SACW | 16-17 Oct. 2005
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Sun Oct 16 20:37:05 CDT 2005
South Asia Citizens Wire | 16-17 October, 2005
[1] PIPFPD Demand's movement of relief workers across the Line of Control
[2] Divided we suffer (Praful Bidwai)
[3] Extremists Fill Aid Chasm After Quake (John Lancaster and Kamran Khan)
[4] India: Right to information -- and survival (J Sri Raman)
[5] India: K.N.Panikkar awarded Nilakkal
Ecumenical Trust Award for Communal Harmony
[6] India: 2nd National Convention on the Right
to Food and Work (Calcutta, 18-20 November 2005)
______
[1]
The Hindu
Oct 16, 2005
DEMAND FOR ACCESS TO NGOS
Special Correspondent
It also calls for easier movement of relief workers across the Line of Control
The forum has set up a relief and rehabilitation
fund Plans to open an information centre in Delhi
and logistic support centres in Srinagar and
Lahore
NEW DELHI:
The Pakistan-India People's Forum for Peace and
Democracy, with several leading personalities
from both countries as members, has called upon
the Centre to lift the ban on non-governmental
organisations from visiting earthquake-hit areas
in Jammu and Kashmir.
The forum, which includes Mubashir Hassan, former
finance minister of Pakistan, Nighat Syed Khan, a
senior human rights and civil rights activist of
Lahore, and Ashok Jaitley and Hindal Tyabji,
former chief secretaries of Jammu and Kashmir,
has also called for easier movement of relief
workers across the Line of Control, considering
that several areas under Pakistan's control were
more easily accessible through India and vice
versa.
The general secretary of the forum and human
rights activist, Tapan K. Bose, said a founder
member of the Forum and Planning Commission,
Syeda Hameed would soon call on Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh in this regard.
Addressing a press conference, Mr. Bose, Mr.
Hassan, Ms. Khan, Mr. Jaitley and Mr. Tyabji said
there was a need for NGOs to be allowed to go to
the affected areas and for relaxing the movements
across the LoC since the quake victims were in
dire need.
Mr. Bose and Dr. Hameed had visited Baramullah
and parts of Uri and found that a large number of
people were staying on the roadside with no
proper shelter or warm clothing, even as the
temperatures were going down to three to four
degrees Celsius.
Large supplies of tarpaulins, heavy plastic and
PVC sheets and blankets, sweaters and shawls were
needed. There was an urgent need for doctors and
medical supplies. The drugs required include
paracetamol, dispirin, different types of
antibiotics, anti-dysentry drugs, pain killers
and dextrose and saline drugs.
The forum has set up a relief and rehabilitation
fund, to which contributions could be sent. It
was also in process of setting up an information
centre in Delhi and logistic support centres in
Srinagar and Lahore to coordinate the relief
operations. The centres would operate in
collaboration with State Government and district
authorities.
It has also taken up a project to train local
masons on how to rebuild houses and other
buildings that were earthquake-resistant and used
local material. For this, it has tied up with
People's Science Institute of Dehradun, which has
a rich experience of reconstructing buildings in
Uttarkashi and Chamoli in Uttaranchal following
the devastating earthquakes there in 1991 and
1999 respectively. A team of building experts led
by Dunu Roy of PSI is leaving for Srinagar on
Sunday for discussions with State Government
authorities on modalities to be adopted.
______
[2]
Khaleej Times
October 16 2005
DIVIDED WE SUFFER
by Praful Bidwai
THE October 8 earthquake that devastated scores
of towns and hundreds of villages in Pakistan and
India and caused untold human suffering was a
quintessentially South Asian catastrophe. It
suddenly rendered India-Pakistan borders
meaningless. Like its geophysical origins, its
effects too cut across politically drawn
boundaries.
This, at the very least, warranted a South Asian
response. For instance, both topography and the
destruction of road links logically dictated that
Pakistan should have accessed its part of Kashmir
through the Indian segment of Kashmir. The two
governments could have cooperated in a hundred
different ways to rescue people and provide them
food, shelter and clothing in time.
