OVER twenty years ago, four of us drove up the Neelum Valley from Muzzafarabad in Pakistani Kashmir on a fishing trip. We didn’t manage to catch many fish, but we saw some spectacular scenery: snow-covered mountain tops towered above us from the Indian side, while a foam-flecked Neelum River roared along on our right as we travelled up the valley.
At a couple of places, we negotiated mud slides which partly blocked the way. And on the flanks of the mountain range, we saw many villages nestling precariously, and wondered at the fortitude of the villagers. These images from the distant past flashed through my mind as I sat glued to my TV, watching the tragedy in the northern regions of Pakistan unfold over the last fortnight..
Those who have travelled in Kashmir and in the North West Frontier Province where the earthquake hit will understand why help is taking so long to reach those who need it so desperately. Mile upon mountainous mile, a fragile network of narrow roads link small towns, villages and hamlets with the outside world. Much of the year, landslides triggered by seasonal rainfall block traffic, cutting off these communities. I can well imagine what this massive earthquake has done to the roads in the area.
Far from the scene of the disaster, it is easy to criticise the relief effort. But anyone remotely familiar with the terrain and the distances involved will realise the difficulty of the task. Of course, one can sympathise with the anger and frustration of the survivors of the killer ‘quake; but spare a thought for the weary drivers and pilots who are quietly and uncomplainingly going about their tasks. The crash of a Pakistani chopper shows how dangerous the task is.
Apart from terrain and distances, another factor in the seeming delay and mismanagement in ensuring prompt delivery of relief goods and medical assistance is the time lag in realising the magnitude of the disaster. My son called me around 11 in the morning on Saturday to tell me that an earthquake had hit Lahore. When I got home around midday, TV reporters were focussing on the collapsed apartment block in Islamabad.
Because of the breakdown of the telephone system in the worst-affected areas, word of the damage and the casualties was slow to reach the outside world. Thus, it was not until late afternoon that news started filtering in from Muzzafarabad and Balakot. It was around this time that we started getting our act together.
For a nation so often at odds with itself, this was perhaps Pakistan’s finest hour. Not since the 1965 war have we Pakistanis shown so much unity and sense of purpose. I was a student in those days, and recall vividly the wave of patriotic fervour that swept across the country. I suppose I was too young then to question the futility of this war, or realise that we had started it. But for the brief duration of that conflict, the nation was united as never before, or until this week, since.
The response of young people, in particular, has been a revelation. I am currently running an undergraduate institution, and my students took the lead in collecting funds and relief goods, as well as volunteering at the collection centre being run by the Pakistan Air Force. This has happened across the country with plane- , truck- and train-loads of supplies being collected, in addition to billions of rupees.
My readers have often accused me of being forever critical in my columns. Sadly, there is much to be critical about in Pakistan. But on this occasion, I am happy to report that the nation’s response to this crisis has been heart-warming. Unfortunately, it has taken a major disaster to unite us.
Another positive element has been the response of the international community. Apart from money and relief goods, many countries have sent trained disaster response teams that have performed magnificently under very trying conditions. For years, many Pakistanis have laboured under the delusion that the rest of the world was against us. Hopefully, this paranoid worldview has been shaken by this outpouring of sympathy and help from countries that were supposed to be at heart of the so-called anti-Pakistan conspiracy.
A few years ago, when a massive earthquake devastated parts of Turkey, Greece was quick in sending help. This humanitarian step produced a breakthrough in relations between these traditional adversaries. Perhaps the generous Indian response will cause a similar thaw in the subcontinent. And by announcing their acceptance of help from Israel, Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz have sent a clear signal of their intention to continue the dialogue initiated recently in Istanbul.
Perhaps the most heart-rending aspects of the tragedy has been the heavy casualties among children. Thousands of boys and girls were in schools when the quake struck, and were buried under tonnes of rubble. While a few of them have been rescued, many have perished. The survivors have probably been traumatised. One of the NGOs I know that is launching a major relief and rehabilitation effort in and around Muzaffarabad is the Concern for Children. My wife and I are contributing to it, and if readers want to find out more about it, they can log on to www.concernforchildren.org.pk
Another NGO that is already mobilised in the disaster area is The Citizens Foundation. Their engineers are assessing local needs, and the TCF plans to provide immediate relief to 20,000 people, and in the second phase, construct 5,000 earthquake-resistant houses. The funds we have collected from staff, faculty and students are being given to the TCF fund. Readers can access their website at www.thecitizensfoundation.org.
