When the news of catastrophe reached Turkey, the Turkish PM Mr. Tayyib Erdogan was in Parliament. Immediately all government functions was stopped and orders were given to related authorities to provide quick and prompt relief to Pakistan. HE Mr. Kamal Gur Ambassador of Turkey in Pakistan was describing his sentiments on PTV at the time of handing over the relief goods to Pakistan government. He said that it is the time to do in return of what the Pakistani did at the time of Tehreek-e-Khalafat in the past. Turkey has sent 15 military and 6 civilian aircrafts containing search and rescue (SAR), medical, Red Crescent personnel and humanitarian aid to the friendly and brotherly Pakistan after the earthquake that occurred on 8th October 2005. The humanitarian aid that have been sent through the foregoing aircrafts contained various medicines, vaccination, medical equipments, tents, canvas, camping material, blankets, sleeping bags, oven and a cooking team, food, plenty of carrot cakes. Soon after the earthquake, Turkish official search and rescue teams as well as NGOs reached Muzaffarabd and started their rescue operation. Natural Disaster Search and Rescue Teams from the Turkish Armed Forces’ Special Forces Command, Civil Defense General Directorate, GEA Search and Rescue Association, AKUT and LIDAM comprising of 70 persons continued their activities in Muzaffarabad and rescued 9 lives from the rubbles.
Turkish medical team has established one field hospital for 50 persons and by today they have vaccinated around 30,000 people as well as provided first aid to 3,706 people. Turkish psychologists are also providing services together with UNICEF in the camps established in Jalaabad, Tori Park, Meratanolia, Celalabandi and Tariq Abad in Muzafferabad vicinity. There is 22 members medical team and 65 members Turkish Red Crescent (TRC) team continuing activities in Muzaffarabad and Islamabad areas. TRC team has provided aid to more than 75,000 people. TRC has established tent villages in Balakot and Islamabad providing shelter to around 5,000 people. TRC has also distributed 10,000 tents to the affected families. Turkish Prime Minister, H.E.Tayyib Erdogan, paid an official visit to Pakistan between 20 - 21 October in order to share the grief and agony of the brotherly people of Pakistan. During his visit, he pledged $ 150 million donation from the Turkish Government. Pakistani authorities declared that this is the biggest pledge made by a single country so far. Within this framework, the Turkish Government will be sending one million blankets, 50,000 tons of flour, 25,000 tons of sugar, 2 million bottles of 1 litter cooking oil and tents as first phase will be arriving Karachi very soon. Turkish Prime Minister assured the Government of Pakistan of extending his country’s expertise in the reconstruction of earthquake-proof infrastructure. In this regard, a five members technical team consisting of Geologists and Seismologists from the Housing Development Administration of the Prime Ministry, arrived Islamabad on 28th October 2005. They are continuing their survey in order to ascertain the inhabitation possibilities in the affected areas. Another 7 experts have also joined the Turkish technical team. They will be able to complete their survey in two months period.
General Directorate of Turkish Emergency Management Agency, Turkish Red Crescent Association, Education Ministry and Department of Religious Affairs has collected through fund raising around $ 52 million. United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which is sending humanitarian aid to Pakistan through their depot in Iskenderum, Turkey. Turkish Government has taken the responsibility of land transportation of their total weight of the humanitarian aid of 860 tons which includes 103,675 pieces of blankets, 9915 pieces of tents and 2000 pieces of stoves from Iskenderum to Incirlik air base. NATO aircrafts are carrying this humanitarian aid from Incirlik to Islamabad. Turkey also provides 2 military aircrafts for the transportation of the aforementioned humanitarian aid to Pakistan. Turkish Government has also provided the following contributions in US dollars to the United Nations Agencies within the framework of emergency assistance request of the UN. UNDP: 500,000 UNICEF:500,000
WHO:500,000 WFP:750,000 UNHCR:500,000 OCHA:250,000 and the total is : 3,000,000
Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the Turkish Embassy in Islamabad is planning to establish a kindergarten or a primary school in the earthquake affected area on permanent basis and for this purpose funds are being collected at the Turkish Foreign Ministry. All banks in Turkey have opened accounts for collecting financial aid. Turkish Red Crescent has signed an agreement with the 3 major Turkish GMS service providers in order to collect donations through SMS messages for the earthquake victims. Turkish Airlines, Ankara, Istanbul, Kocaeli and Konya Municipalities, Human Rights and Foundation for the Human Freedom Assistance (IHH), Baţkent University and Deniz Feneri Assistance and Solidarity Association are also sending extensive humanitarian aid to Pakistan. Human Rights and Human Assistance Foundation (IHH) are continuing their assistance by running one mobile hospital and one mobile restaurant. Baţkent University has sent humanitarian aid in shape of medicines around $150,000 for the earthquake affected people. Deniz Feneri Assistance and Solidarity Association have given around $500,000 assistance and they will be providing tunnel type tent for the accommodation of 100 families, 200 prefabricated houses, cloths, food and medicines. Turkish Airlines has decided to send 40 tons of humanitarian aid. Turkish Airlines has also decided to provide free or discounted tickets to any individual or association who may be desirous to extend help to the humanity affected by natural disasters, be it in Turkey or any part of the world. Within this framework, the individuals or associations who may like to extend their assistance, from any part of the world, for the earthquake affected people of Pakistan can avail this opportunity. Ankara Municipality has announced $1 million cash assistance and 1 million blankets. Ankara Municipality has also sent an oven which will be installed in Balakot. Whereas, Istanbul Municipality has installed 1 oven in Muzaffarabad having the capacity to cook 2,500 breads per day which are being distributed among the affected people free of cost.