Yet, India and Pakistan failed to summon up a
joint subcontinental response to the earthquake.
That's their second tragedy. The causes of the
first lay in natural causes-in plate tectonics
and the release of enormous amounts of energy
through rifts and fissures in rocks. The causes
of the second are entirely man-made and political.
In fact, disaster management and post-disaster
relief has long been politicised in the
subcontinent. This became glaringly obvious with
the tsunami last December, when India was more
anxious to project its power in the neighbourhood
by dispatching relief teams than to being succour
to its own citizens in the South and the
Andamans. (In keeping with power considerations,
India also offered the United States $5 million
in assistance after Hurricane Katrina - a weird
thing to do for a state that cannot look after
its own poor people.)
What's new about today's politics of disaster
management is that it's taking place about two
years after the India-Pakistan peace process
began. This speaks to the relative fragility of
the process. That's not all. The two governments
swear by Kashmir. And yet, they have failed to
respond to ardent appeals by Kashmiri leaders
from both sides of the Line of Control for joint
rescue and relief operations. This won't endear
either of them to the people of Kashmir.
Pakistan has cited domestic "sensitivities" while
refusing India's prompt offer of aid and joint
relief efforts. In plain English, this spells
Islamabad's fear that accepting substantial aid
from India would be seen as a sign of weakness
- the opposite of "national pride". This
replicates India's own repeated recent rejection
of aid offers, including during the Bhuj
earthquake and the tsunami. Pakistan even spurned
a loan of light helicopters to airlift people
trapped in remote villages. Evidently, false
notions of prestige matter more to the
subcontinent's governments than saving citizens'
lives.
India generously offered relief material to
Pakistan. But it has refused to share seismic
data with Pakistan for fear that the data would
be used to detect the precise location of any
future nuclear experiments (including
non-explosive tests called hydronuclear tests).
In reality, such locations are known to the
entire international science establishment
through thousands of seismographs placed all over
the globe.
The real reason for India's refusal lies in its
nuclear ambitions and its opposition to the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The CTBT remains a
dead letter because powerful states, including
the US, have refused to ratify it. But some
verification arrangements agreed under it have
become operational in another guise.
For instance, there is a network of 128
high-quality seismic stations maintained by the
Incorporated Research Institutions for
Seismology, Washington, a consortium created by
universities. India has refused to join IRIS.
Joining it would give India real-time access to
seismic data. Although this would still not allow
earthquake prediction, it could substantially cut
the response-time to earthquakes and save lives.
Such indifference towards human life is part of a
larger bureaucratic culture of apathy, which
results in appalling levels of disaster
preparedness, management and relief. Earthquakes
are a "normal" feature of India's geological
make-up. More than half of the country's land
area falls within the most seismically active
Zones 3 to 5.
Zone 5 is the most hazardous and includes certain
areas in the Kashmir Valley, the Chamba and
Kangra Valleys of Himachal, and parts of the
Northeast. The next riskiest zone (IV) includes
large parts of Punjab and Himachal. Pakistan has
almost exact parallels to these vulnerable areas,
including its part of Kashmir.
Particularly worrisome are sections of Zone 5 in
the Himalayan range, which has witnessed four
gigantic earthquakes in the past century, each of
a magnitude 8.5 or greater on the Richter scale,
and accompanied by 200-300 km-long fault slips or
ruptures of the detachment plane. This is the
great faultline where the Indian plate thrusts
against the Eurasian plate generating enormous
strain along some 2,400 km of mountains. The
energy accumulated in the rocks is suddenly
released in catastrophic earthquakes every few
hundred years.
And yet, India is building the large Tehri dam
along the great faultline, near the very location
where geophysicists the world over forecast
another monster earthquake of intensity 8.5 in
the next 50 to 100 years. This would release more
than 30 times the energy delivered by the
Muzaffarabad event, probably breaching the dam,
downstream of which live some 300 million people.