Many reporters covering the disaster have commented on the fact that private sector aid has reached remote areas faster than the government has been able to react. The reason, of course, is that individuals and NGOs do not have to go through red tape to collect and despatch relief goods. Many people have simply loaded their private cars with food and clothing and driven up to places like Mansehra and Muzzafarabad as soon as the road was cleared by army engineers.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many Pakistanis were convinced that the disaster that flooded New Orleans was an act of God aimed at punishing America for attacking Afghanistan and Iraq. No doubt these same people see the Maker’s divine purpose in the recent earthquake. The people truly deserving of God’s wrath are those profiting from the disaster. For instance, I have been told that one 5-star hotel in Islamabad has tripled its room rent to cash in on the flood of foreign journalists. A bolt from the blue for those cashing in on people’s misery would be welcome.

Anti-bird flu fight should begin with farmers
Gwynne Dyer

It would be funny if it were not so serious. As migratory birds carry the avian influenza virus West across Europe, Britain is following in the footsteps of Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Turkey and asking hunters to shoot down as many incoming ducks and geese as possible. They have been issued with bird flu testing kits to see if their victims are carrying the dreaded virus, but they really have little to worry about: All the cases of direct bird-to-human infection, now over a hundred in total, have occurred on family farms in Southeast Asia.
The panic over bird flu is not wholly misplaced. If the H5N1 strain that is currently ravaging wild bird flocks learns to pass between human beings easily while retaining even a tenth of its current lethality — the death rate among people who catch it directly from birds has been as high as 50 percent — the world would face an influenza pandemic as grave as the one in 1918-19. That one, known as the “Spanish influenza”, killed between fifty and a hundred million people at a time when the world’s population was only a third of what it is now.
Only in the past couple of decades has it been widely understood that almost all the quick-killer infectious diseases that have emerged to ravage human populations since the rise of civilization come from our own domestic animals. Human beings in the wild, like other predators that live in small, isolated groups of a few dozen individuals or less, would rarely have fallen victim to the quick-killer viruses and bacteria whose natural habitat is animals that live in large herds. Even if such a disease did jump from some prey animal to the hunters who killed it, and even if it then adapted enough to infect the other members of the hunter-gatherer band, the new, human-infectious form would usually die out when it had run through those few dozen people. Only when civilization brought people together in large groups, and those people began living in constant close contact with domesticated versions of herd-dwelling animals, did the quick-killer diseases that often devastate those species begin to adapt permanently to the human species.
Over the past three or four thousand years this process has given us a whole range of highly infectious new human diseases, including quite lethal ones like smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and the Black Plague. Influenza, which colonized civilized human beings via their flocks of domesticated birds, is usually a relatively mild member of this family of diseases, but the flu virus mutates with great ease, and occasionally it assumes a highly lethal form.
As our population has grown into the billions and the volume and speed of travel have soared, we have become more vulnerable to these “emergent” diseases, but they are unlikely to emerge on a British or even a Russian farm. Eighty years ago the “Spanish Influenza” virus probably made its way from wild ducks into chickens and thence into human beings on a Kansas farm, but modern commercial farming does not involve people and their animals sharing the same living spaces. Moreover, if some disease does cross the species barrier anyway, its human victims are far more likely to get early treatment (and, if necessary, quarantine).
The places where the style of farming and the density of human and animal populations still favor the easy movement of diseases from animals into people are mostly in Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia. That is where all the new flu viruses have emerged in the past half-century, where the SARS virus came from two years ago, and where other emergent diseases are most likely to appear. As a first step, it would make sense to create a network of trained observers who would report on any unusual disease patterns among the local farm families or their animals. This is being done in Thailand, and much poorer Vietnam is making a start, but Indonesia has done little, the Chinese refuse to say what they are doing, and some of the smaller countries have done nothing. The developed countries would be wise to support these reporting networks, since they offer the best chance of stopping a new disease before it reaches the rest of the world.
