BERLIN has announced a change of guard. Germany will be governed by a grand centre left-right coalition led by a female conservative from the East, and yes, the first female chancellor in German history. The loaves of office are being distributed. Germans have been persuaded to believe that their moment has come to be led into the sun.
But there is always the morning after. The picture at home is still one of unemployment, slow growth and the imperative of reforms. There is also the larger picture. Europeans, watching the drama unfold, are keen to observe how Germany is going to adjust its EU policies and bring about change in their lives. How will Germany act in an enlarged EU while integration founders and globalisation throws up increasing bouts of national self-assertiveness?
Give them time, one might say. But Germany has long done away with the fiction of the European interest being the same as the German interest. The worrying question that has surfaced in Brussels is not whether the EU is witnessing a resurgence of national self-interest at the core, that threatens the solidarity of the ties of the diverse member states, but the more disturbing one of whether the EU is in danger of going into reverse mode! The French and Dutch rejections of the European constitution have reinforced the trend whereby the link between EU institutions and electorates stands terribly damaged.
It is safe to say that the music of Germany’s EU policies may change but the lyrics will remain the same. Germany’s new leader has not shied away from expressing her revulsion at the personalisation of EU politics that took place under the previous regime — from the former chancellor’s intimate embrace of Chirac during the stability pact episode to his direct attacks on British Prime Minister Tony Blair, during the failed June summit in Brussels.
Ms. Merkel’s own pronouncements will have us believe that she would attempt to solve disputes in a less emotional manner and that she would consult with smaller member states before important decisions. However, she struck a discordant note when she stated in a parliamentary address that the French and Dutch rejections of the EU constitutional treaty had shown that EU citizens had had enough of “Brussels’ tendency to interfere in matters that are better tackled at the local level”. Indeed, EU citizens had not become Eurosceptic, rather it was the EU that had become too big, bureaucratic and unaccountable, ran the message.
If anything, Turkey will provide something of a touchstone for Germany’s policy towards the EU. The EU has opened entry-negotiations last week as promised but not before being briefly stopped at the historical gates of Vienna, as it were, by the Austrians through an initial veto. The prospect of Turkey’s entry has triggered a wave of unease and anxiety in some member states, many of which cited the issue as a key reason to call a halt to the European project.
Some countries with large Turkish populations rightly fear further migration. Germany, for instance, is still coping with its influx of Turks and desperately trying to integrate them in mainstream society. Nevertheless, Turkish accession is also viewed by sections of European societies as encouraging emergence of a truly modern version of Islam that incorporates European values, women’s empowerment and human rights.
Quite obviously, this is all very awkward for Britain, which has taken a lead in ushering Turkey towards the EU. It’s no surprise that British diplomats are working hard to ensure that accession talks do not collapse under the current British presidency. But do not count on help from Berlin. Chancellor-designate Angela Merkel has made opposition to Turkey’s membership clear from the start, preferring what she calls a “privileged partnership” with the EU, a second-class status.
Germany’s attitude towards EU institutions has also undergone a subliminal change in recent years. It is driven less by its original ideals than by the state of its depleting finances that no longer enable Germany to exercise its cheque book diplomacy to underwrite compromises emerging from long and tumultuous talks. Germany’s budget deficit is due to touch 4 per cent of gross domestic product this year, a fact that led Schroeder to conspire with President Jacques Chirac of France two years ago to block the Commission from imposing sanctions against Berlin’s lax fiscal policy. Five of the 12 Eurozone members are now in breach of the stability and growth pact, the EU’s fiscal rules.
Once among the most enthusiastic advocates of the single market, with its “four freedoms” — the freedom of movement of goods, people, services and capital — to underpin the continent’s post-war recovery, the government in Berlin is now doing some rethinking. While the single market in goods is largely complete, member states are bickering furiously over a draft law to open up the market in services, which represents 70 per cent of the EU economy. Both France and Germany, gripped by fears that the directive would open the floodgates to a wave of low-wage workers from abroad, greatly wish to dilute the law.
In effect, France, Germany and other countries are now questioning the wisdom of the “four freedoms”, in a reflection of their fears of globalisation and the impact on fragile economies. The rise of national self-interest has further eroded the free movement of capital, including cross-border mergers and takeovers.