This is an invitation to a calamity of biblical
proportions. India and Pakistan's failure is
evident on a less catastrophic scale too. They
have done little by way of designing
earthquake-resistant structures, evolving a
building code, and enforcing it at least in the
most vulnerable areas. True, some Indian cities
(e.g. Delhi) now insist that new buildings comply
with some earthquake-resistant features. But
these are inadequate according to seismologists
and architects. Besides, builders often cheat on
these and obtain false certificates. Old
buildings are meant to be "retrofitted" with
modifications to make them earthquake-proof. But
these are based on obsolete and unsound
principles.
Official apathy is thus leaving millions of
people vulnerable to the next great earthquake,
which is due in the Central Himalayas, probably
between Dehradun in Garhwal and Kathmandu.
Nothing could be further from democratic
accountability. Nothing could be more lethally
irresponsible either.
Praful Bidwai is a senior Indian journalist,
political activist and widely published
commentator
______
[3]
Washington Post
October 16, 2005
Extremists Fill Aid Chasm After Quake
By John Lancaster and Kamran Khan
MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 15 -- The army
was slow to respond, and international aid
agencies are in some ways just getting started.
But here amid the rubble and the rain at the
heart of Pakistan's earthquake zone, the zealous
foot soldiers of Jamaat ul-Dawa, one of the
country's most prominent Islamic extremist groups, are very much in evidence.
On a sloping muddy field near the rushing
Neelum River, the group has established a large
field hospital complete with X-ray equipment,
dental department, makeshift operating theater,
and even a tent for visiting journalists.
Dispensaries are piled high with donated stocks
of antibiotics, painkillers and other medical supplies.
"Even the army people have come over here to
get first aid," said Mohammed Ayub, a
long-bearded urologist from Lahore who is
volunteering at the field hospital. "The
casualties and destruction are so much that they are unable to cope."
Jamaat ul-Dawa is no ordinary charity. Founded
in 1989 under a different name, it is the parent
organization of Lashkar-i-Taiba, one of the
largest and best-trained groups fighting Indian
forces in the disputed Himalayan province of
Kashmir. Lashkar-i-Taiba has been linked by U.S.
authorities to al Qaeda and in 2002 was banned by
Pakistan's government as a terrorist organization.
Jamaat ul-Dawa is one of several hard-line
Islamic groups that have assumed a prominent role
in relief operations following the devastating
Oct. 8 earthquake in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir and adjacent areas.
Other groups with a visible presence on
Saturday in Muzaffarabad, the largest town in the
area, were the charitable wing of
Jamiat-i-Islami, an Islamic political party with
ideological links to the Palestinian militant
group Hamas; and the Al-Rasheed Trust, a
Karachi-based charity whose U.S. assets were
frozen by the Bush administration in 2003 on
grounds that it channeled funds to al Qaeda. The
group has denied the charge and says it is focused purely on social welfare.
The groups' effective and visible relief work,
analysts say, has bolstered their prestige,
possibly at the expense of Gen. Pervez Musharraf,
Pakistan's president, and the army, whose initial
response was widely criticized as slow and disorganized.
"Definitely they will gain," Ershad Mahmud, an
analyst on Kashmir at the Institute for Policy
Studies in Islamabad, said of Jamaat ul-Dawa.
"They have diverted their whole network toward the relief operation."
Pakistani officials say the army has performed
admirably given its own devastating losses in the
quake, which killed about 450 soldiers. But in an
interview Saturday, Interior Minister Aftab Khan
Sherpao acknowledged the vital role of Jamaat
ul-Dawa and other such groups, calling them "the
lifeline of our rescue and relief work."
Jamaat ul-Dawa, he added, "is only involved in
extensive charity work, and their footprint now
covers almost the entire quake-affected zone in
the country." Pakistan placed Jamaat ul-Dawa on
its "terrorism watch list" in late 2003.
The government on Saturday raised its estimate
of the death toll from the quake to 38,000, with
62,000 injured. The worst damage was in the part
of Kashmir controlled by Pakistan; about 1,400
are thought to have died on the Indian side of the province.
With a chilly rain falling on much of the
earthquake zone and early snows dusting nearby
mountaintops, aid officials voiced growing
concern about the welfare of an estimated 2
million people made homeless by the quake.