Kimse Yok Mu Solidarity Foundation of Turkey has presented a cheque of US $ 4 million to the President of Pakistan on 28 October 2005 which they collected through a campaign in Turkey. International Turkish-Ukrainian Businessmen Association (TUID) has collected US $21,500 and the amount has been handed over to the Embassy of Pakistan in Keiv to be delivered to the relevant authorities of Pakistan. Turkish Businessmen Association Poland has collected US $15,635 and handed over it to the Embassy of Pakistan in Warsaw. Istanbul International Brotherhood and Solidarity Association (IBS) have sent humanitarian aid on four long vehicles consisting of tents, blankets and food items. Deniz Feneri Assistance and Solidarity Association of Turkey have sent five long vehicles carrying humanitarian aid to Pakistan consisting of blankets, tents and food items. The provision of such kind of assistance by the organizations and community foundations is expected to grow. The announcement of 150 M US$ more assistance in recent donor conference is a beacon of hope for earthquake survivors and we must say well done Turkey.

Kyoto and the Blair switch
Gwynne Dyer

If the world were run by scientists, by the time the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Montreal ends on Dec. 9 we would have global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 or 30 percent in the follow-on period to the Kyoto agreement, which expires in 2012. But it won’t happen: The Bush blockade and the absence of China and India were probably enough to block agreement anyway, and now there is also the Blair switch. The original Kyoto accord, negotiated in the mid-1990s when climate change seemed a much less urgent problem, mandated average cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of less than 6 percent from the 1990 level by 2012, and only obliged industrial countries to comply.
It was really only meant to serve as a precedent for later agreements that would impose deeper cuts and bring in developing countries like China and India, whose economies had only recently begun to grow rapidly. By the turn of the century, it was clear that those countries were becoming a much bigger part of the problem: China now opens a new coal-burning power station every two weeks, and will overtake the United States to become the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide by 2025. International financial incentives might have persuaded the newly industrializing countries to invest in low-carbon alternatives and rein in their soaring emissions without curbing economic growth, but the Bush administration’s defection from the Kyoto agreement in 2001 scuppered that possibility.
The Bush administration’s hatred of internationally mandated emission limits is largely ideological. It insists that they would destroy the American economy, but in fact the US has a relatively energy-efficient economy whose greenhouse gas emissions only grew 13.3 percent between 1990 and 2003. It would have considerably less trouble in complying with the Kyoto rules than neighboring Canada, whose emissions grew by 24.4 percent in the same period. The accord finally came into effect early this year after Russia ratified it (despite intense American pressure not to), and only America and Australia remain outside it among the industrialized countries. It was already high time to start negotiating the next round of cuts and bring the big developing countries into the treaty, for climate change was moving much faster than anticipated.
Arctic sea ice, which normally covers an area about the size of Australia, has shrunk by almost 20 percent over the past quarter-century, and the rate of loss is accelerating. Tropical storms have doubled in destructive potential over the past thirty years because of ocean warming, according to a recent article in “Nature” by Prof. Kerry Emmanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And the steady rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues, from 270 parts per million in pre-industrial times to 379 p.m. today and 400 ppm by 2015. At 500 ppm, which we will reach by 2060 at the present rate and far sooner if the newly industrializing countries don’t accept emission targets, the Greenland icecap melts and all the world’s coastal cities drown. As Lord Ron Oxburgh, the geologist who recently retired as chairman of Shell Oil, said in June: “If we start NOW, not in ten or fifteen years’ time, we have a chance of hitting those targets. But we’ve got to start now. We have no time to lose.” Unfortunately, we are not going to start now.
