage caused by the earthquake that in many ways was more devastating than the tsunami? The number of fatalities — certainly more than the official figure of 73,000 — is smaller than the number killed in the tsunami but an equal or a larger number remains at risk of exposure to the winter snows without adequate shelter or nutrition. The number of homeless at three million or more is certainly higher than the displacement figure caused by the tsunami.

We start with a disadvantage. The immediate need for providing winterized shelter and food to remote and inaccessible villages entails the use of extremely expensive helicopter and cargo plane airlifts eating into the funds available. These funds too, despite the Herculean efforts of the government and the assistance of our friends, may suffice for the envisaged reconstruction but will increase our debt burden to what may become unsustainable levels.

Of the total pledge of $5.8 billion, more than two-thirds is in the form of loans rather than grants and it is possible that much of this will be tied to the provision of goods and services from the donor country. As one representative of an international relief organization put it, “The international community risks heaping even more misery on survivors by increasing the debt burden of Pakistan through these reconstruction loans.”

This will mean that our reconstruction goals may have to be revised to more modest levels. There is talk of replicating the example of Lisbon which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1755 but under the inspiring leadership of the then prime minister was rebuilt as a city with grand quake proof buildings which today are the pride and joy of the Portuguese people. But we must cut our coat according to the limited cloth we have.

We start with the advantage that reconstruction material is available in Pakistan or can be easily procured from our neighbourhood. Since reconstruction cannot in any case be started until the end of the winter season we have time to both procure and store this material and to instruct cement manufacturers that they should enter into no export contracts from February onwards. What we construct should be done after detailed consultation with the local people. As was seen in both Indonesia and Sri Lanka there is a strong attachment with the land and despite inducements nobody is ready to abandon the land they own or on which they have lived. They will be distrustful of shelters that do not conform to their way of life and to their traditional systems of livestock breeding and subsistence farming.

We will need, on an urgent basis, to train skilled craftsmen — masons, carpenters, etc., who will be needed for reconstruction. We will need to set up teachers’ training schools to produce teachers needed to replace those lost and perhaps to expand the government school system to ward off the creation of an alternative school system that does not conform to the needs of our society.

Even while our hopes that the catastrophe would bring the sort of durable peace that appears to be prevailing in Aceh are not being realized we must ensure that the present uneasy peace prevails and that there is no deterioration of the situation that could create Sri Lanka-like conditions.

We must take full advantage of the enthusiasm with which civil society took the lead in relief efforts. This needs to be harnessed further with the army and the bureaucracy playing only a supervisory role and ensuring that civil society’s contributions do not lead the people of the region in dangerous directions.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Balochistan in turmoil again

THE war in Balochistan is once again making headlines. 2005 was a troubled year for the province with the insurgency simmering throughout the year interspersed with military action by the Frontier Constabulary from time to time. It is a pity that as the year draws to a close the army has stepped up its operations and there are reports of casualties that include women and children.

This time the provocation has ostensibly been a rocket attack on the president while he was visiting Kohlu on December 14. It was described as an assassination attempt, and thereafter, the government launched an operation in the Kohlu district. Officially it is said that the army is trying to root out the ‘miscreants’ and ‘saboteurs’ who are accused of creating trouble in different regions of Balochistan. These are the terms we are quite familiar with in Pakistan. It was bandied about a lot in 1970 during the civil strife in East Pakistan and the province was the target of army action. Again in 1974, when Balochistan was under attack, the rulers dug out these labels from their vocabulary. They are again doing the rounds.

What is happening in Balochistan is quite a familiar phenomenon. The most backward and underdeveloped of all provinces of the country, Balochistan naturally feels deprived and exploited. It is rich in resources but these are not channelled into the development of the province. The data available confirms the general belief that Balochistan has been denied its political and economic rights.

A classic case is that of Sui gas which was discovered in the Bugti area in 1955. This was first of all piped to Karachi. Other major cities of Sindh and Punjab were supplied gas soon thereafter. Quetta the capital of Balochistan was low down on the list of priorities, and was connected with the Sui gas fields much later.

Having learnt from their experience with the gas companies, the Baloch have generally been sceptical about the blessings that are expected to accrue from the development of Gwadar port. The government leaders — from the president and prime minister to petty functionaries — have been promising that development of the port area will generate jobs and economic benefits for the local population. So far, this has not happened and the technical hands and workers who are being brought from other regions by the non-Baloch contractors have reinforced the beliefs of the nationalists that Gwadar will change the ethnic composition of the province by allowing the induction of a large number of people from other provinces.