Already there are signs of disease, with 80 cases
of diarrhea reported Saturday in the heavily
damaged town of Balakot, up tenfold from the day
before. Relief officials estimate that 600,000
toilets will be needed to provide adequate sanitation for survivors.
The Jamaat ul-Dawa camp is one of the most
visible relief operations in Muzaffarabad, a city
of about 70,000 that was largely destroyed by the
earthquake and is roughly 50 miles northeast of
Islamabad. Situated on the edge of town, the camp
is marked with a large hand-painted banner and
consists of about 35 canvas tents -- many bearing
the name of Jamaat ul-Dawa -- housing medical
facilities and more than 100 patients. U.S.
helicopters, carrying supplies and the injured, regularly fly over the area.
Equipment and medicine for the camp were
salvaged from the group's wrecked hospital in
Muzaffarabad and supplemented with donations from
across the country, camp officials said.
Besides volunteer doctors and other medical
staff, personnel at the camp Saturday included
about 20 bearded young men, some wearing
camouflage jackets and white headbands emblazoned
with the group's name. Ammar Ahmad, an
engineering student from Lahore who is
volunteering at the camp, said the men were on
hand as protection "against ruffians" and were armed with 9mm pistols.
Qazi Kashif, who edits Jamaat ul-Dawa's
national magazine and was visiting the camp
Saturday, said that the organization no longer
had any connection to Lashkar-i-Taiba and that
the insurgent group now operates purely on the
Indian side of Kashmir. Jamaat ul-Dawa, he said,
is "for preaching and public welfare."
But he added, in reference to the Kashmir
insurgency, "We are in favor of jihad, no doubt."
Lashkar-i-Taiba operated for years with the
blessing of Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence Agency, which provided the group
with arms and training and helped launch its
fighters across the cease-fire line separating
Pakistani and Indian forces in Kashmir. It was
founded by Hafiz Sayeed, a former Punjab
University engineering professor who also started
Jamaat ul-Dawa. The two groups shared the same
headquarters in the town of Muridke near Lahore.
During the height of the insurgency in the
1990s, Lashkar-i-Taiba fighters assembled openly
in Muzaffarabad and nearby training camps. In
early 2002, under intense pressure from the
United States, Musharraf banned the group and
froze its assets. Sayeed was subsequently
arrested, although a Pakistani court later ordered his release.
The State Department, in its annual terrorism
report, asserts that a top al Qaeda lieutenant
was captured at a Lashkar-i-Taiba safe house in March 2002.
Notwithstanding recent progress in peace
negotiations with Pakistan, Indian officials have
questioned the sincerity of Musharraf's ban and
said that Pakistan has yet to dismantle the
infrastructure used by insurgent groups on its territory.
Some Pakistani officials seemed to acknowledge
as much in the days after the quake. Sikander
Hayat Khan, the senior elected official in
Pakistani Kashmir, told the private Geo
television network that "jihadi organizations had
to face massive destruction" near the town of Bagh because of the quake.
And a senior police official from Pakistani
Kashmir said that Lashkar-i-Taiba and another
prominent separatist group, Hizb-ul-Mujaheddin,
"have lost significant assets both in men and
material." The official spoke on condition of
anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.
At the Jamaat ul-Dawa field hospital Saturday,
Abdul Majid said he did not know whether the
group was involved in violence, nor did he care.
A 35-year-old construction worker, he was lying
in a leaky tent with a broken leg and back
injuries from the earthquake, which killed two of his children, ages 2 and 4.
"Every 10 minutes a doctor or medical attendant
comes in to check on me," he said from beneath a
heap of blankets. "I have a very high opinion about this organization."
Khan reported from Karachi.
______
[4]
The Daily Times
October 17, 2005
RIGHT TO INFORMATION -- AND SURVIVAL
by J Sri Raman
While instances of corruption and human rights
abuse can be used to put some sacred symbols of
state militarism in the dock, the public has no
right to information that will question their
very rationale. We can ask for casualty figures
in a nuclear accident, but not for the facts that
are supposed to necessitate a mad rush down the
nuclear path
On October 12 there came into being a new law, of
which Indians can be proud. The Right to
Information Act, 2005, was the result of long
years of struggle by the country's marginalised
community of human rights activists. Their
victory, however, remains partial, with a vital
area of legitimate popular concern still left
uncovered by the law.
