PUBLIC response to the appeals for relief supplies to the earthquake victims is overwhelming. As the time rolls by, hope for survival of those still trapped under debris is fading away. According to press reports, some 30,000 shrouds (kafan prepared from latha) have been rushed to the disaster area by Karachi traders alone. Similar donations are being sent from everywhere and anywhere. The dead need to be buried to avert a public health disaster. The bodies can be buried without shroud. However, the compelling need is to look after those still alive. The injured have to be given medical care and medicines. Some desperately require specialist treatment and surgery. However, survivors are generally without water, food and shelter. Their miseries are being compounded by cold weather hail and rains. Thousands would die if no food and shelter could be arranged particularly at remote areas not yet reached by rescue and relief operations teams. The looting of supplies trucks by the hungry population at some places indicates survivors’ desperation.
While coordination is an uphill task, breakdown of communication facilities is hampering supplies to the worst affected areas. We need many more helicopters to send supplies to areas not accessible by road. The scattered villages in Hazara Division and most parts of Bagh and Muzaffarabad Districts have yet to see any relief worker. It is here the non-governmental organizations, youth workers and volunteers from educational institutions and other organizations could focus in consultation with local bodies on areas devastated by Saturday’s killer earthquake. The non-official effort should now be made in tiny villages which have remained totally neglected so far. Apart from food, water and shelter, they will need help in raising new homes. The rehabilitation of the survivors should receive urgent attention.
Rehabilitation work in the worst affected would require enormous funds. International community has so far demonstrated great generosity. Donations amounting to some 600 million U.S. dollars have been received from abroad. Additional aid is expected to follow as the extent of damage is becoming clearer by the day. Over three million people have been rendered homeless. However, rehabilitation operations shall have to be handled with utmost care to obviate the possibility of any misappropriations or pilfering According to the United Nations, over 1,000 hospitals and health centres have been destroyed. The number of school and college buildings destroyed in the calamity hit region is going o be equally staggering. Top priority shall have to be assigned to rehabilitate the health care network.
As Islamabad, Frontier and parts of Balochistan lie in zone prone to earth quake, it is vital that a disaster relief plan must be ready at the national level to meet any eventuality. Natural calamities do not recognize any state boundaries. Saturday earthquake caused considerable damage to Afghanistan and parts of the Indian held Jammu and Kashmir. It will be advisable, as suggested on the floor of the National Assembly on Tuesday, that a regional disaster plan should be prepared and become operational as soon as a disaster of Saturday-type befalls any country in the region.

Merkel as Chancellor

ANGELA Merkel’s rise to the German chancellorship has been anything but inevitable. She has had everything against her. She is a woman in a country which is very conservative when it comes to women in positions of power; she is an East German in a country where the majority of the population are, to put it mildly, less than enthusiastic about East Germans; she has enemies in her own party who find her reform agenda too right wing; and despite her CDU/CSU party emerging as the largest force in Parliament after last month’s elections, it was the shallowest of victories over the Social Democrats. Indeed, when looked at in historic terms, the CDU/CSU actually took its lowest number of votes ever. Fortunately, with the SPD faring even worse, no one is looking at it that way.
The fact is that, despite winning the thinnest of leads compared to what had been predicted, despite the SPD’s attempt to use this in the coalition negotiations, implying that in a sense she had somehow lost the election and therefore did not deserve the chancellorship, there was never any doubt that she would be the new chancellor. The election may have delivered confused massages, but one message was clear — a rejection of outgoing Chancellor Schroeder’s economic policies. Merkel may not have won but Schroeder certainly lost.
There was the other reason why there was no chance of him remaining in office. He called the election early because the SPD had lost its majority in the upper house, the Bundesrat, to the CDU and could not get policies approved there. That situation did not change with the election. If a coalition was the only workable government that the inconclusive election results would permit, it has to include the CDU if government bills are to be passed; it did not necessarily have to include the SPD.
That gave Merkel and the CDU the edge in their negotiations. She wanted the chancellorship — and so she got it. But for those other reasons — the odds stacked against her as an easterner and a woman — she deserves the post; not least also because she took a tired, discredited and visionless party, and remolded it, gave it appeal and sold it to an electorate that had been suspicious of it. However, if Germany now has a workable government, does that government have any workable policies? That is the worry. Germany desperately needs economic and fiscal reform. The economy is not yet in major crisis, but it is drifting dangerously; stagnation is looming. Growth is required — growth that delivers jobs.
Merkel’s liberalizing policies would do that, but at the expense of social spending — and that the Social Democrats are unlikely to tolerate; they have the power to block her if they wish. Whether or not she can browbeat them into submission and prove herself a German Margaret Thatcher remains to be seen. Maybe she can; she has already managed to sideline the opponents within her own party.

—Arab News