True, the government is now paying a hefty amount as royalty for gas. It is Rs 13 billion per annum along with Rs 31 billion as gas development charges. But the key question is how much of this has actually trickled down to the common man? Strangled by an oppressive sardari system that was on paper abolished by Z.A. Bhutto’s People’s Party government in the ‘70s, the province is a picture of contrasts and extremes. While the sardars have wealth and affluence and enjoy all the luxuries one could wish for, their serfs are weighed down by grinding poverty that is unimaginable. Moreover, the sardars enjoy immense power — political and military — that has made them almost invincible.

The governments in Islamabad have had a paradoxical love-hate relationship with the sardars as the sardars have had with their people. On the one hand, Islamabad has patronized the traditional sardars giving them privileges and even a share in the governance of the province if they are prepared to be subservient to the federal government. They have been bribed with huge amounts being poured into their coffers to win their loyalties.

But at the same time, Islamabad has not fully trusted the sardars and has tried to undermine them by taking military action against them and also by trying to wean away the people from them. At present a large number of development schemes estimated at Rs 8.5 billion have been launched in Balochistan.

Infrastructure development is taking place in a big way. In this struggle to win the people’s hearts, the federal government appears to be having a tough time vis-a-vis the sardars who continue to enjoy the support of the people. It is perhaps the low credibility of the government that is responsible for its failure to win the confidence of the masses.

Viewed against this backdrop, it is not at all clear how the current crisis will be resolved. The government will first of all have to recognize the fact that the long standing Baloch problem will not be resolved by sending in troops and strafing and carpet bombing large areas. Given its hilly terrain, Balochistan is not an easy theatre of war for armies trained to fight a conventional war. It suits the insurgents who have been fighting a guerrilla war and who cannot be put down by cannons and helicopter gunships. Besides the fighters are at an advantage when fighting troops as the latter do not enjoy the backing of the people in whose territory the war is taking place.

The present round has ostensibly been launched after the president was attacked in Kohlu. But there are many who believe — rightly or wrongly — that the president’s trip that was unplanned is being used as a pretext for military action. In support of their argument, these observers insist that the army had already started concentrating its forces in the province since November and the president went there in mid-December.

It is believed that the present operation is part of a wider design aimed at paving the way for the pipeline politics that is looming large on Balochistan’s horizon. With the work on the Iran-India gas pipeline scheduled to start next year and the gas pipeline from Turkmenistan and Afghanistan in the offing, the government is now feeling the pressure of developing the communication infrastructure in the province and urbanizing it to facilitate the laying of pipelines.

What needs to be emphasized is that economic and political goals cannot be achieved through military means. The government in Islamabad had understood this earlier when the gas installations at Sui had come under attack from Bugti tribesmen. Hence a parliamentary committee under Chaudhry Shujaat has sought to defuse the crisis. It set up two sub-committees — one under Mushahid Hussain that was quite active in visiting the area and meeting various leaders and the other under Wasim Sajjad that was to look into the constitutional side of the problem. The second committee failed to make any recommendations.

In fact a ceasefire was also agreed upon and the army vacated 15 trenches in the Bugti areas and pulled back. Now Nawab Akbar Bugti is charging the government of having regressed and reoccupied 45 trenches. One cannot be too sure that other clauses of the agreement have not been violated either. In May, the Mushahid subcommittee submitted its recommendations that focused on financial measures such as the payment of gas royalties and the pumping in of Rs 9 billion into Gwadar, Quetta and Sui in order to transform the place. But these recommendations were rejected outright by the nationalists who claimed that their demands of a strategic and political nature were not considered at all.

Thus, the Baloch feel concerned about Pakistan’s military presence in the province. They would like the army to withdraw. Instead, one hears of plans to build three military cantonments (at Gwadar, Sui and Kohlu). It was also said that 10,000 jobs would be created in the Frontier Constabulary for which locals would be recruited. The gas royalty rates were to be enhanced substantially while the province was to be empowered to sign petroleum exploration and sale deals.

As is our wont, governments retract on their commitment without batting an eyelid. If the same has happened this time can the so-called ‘miscreants’ be blamed? The fears of the Baloch are genuine and should be understood with empathy. They fear that they are being turned into a minority in their own province. The commitment made in the 1973 Constitution in respect of provincial autonomy has still not been fulfilled. Can these doubts be removed and the Baloch reassured through military action?