Consider this. Gerhard Schroeder has clashed with the European Commission over its attempts to scrap the “Volkswagen Law”, which protects the company from hostile bids. In France, prime minister Dominique de Villepin has invoked the principle of “economic patriotism” to rail against the possibility of a US consumer group launching a hostile takeover of Danone, the publicly traded French foods company. What’s more, he has drawn up a list of ten strategic sectors in which companies will be shielded from foreign takeovers, raising the ire of the bureaucrats in Brussels. Competition policy has taken a severe beating.
Let’s face it. There’s dwindling enthusiasm for the European project. A loss of confidence here has combined with the loss of leadership in France and Germany to create a kind of political vacuum at the Commission, effectively proscribing necessary action. Germany would do well to step out of the defensive alliance with France and chart an independent path for European development, taking the help of the new member states that are still fired by the ethos of a “new Europe”. Ms. Merkel can do something about that.

Pakistan will not forget this tragedy
Tariq Ali

THE scale of the disaster has traumatized the entire country — or perhaps not quite. Here in Lahore a group of people collecting funds for earthquake relief were apprehended and charged. They were amassing money for themselves. Even in the midst of devastation, life goes on. The global media have descended on the country, their reports repeating the same images and the same banal comments every few minutes. Soon they will move on, so that when they are really needed, to monitor relief efforts and reconstruction or keep watch on the funds, they will no longer be there. The citizens of the West will also forget. But Pakistan will never be able to.
The situation in the northwest of the country is much worse than has been reported. The prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, lost his cool at local journalists for reporting the destruction of schools and the deaths of hundreds of children: “Why are you being sensationalist? Be optimistic!” The defensiveness was unnecessary. Nobody blames the regime for the earthquake and even the normally loquacious Frontier province and Afghan mullahs, eager to describe Katrina as “God’s punishment” for US wars, have fallen silent. Why would Allah punish the Islamist strongholds in Pakistan?
The death toll has been underestimated. Balakot, a small city which is the gateway to the beautiful Kaghan valley and heavily dependent on tourism, has been destroyed. Corpses litter the streets. According to estimates, at least half of the city’s population of 100,000 is now dead. A whole generation has been wiped out. Survivors were, till yesterday, without food or water because the roads were wrecked and helicopters were in short supply.
It is the same story in Muzaffarabad, in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Everything is wrecked. Here there have been anti-government protests and citizens have “looted” shops in search of food, just like in New Orleans. Further up on the Indo-Pak border, where a state of permanent tension is deliberately kept alive by both sides, 400 Pakistani soldiers sitting in trenches were crushed to death as the mountain wall protecting them crashed and buried them alive.
What of the relief effort? The government is doing its best, but it is not enough. The absence of a proper infrastructure, a dearth of reserve funds to deal with unexpected tragedies, and a total lack of preparedness despite annual disasters on a lesser scale, have cost innumerable lives. To watch General Musharraf on television bemoaning the shortage of helicopters was instructive. A few miles to the north of the disaster zone there is a large fleet of helicopters belonging to the Western armies occupying parts of Afghanistan. Why could the US, German and British commanders not dispatch these to save lives? Is the war so fierce that they are needed every day? Three days after the earthquake, the US released eight helicopters from “war duty” to help transport food and water to isolated villages. Too little, too late.
Pakistan’s army has been put into action, but armies are not suited to relief work. They are not trained to save lives, and reports yesterday that aid convoys are being attacked and seized by angry crowds long before they reach their destinations are an indication of the chaos. Even in normal times the poor have limited access to doctors and nurses. The shortage of medical staff has been a curse for 50 years. No regime has succeeded in creating a proper social infrastructure. At times like this the entire country feels the need but it will soon be forgotten, till the next disaster. In a privatized world, the state is not encouraged to buck the system. Things look bad here this week, but they will look worse when rescue teams arrive in areas still out of reach.