In the longer run, farmers throughout the region must be encouraged to change their long-established ways of raising poultry, pigs and other animals. That is a tall order, but similar shifts in farming practice have already happened elsewhere, and at least the region’s economy is developing fast enough that it can provide markets for a more commercial style of farming and non-farm jobs for those no longer needed on the land. The countryside wouldn’t be nearly so picturesque at the end of the process, but the world wouldn’t be facing so many new diseases, either.

Why Australia’s minorities are unhappy with PM Howard
Ross Peake
 
THE embattled Muslim community in Australia has a new local hero — and surprisingly he is a politician. He is Jon Stanhope who has defied Prime Minister John Howard’s obsession for total control and secrecy. Stanhope is the Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory and therefore effectively the Mayor of Canberra, the national capital. He has dared to make public the secret draft of the draconian terrorism legislation that Howard is planning to impose on Australia, in response to the bombings in London and Bali. Stanhope recently went to a summit with Howard and the country’s other state Premiers, where he reluctantly agreed to support the new laws. Stanhope is a left wing Labor politician with a deep conviction for social justice issues. However, he was confronted at the closed door meeting by the heads of Australia’s key spy agencies who gave him secret intelligence that implied there was a clear and present danger of an attack by a “home grown terrorist”.
Stanhope agreed in principle to support the new laws which will allow police to lock people up for two weeks under so-called preventative detention orders if they are suspected of being involved or having knowledge of a terrorist act. Suspects detained by police will be allowed one telephone call to loved ones but will be not allowed to tell them where they are, while judges can stop suspects from using the Internet or telephones for a year after their detention. Now Stanhope has taken a stand — he has upset Howard’s tightly controlled agenda by posting the draft legislation on the ACT government web site. This has created a huge row, for two reasons — Stanhope has broken the unwritten rule that security issues being negotiated between governments remain confidential until final agreement is reached, and he has revealed that Howard has gone further with the draconian laws than originally thought.
After the bombings in London, British police shot dead an innocent man who ran away from them at a railway station. Now Australian police are to be given shoot-to-kill powers when dealing with terrorism suspects. This is alarming the president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, Ameer Ali. “Do we want that kind of (London) scenario in this country?” he asks. He said the provision was not mentioned during a private briefing given to him last week on the legislation by Attorney-General Philip Ruddock.
Muslim community leaders are also concerned about a possible clamp down on free speech to be imposed by new sedition laws. The new laws provide a jail term of seven years for encouraging the overthrow of the government, encouraging a person to fight for the enemy or promoting feelings of ‘ill will’ or hostility between different groups that would affect peace. Dr Ali is worried that the terminology of the proposed new laws is too broad and would be subject to interpretation by lawyers. “It’s a double edged sword, it can make innocent people appear to be terrorists but terrorists could argue that what they said was in good faith,” he said.
Dr Ali says the draft legislation has sparked new concerns about the erosion of civil liberties. “Not only for the Muslims, it has increased the alarm of the wider community, a lot of people are saying that we are descending towards a police state.” The key concern is whether Howard is intending to use the new laws on sedition to muzzle critics of the war in Iraq. Even moderate MPs in Howard’s own ruling Liberal Party think he is going too far. They say privately that it is extraordinary for a champion of free speech like Howard to be going down this road.
In the national uproar since Stanhope posted the draft legislation on the Internet, Howard has been forced to back peddle. He has gone on national radio to give an assurance that Australians will be able to continue to criticise the government’s highly unpopular policy on Iraq. “But what the laws will stop is people encouraging people overseas to attack our soldiers in Iraq for example,” he said. At last year’s federal election, Howard gained control of both Houses of Parliament. With this power, he seems intent on ramming the new counter terrorism laws through parliament as quickly as possible and with little scrutiny. However, the Muslim community thanks Stanhope for allowing Australians to see the previously secret provisions in the law, thereby allowing them to agitate for change before it is too late.