In August, the Bush administration persuaded China, India, Australia, Japan and South Korea to sign up for a rival pact, the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate, that fixes no emission targets and talks only of encouraging private industry to develop low-emission technologies and transfer them to industrializing countries. But if there are no targets, where’s the incentive? As Shell, BP and eleven other companies wrote to British Prime Minister Tony Blair last May: “Governments tend to feel limited in their ability to introduce new policies for reducing emissions because they fear business resistance, while companies are unable to take their low-carbon solutions to scale because of lack of long-term policies.” Lord Oxburgh put it more bluntly: “What we don’t want to see is in two years’ time the government simply becoming bored with climate change after we’ve invested a lot of our shareholders’ money.” Give us the limits and we’ll do the job.
Now even Tony Blair, long the main champion for Kyoto among the G8 leaders, has effectively declared the treaty dead. In September, sitting on a platform with Condoleezza Rice, he announced that he was “changing my thinking about this,” and no longer wanted the world’s nations to negotiate international treaties on climate change. “The truth is, no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in light of a long-term environmental problem,” he said — not even one that he used to call “the single most important issue we face as a global community.” The only hope, Blair concluded, echoing Bush’s position, lay in new science and technology. Given these grave new blows to the basic Kyoto notion that emission limits and new technologies go hand in hand, it’s probably pointless to expect the Montreal conference that opened on Monday to be more than a holding operation. Nobody will be aiming at 30 percent cuts in CO2 emissions in 2012-2020. Just agree to meet again in a year or two, and wait for more environmental disasters to change people’s minds.
 

Election over, it’s payback time in Sri Lankan politics
Ameen Izzadeen

IF ONLY former US president Bill Clinton had time to read the local papers during his recent whistle-stop tour of Sri Lanka, former president Chandrika Kumaratunga would have found in him a sympathiser. After all, both, apart from being ex-presidents, have something in common: The political retirement of Kumaratunga, like that of Clinton, is steeped in controversy. Kumaratunga, now reduced to a mere ex-president, has been on the receiving end of great deal of criticism ever since Mahinda Rajapakse won the November 17 presidential election. There is no love lost between the incumbent president and the immediate ex-president although they both represent the same political party.
The battle between Rajapakse and Kumaratunga started some 12 years ago when the former was a mid-career politician and the latter a rising star. In one of their encounters at a public rally, a few years before Kumaratunga became president, Rajapakse ordered her out of the stage, reportedly using the choicest words in the Sinhala lexicon. When Kumaratunga became President and later took over the leadership of the party, which her mother Sirimavo Bandaranaike held for nearly four decades, Rajapakse the political realist — a fact even the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran has acknowledged in his Nov. 27 heroes day speech — withdrew into his shell and stomached all the innuendos and insults directed from the presidential quarters.
But he asserted his authority and got what he wanted at the right time. When Kumaratunga’s alliance won the 2004 general election, Rajapakse was not to be made the prime minister. Kumaratunga’s choice was Lakshman Kadirgamar. But Rajapakse’s persuasive powers coupled with a mild dose of strong-arm tactics forced Kumaratunga to relent and offer him the job. Rajapakse was to repeat the same tactic to win his party’s nomination for the presidential election. But his troubles did not end with that. Even during the presidential campaign, he had to stomach Kumaratunga attending his rallies and praising his rival Ranil Wickremesinghe’s policy regarding the ethnic conflict. However, weathering all the Kumaratunga salvoes, Rajapakse has worked his way to the top of his political career. And it now appears to be payback time in Sri Lanka politics. All what Kumaratunga had hurled at Rajapakse is boomeranging on her. The woman who some three weeks ago wielded immense power and ruled over the destiny of 20 million people is today reduced to a political orphan with her own party members abandoning her.
She first requested Rajapakse to delay his swearing-in, but Rajapakse was in no mood to do so. Then she asked him that a state ceremony with full military honours be held to send off the outgoing president and welcome the new president. Rajapakse shot down that request too. Even her request for an address to the nation on state TV was not granted. The only request that Rajapakse acceded to was one that allowed her to stay a few more weeks at President’s House until her official residence was refurbished. Rajapakse, once in presidential office, stopped payments on Rs. 750 million worth of cheques Kumaratunga had signed just days before the presidential election. Two such questionable cheques were written in favour of an organisation where she was a board member. Then there was a story that she was trying to return to parliament making use of the vacancy created by the death of Kadirgamar. The new President is said to be not in favour of the move as he wants to appoint one of his favourites to the slot.