First, the positives. The new law represents a
great leap, by the standards of a developing
country, over the grossly inadequate provisions
on the statute book thus far. It can make the
right more real and bring it closer to the common
people, if implemented and acted upon.
The Act covers a wide range of information
defined as "any material in any form including
records, documents, memos, e-mails, opinions,
advices, press releases, circulars, orders,
log-books, contracts, reports, papers, samples,
models, data material held in any electronic form
and information relating to any private body
which can be accessed by a public authority under
any other law for the time being in force."
Under the new law, the information-seeking
citizen is not required to furnish his reasons as
he was under the old provisions. No more can the
petty mandarins reject such applications on the
ground that the reasons cited are "unacceptable".
It has been made clear that citizens below the
"poverty line" need not pay the fees prescribed
for other information-seekers. What deserves
note, however, is what information cannot be
sought and what agencies have been put safely
outside public scrutiny of this kind. The public
has explicitly been denied the right to
information, "disclosure of which would
prejudicially affect the sovereignty and
integrity of India, the security, strategic,
scientific or economic interests of the State,
relation with a foreign State or lead to
incitement of an offence."
Constitutional reasons might be cited for the
provision that the law covers all states except
Jammu and Kashmir. The clauses on exclusion,
however, leave little doubt about a
political-ideological outlook that can severely
restrict the right to information, especially in
an area that the law does not mention at all.
Among the organisations excluded from the purview
of the Act are the national security agencies and
most of the paramilitary forces. These include:
the Special Frontier Force (SFF), the Border
Security Force (BSF), the Central Reserve Police
Force (CRPF) and the Assam Rifles (AR). Two of
these, the BSF and the AR, have been involved in
serious security and human rights issues in Jammu
and Kashmir and the north-eastern state of
Manipur, respectively.
The law does not mention the installations and
agencies that make up the nuclear establishment
of the nation. No activist or analyst acquainted
in the least with the mind of the lawmakers,
however, assumes that the secrecy shrouding
nuclear activities is now a thing of the past.
This remains an area of acute ambiguity. The
Indian peace movement has long been demanding
either the scrapping or a severe amendment of the
extremely secretive Atomic Energy Act. The
Charter of India's Coalition for Nuclear
Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), adopted not long
after India (and Pakistan) turned nuclear weapon
states, noted the absence of a nuclear safety
authority that was independent of the official
Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). The safety and
regulatory functions of the main weapon research
centre had even been made the job of an internal
committee, instead of a separate official Atomic
Energy Regulatory Board (AERB).
The nuclear establishment, of course, protests
its never-weakening commitment to public
accountability. Facts, however, warrant no public
faith in such claims. It is not only that the
Atomic Energy Act does not oblige nuclear units
to publicise results of their studies about the
health hazards from their activities, for
instance. Worse, they do not even have to answer
public objections. The establishment makes a
mockery of the much-hyped 'public hearings' on
nuclear projects, and goes ahead with them even
where only objections to them have been voiced at
such hearings.
Under the new law, information can be sought even
about the exempted organisations and their
activities, if either corruption or a human
rights violation is involved. This does provide
increased scope for activists, even on the peace
front. While instances of corruption and human
rights abuse can be used to put some sacred
symbols of state militarism in the dock, the
public has still no right to information that
will question their very rationale. We can ask
for casualty figures in a nuclear accident, but
not for the facts that are supposed to
necessitate a mad rush of the nation down the
nuclear path.
It has been pointed out that it is for conscious
citizens to use the law to make the right to
information more real. It is for the peace
movement to make the right to information a
powerful instrument to save South Asia from the
gravest peril that faces it.
