Anjum Niaz on the refugee crisis in Pakistan and the indifference/incompetence of the government.
Its name is IDP. It was reborn ten days ago. Baptized by Barack Obama while Asif Ali Zardari held it, the American president showered the newborn with a $1.9 billion cheque. Fearing that Pakistan may throw the baby out with the bathwater, the US Congress vowed to honour the cheque once the sum reached the recipient. With Musharraf government swiping over 12 billion dollars, the whole world knows, including Pakistanis, that our effete elite pocket the money meant for the poor. Flush times are here again. Paisa dey do is the signature tune played by the information minister of NWFP. Daily he begs for money. It doesn’t look nice. What would look nice are footage of his chief minister, governor and a cabal of cabinet colleagues and party loudmouths spreading out in the field.
Let all the fat cats sweat it out in the sweltering sun to visit IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons). Show us first your humane handling of the crisis, even though it’s gargantuan. Take us each night with a candid camera to a camp. Randomly ask the IDPs how they fare. Demonstrate to us that you’ve resolved their complaints on the spot. You are then worthy of our worship and donations. But according to an Al Jazeera reporter, the grousing has already set in: “We went to an IDP camp today … there were no signs of officials from the provincial government. There has been a lot of talk, but they have not done anything. There is, understandably, reasonable justification for [the civilians’] anger at the government.”
The ANP leader Asfandyar Wali is missing from action. Is he in the cooler climes of London?
Morally, the onus falls on Asif Ali Zardari. But he’s somewhere abroad doing business – personal or official, that we don’t know. Staying in a Washington hotel at a prodigious $5,000 suite per night with 62 camp followers in tow, he repeated “my democracy” and “our democracy” almost 20 times in a three-minute statement (didn’t Ambassador Husain Haqqani give him talking points to sound more presidential?). What he forgot to mention was the plight of the IDPs and how he intended handling the crisis. The president should have been back turning into a control freak screaming at the slothful and purging the corrupt caught stealing IDP funds. That is democracy – serving your people.
Prime Minister Gilani is not doing a heck of a good job either while minding the store. His national address on television the other day claiming to call the shots in Swat appeared mawkish. Not only did it co-occur with Zardari’s visit to US but it seemed as if the script came from across the Atlantic, emailed perhaps by our ambassador to appease the Americans. Gilani like his boss has not cared to venture out to the IDP camps. His decorous prose out of his air conditioned fortress in Islamabad sounds hypocritical. Presently he seems seized with his flirtatious forays with the Sharif brothers. Maybe he fears the elder Sharif replacing him as the Americans would like, according to Mushahid Hussain of Q League.
Whatever, Gilani needs to fiercely jolt his cabinet of 100 spiritless and open up a daily log to assign each and every man and woman to reach out to the IDPs. Let these parasitical creatures blood sucking the economy awash with their opulent lifestyles and junkets abroad take their task seriously. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), sitting pretty in Prime Minister’s secretariat can rev up matters by being the great facilitator. Its mandate covers the “coordination and management of the whole spectrum of disaster risk management, providing technical guidance to national and provincial stakeholders about formulation of plans, strategies and programmes.”
Question: has the PM or his cabinet bothered to come down from their high horse and ask for an in depth briefing? The only thing posted on the 0NDMA’s web site is an April 23 ‘suited booted’ pretty picture of the PM and Gen (r) Farooq Ahmad Khan, the authority chairman. Both the gents cut a dashingly dapper figure. The write-up, typically ‘babuish’ is old hat. I called up a high-up at NDMA asking if he would answer some of my questions. “You need to come down to see us,” said the good man. I just need a quick response to the current disaster and how it’s being handled, not the archival data. He still was not convinced. “You need to be familiar with our structure and its background before writing,” he said. I gave up, not wanting to argue that I was not planning on writing a PR piece on the wonderful work these gentlemen were doing. I’m sure they are all wondrous folks up at the PM secretariat, but I needed to know what they have done so far on the ground regarding the 10-day old IDPs.
The international donors based in Pakistan are a sharp bunch. They are swooping in with a lot of face time on TV channels abroad. Just over a month ago, I met a young man recently landed from abroad, to work for the Red Cross here. He didn’t know a thing about this country. Recently I watched him on BBC holding forth about the current IDPs crisis, I was stunned. The young man knew his facts and figures like the back of his hand. What he talked was real stuff, not fluff, contrary to Pakistani officialdom. “The numbers are soaring at an alarming rate. By late afternoon 102,000 displaced people had registered for assistance, up from 45,000 a day earlier,” said Killian Kleinschmidt, a senior UNHCR official in Islamabad. And this is just one day’s counting. Imagine what the groundswell is as we speak. The agency needs $180 million and the good news is that the UN is willing to pour in the money.
Ultimately, the bureaucracy holds the key to the IDPs fate. The chief secretary NWFP has made the right noises; the rest of his tribe – from the lowest to the highest seems invisible. Where are these angels of mercy? Should one assume that all of them are God’s soldiers, with their hearts beating in unison for the millions of miserable men, women and children who are rotting in the camps under a burning sun? All that these unfortunate souls ask for are fans and clean drinking water. Is that too tall an order? The much-awaited $1.9 billion will soon be on its way from the US. Provided there’s no pilferage, the policy makers should have readied their action plan and hit the ground running. Have they? There’s still time for them to do their homework if they want the US Congress to continue to dole out the tranche every three months.
Warns an e-mailer, “I wander how many of your fellow columnists, gave a thought to these issue when advocating the current round of the elimination of the Taliban? The new IDPs left at the mercy of our corrupt officials/politicians will join the rest of the squalid and God-forsaken former IDPs, some of them turning to militancy.” The media indeed is accountable. “Opinions, however insightful or provocative… are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive.” Writes Frank Rich of New York Times “We can’t have serious opinions about America’s role in combating the Taliban in Pakistan unless brave and knowledgeable correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time what is actually going on there.”
To be more intrusive, the press needs to physically enter the IDP story as it unfolds. Columnists like me are merely opinion slinging. Reporters bring the news at our doorsteps.
The writer is a freelance journalist with over twenty years of experience in national and international reporting. Email: aniaz@fas.harvard.edu
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