Image-building in politics

“TOP brass of the Pakistan People’s Party are reported to have finalized a deal with a well-known firm of publicity experts in the United States who will take up the job of whitening the political and public image of Ms Benazir Bhutto and husband Asif Zardari at a cost of a million dollars or so.”

This is not an extract from a recent news report but part of a political analysis that appeared in an Urdu newspaper in June 1997. I culled it from my scrapbook which, I must say, has provided me topics for this column a number of times. Apparently the firm did not get down to the job at once otherwise the party may have made a better showing in the general election that followed later that year.

For the five general elections since 1988, the main political parties commissioned leading advertising agencies in the country to plan their election campaign and to tell voters that they could be the saviours of the country if given the opportunity to (again) manage its affairs. Reportedly foreign firms like Sachi & Sachi were also consulted. It’s surprising that political parties had to seek help from professionals to whip up popular enthusiasm for their programmes. One would have thought that these parties were full of leaders who normally are pastmasters at issuing press statements guaranteed to achieve results — positive for themselves, negative for their opponents.

The parties are not short of experts in intrigue, as without their presence our politics would become bereft of excitement. Such experts are in great demand, and whenever they change sides, which they often do, the party opening its doors to them considers itself lucky to have acquired their services. There must be some psychological reason behind the craze for outside advice on projection, particularly during election campaigns. Foreign experts in this profession can always buy time on radio and television. But with these two media being available only to pro-government leaders, I really wonder in which field the expertise of these go-getters was expected to be utilized.

Times have changed and now there are private channels operating in Pakistan, but it is a moot point if they will lend themselves to blatant publicity of political parties that is involved in the system of buying time, in which system you can say what you like, within the bounds of decency of course. Did these foreign experts advise the contending political parties on how to put up banners and distribute handbills? Or did they provide guidelines on what to say in public meetings? The only reason for going abroad for publicity advice that I can think of is that we love to go abroad for everything. Don’t we know that in the subcontinent values and standards about the merits of election candidates are far different from those in Europe and America. Mr Gary Hart had to withdraw from the race for the US presidency when his intimate connection with a showbiz girl became known. And this was despite the state of sexual permissiveness in that country.

On the other hand, such an escapade is not likely to be frowned upon in this part of the world. The story goes (and I am assured that it is true) that, just before an election, a Sikh candidate in East Punjab was caught in a compromising position with a woman of easy virtue. His opponents did their best to make capital out of his predicament.

Undaunted, he announced a public meeting where he promised to speak specially on this matter. A large number of people turned up to hear what excuse he makes. Sardarji made no excuses. Instead he boasted brazen-facedly about his exploit as an act of male macho, saying that if he got the opportunity he would do it again. Thunderous applause greeted this ultra masculine confession. Could Sachi & Sachi ever give him such an advice?

The bigger advertising firms in Pakistan always gear up their resources to prove equal to the task assigned to them by their political clients during elections. In the 1993 general election, the head of one Karachi agency, an old friend, admitted that he had been approached by a party to take over its entire campaign. At the same time he confessed that he had been tempted by the thought of standing for election himself. “Yaar,” he said, “why not use all this talent for myself instead of for a party that I don’t fancy as a voter.” However, wiser counsels prevailed and he gave up the idea of making a fool of himself.

No agency in the West is qualified to give advice on how to capture the imagination of a public meeting in the subcontinent. They are accustomed to gatherings in public halls where the educated audience is no more than a couple of thousands. In our election rallies the crowd can go up to a hundred thousand or more. These crowds don’t like facts and figures and logical arguments on a public issue. They come to hear rhetorics and hard-hitting sallies calculated to evoke spontaneous applause.

Then we have professional slogan-raisers, spread out evenly all over the meeting place, who know at what point they have to shout which slogan to be echoed with vociferous shouts of zindabad or murdabad, as the case may be. Western experts do not even know that such a breed exists.

Take another example. Any expert from the West would have advised old Nawabzada Asghar Ali of Gujrat never to make a speech. Very active in the ‘50s and 60s, the Nawabzada had a terrible stammer, but this never deterred him from addressing public meetings. The audience laughed at his stammer but it also applauded him for his doggedness. He never lost an election.

Aside from the contribution, if any, of professional image- builders to political parties’ success or failure in past elections, armchair experts can start making conjectures about the coming days in Pakistan’s politics. For instance, will the PPP, for the election in 2007, need some expert to rebuild the image of some of its leaders? Or will the party think that people’s emotional attachment to the family is enough?