The writer is a journalist and peace activist based in Chennai, India
______
[5]
K.N.Panikkar awarded Nilakkal Ecumenical Trust Award for Communal Harmony
The first Nilakkal Trust award for communal
harmony and religious fellowship was presented to
Prof. K.N.Panikkar by Justice V.R.krishna Iyer on
15 October at a very largely attended function.
The citation of the award states as follows: In
awarding this honour the committee have taken
into account Dr. Panikkar's noble endeavours and
unceasing efforts to uphold the sacred cause of
secularism and the key role he played in
conscientising the people of the country about
the perils of communalism. What Dr. Panikkar has
done in one of his celebrated books, Before the
Night Falls, is clearly indicative of the tenor
of his life's toil. He expresses in this piece of
literature his apprehensions of communal forces
seizing power by employing fascist tactics. He is
indeed a concerned Indian to echo truthfully the
genuine concerns of the founding fathers of the
Indian constitution.
In his voluminous works on history, culture and
varied social problems, Dr.Panikkar provides the
theoretical foundation for a secular culture and
diagnosis of communalism as the most potent
danger the Indian society is confronting. It is
fundamental to his view that history should be
defended against distortions at the hands of
communal forces and that no nation can consider
itself civilised if it fails to provide social
justice and to listen to the voice of the
minorities and the marginalised.
As a professor and academic, as a writer of
historical themes, as an administrator of
institutions of higher learning and as an
intellectual of national eminance, Dr. Panikkar
has spoken against all manifestations of divisive
tendencies in the country... This special award
for religious harmony and fellowship is being
presented to him with the wish, hope and prayer
that it would help to highlight the exemplary
leadership Dr. Panikkar has been providing for
the serene and sacred cause of religious
fellowship and communal harmony.
_______
[6]
Dear friends,
We would like to invite you to the 2nd National
Convention on the Right to Food and Work, to be
held in Kolkata on 18-20 November 2005.
Organisations committed to the right to food and
work are expected to join from all over the
country. The main purpose of this convention is
to share experiences of grassroots action for the
right to food and work, and to plan future
activities.
Among the main issues to be discussed at the
convention are: Public Distribution System;
Children's Right to Food; the National Rural
Employment Guarantee Act; the Right to
Information Act; Protection of Existing
Livelihoods; Land Rights; Gender Aspects of the
Right to Food; Legal Action for the Right to
Food; Organisational Aspects of the Right to Food
Campaign. This will be an action-oriented event,
structured around a series of parallel workshops,
plenary sessions, cultural activities, and more.
A tentative schedule is enclosed, along with
details of the venue, local contacts etc.
Please consider organising meetings, workshops
and conventions at the district/state level on
these issues in advance of the national
convention. This would facilitate better
involvement of local groups and grassroots
organisations at the national convention.
Participating organisations are also invited to
bring their campaign material (e.g. reports,
posters, exhibitions, etc.) for circulation or
display at the Kolkata convention
This event is a follow-up of the first National
Convention on the Right to Food and Work, held in
Bhopal on 11-13 June 2004, and also of the
convention on "Employment Guarantee and Right to
Work" held in Ranchi on 17-19 June 2005 as part
of the Rozgar Adhikar Yatra.
The tentative budget of the convention is about
Rs. 2,25,000/-. This cost will be met through
voluntary donations and registration fees (Rs 100
per participant for three days, including food
and accommodation). All participants are
expected to make their own travel arrangements.
Kindly book your tickets well in advance due to
festival season. Please let us how many are
planning to participate in this convention so
that we can plan for logistics.
For further information, please send a line to
<mailto:righttofood at gmail.com>righttofood at gmail.com,
check the campaign website
(<http://www.righttofoodindia.org/>www.righttofoodindia.org)
or contact the secretariat at 011-2351 0042 or
9350530150.
In solidarity,
Navjyoti and Rosamma
(secretariat, right to food campaign)
Venue of the Convention:
Badu Collective,
c/o JSK Training Centre (Nutan Ashram),
1, Shibtola Road, Village Maheswarpur,
P.O. Badu, Kolkata - 700128
(Please note that Badu is about 1 ½ hrs from the
centre of Kolkata. To reach Badu, take a bus
from Hawrah station (bus no. L 238) or from
Sildah station upto Madhamgram and from
Madhamgram take another bus or auto for Badu,
after to reach Badu can ask about Nutan Ashram. )
[...].
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit
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