WHILE Pakistan Army, local relief workers, NGO’s and foreign medical and engineering teams are working round the clock to open up hitherto blocked accesses to valleys and thousands of tiny villages on hilltop, Pakistan and India agreed on Saturday to allow Kashmiris living on either side of the Line of Control to cross over at five different points to provide help to the quake victims in relief and rehabilitation efforts. The accord will enable the people of the two parts of the disputed state to help one another in supplying food items, blankets, tents, clothes, medicines and other relief material desperately needed by those devastated by the monumental tragedy. File U.N. continues to urge the international community to come to urgently the rescue of millions of survivors before the cold winter of tile Himalayas begins to take another heavy toll of human life. While preparations are being made to hold an international donors’ conference in Islamabad later this month, dignitaries from abroad are arriving to make an on-the-spot assessment of the colossal damage. The Jordanian Queen and Price Al-Waleed Bin Talal have toured the affected areas and met the injured in the hospitals. Prince AI-Waleed has announced to set up 20 schools and donated another US$ one million to the relief fund. The U.S in the meantime has vowed to continue to assist the Government of Pakistan in the relief and relief operations. Assurance has been given to maintain helicopter operations for an indefinite period.
The opening of LOC is a major confidence building measure. The travel requirements will take at least 10 days to be completed but this decision will greatly facilitate the people desiring to help their brethren on either side of LOC. President Pervez Musharraf has observed that through this major step the LOC is being made irrelevant. He has once again called for demilitarization of the disputed state and has expressed the hope that the havoc caused to the masses in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir has added urgency to the amicable resolution of the core issue between two nuclear-armed neighbours. The impact of the tragedy on the ongoing peace process is indeed very huge and the accord on LOC crossings at five different points has to be viewed in that context.
The thousands of aftershocks and the dust coming out of mountains at Allai, in close proximity to the proposed site of Bhasha Dam, as also experts’ view that the proposed dam will fall into the `fault area’ will facilitate a decision on Kalabagh as a feeling is since growing that Basha Dam site is surely in the risk area. The political controversy over the site for a big dam which has to be constructed must now end. Likewise, Opposition leaders are crying hoarse on the presence of NAT troops involved in relief operations. No Government alone could face the gigantic task of relief in a widespread area where devastation at unimaginable scale has been witnessed. Pakistan could not cope with the huge task on its own. Thankfully, foreign Government and troops from friendly countries are at hand to give expert advice and much needed assistance as also equipment and machinery for relief work. The Opposition is trying to politicize a purely humanitarian issue and hurting Government’s efforts to procure technical, medical, physical and monetary help from any where and everywhere. To criticise Government’s stand that relief goods are to be accepted from any country including Israel is bad politics. Let us for once shed all political difference and jointly face this monumental tragedy purely as a humanitarian issue.

Missing good faith

The cease-fire between Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Israel is supposed to last through the Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for Jan. 25. Israel’s return to its policy of targeted assassinations, airstrikes and arrests and Palestinian responses suggest, however, that the truce, reached in February, may soon be over. The eight funerals in Gaza — 15 dead in all at the weekend — makes a cease-fire collapse a real possibility. The latest truce violation was all too predictable. A senior leader of Islamic Jihad was killed on Monday; then a suicide bomber killed five Israelis on Wednesday. Nine Palestinians died in Israeli airstrikes on Thursday and Friday. The week ended with Israel pounding the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday with aircraft and artillery.
Israel wants to stop all the firing from Gaza and has threatened to reoccupy Hamas’ missile-launching areas if necessary. It might invade Gaza proper altogether, thus making a farce of its withdrawal from the strip in the summer. Another worry has been the reaction and responses of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as opposed to those of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas has condemned the Hadera bombing as counterproductive and has vowed that the Palestinian Authority will increase efforts to ensure the continuation of the truce. Let Abbas’ comments be compared with those of Sharon whose vow of wide-ranging and ceaseless operations against Palestinian activists has become reality. Sharon also will not meet Abbas in a summit, which was postponed from the middle of this month to early November and now has been again postponed.
Sharon’s aides seem to be taking cues from their boss. Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom dismissed an American call for Israel to show restraint and to resume talks. Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz expressed doubt that Israel could make peace with the present Palestinian leadership or that a Palestinian state would see the light of day in the coming years. That sounded much like President Bush’s recent suggestion that a Palestinian state may not be created before he leaves office in January 2009. The progress that was supposed to have been made after the Gaza pullout has never materialized — and in fact has been swept aside by renewed violence — because progress depends on the good faith efforts of the PA and the Israeli government and their compliance with each of the obligations outlined in the road map. The formula might seem exceptionally simple if both parties genuinely wished to achieve a comprehensive and just peace. The reality, however, is that Israel has no such ambitions. Israel used the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip to make the world think it was taking the peace initiative although it is in fact a trade off — the Gaza Strip for most of the West Bank, for the relinquishing of the right of return, for prisoners, for Jerusalem, borders and perhaps a state itself. Israel’s abuse of its power will allow it to continue to hamper Palestinian aspirations and provoke extreme responses and reactions.

—Arab News