Hope amid ruins
Declan Walsh

ARE miracles still possible? Colonel Jean-Jacques Mornat mused the question as he waited for a helicopter out of Balakot on the floor of a Kashmiri valley. Hours earlier the French officer had led a rescue team that plucked five children from the concertina-like ruins of a collapsed school. Impressively, they survived 72 hours after Saturday’s awesome quake. But they were probably the last lucky ones left in town, he said. The French team had packed its bags and was leaving. “Of course I believe in miracles,” declared Col Mornat. “But there are none left here.”
Balakot looks like a town that has been eaten alive. The convulsion buckled the earth, chewed up buses and levelled practically every building in sight. Nobody can provide the death toll because there is nobody to ask. The mayor, the police chief, the magistrate — all swallowed up by the earth. Yet four days later, promised relief has not arrived. There are no food queues, no water tankers, no tents, just thousands of hungry, cold and increasingly angry residents. So on Tuesday a volunteer army of Pakistani men took matters into their own hands. From morning the twisting mountain road leading to Balakot was clogged with cars, trucks and perilously overcrowded buses. The volunteer army came from as near as the next village and as far as Karachi, hundreds of miles south. They came from all walks of life — labourers, office clerks and university lecturers — bringing modest supplies of medicine, food but an abundant promise of help.
“They appealed for volunteers at my local mosque last night,” said Muhammad Yunis, a 40-year-old farmer carrying a farmyard hoe in his hand. “I felt it was my duty to come.” If they came to save the living, many ended up searching for the dead. With thousands of decaying corpses still trapped in the rubble (a sickly whiff pervades the town) Balakot’s most pressing worry is to dispose of them. Some volunteers were clearly overwhelmed. “It looks like God has cursed this place,” said Javed Anwar from nearby Abbottabad. Hidayat Rehman, an agriculture lecturer from Peshawar, had cancelled class and brought 50 students to help. But they had no tools to cut through the wreckage. “We don’t even know how to start,” Dr Rehman said, standing helplessly before a crushed school. “This is so heartbreaking.” Throughout the morning soldiers, survivors and volunteers swarmed over the debris. Schoolbags were piled on the roof of a girls’ school that had been crumpled down to waist height.
Silver-helmeted rescuers from the United Arab Emirates sifted through the wreckage using sniffer dogs and sonar probes. “Hello? Hello?” shouted one, banging on a wooden door under a collapsed roof. There was no answer. Fear of a second quake hung in the air like an unspoken curse. Now and again the ground vibrated alarmingly for a few seconds, then stopped. It was so much easier to work after the tsunami, said Saif Abdul, a 32-year-old police officer from Dubai. “There you didn’t have to search for the dead, there were thousands of bodies on the road,” he said. In the town market, a sprawling jumble of flattened shops, rotting vegetables and scattered tins, Inamul Haq drove a sledgehammer into the roof of a grocer’s shop.
The 32-year-old engineer was helping a friend, Raja Hanif, search for his dead brother. They believed he was buried under the roof at their feet. He was scathing about the government’s efforts to help. “The army has come here pretending to help but they are doing nothing,” he spat. “The officers drive up, look at us, and drive away. It’s all a sham.” Moments later the missing corpse poked through the debris. Haq threw his arms around Hanif, who burst into choking sobs. Then his own eyes welled with tears. The army had run up to 100 emergency helicopter flights into the valley yesterday, evacuating the wounded and bringing some limited food supplies, said Major General Shakeel Hussain. “I appreciate people’s impatience. But there is a limit to what we can do,” he pleaded. Rescue efforts stalled at lunchtime, when the battleship grey sky split open, spilling a torrent of rain over town. But the work of burying the dead continued. Mourners took the corpses on wicker beds to a hillside where they were hastily buried. One mass grave had already been filled beside a basketball court. As the rain pelted down, a team of boy scouts helped fill a second one.
The emotional toll weighed heavily on survivors. Mohsin Khan, 21, returned home from university on Monday to find his mother, brother, sister and grandmother had been killed. He cried in the car on the way home, he said, but had not allowed a single tear since. “I am young, I am energetic, and there is too much to do,” he said. “After all this is my town.” He paused to correct himself. “This was my town.” But after the rain, Chinese rescuers brought unexpected good news: a five-year-old boy had been pulled alive from the rubble in a village three miles away. Maybe, just maybe, miracles are still possible in Pakistan today.