Translate

Search This Blog

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Zardari's Katrina

The Pakistani media are calling it "Zardari's Katrina." President Asif Ali Zardari has become the lightning rod for the Pakistani public's fury with the government's handling of catastrophic floods that so far have killed 1,500 people across Pakistan, left hundreds of thousands homeless and ravaged an already fragile economy. Pakistanis from the Swat Valley in the north to submerged villages along the Indus River in southern Pakistan have criticized the government's relief efforts as slow and disorganized. As the country's chief executive, Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gilani has the responsibility of overseeing rescue and relief efforts. But it's Zardari who has been singled out as the poster child for flood relief mismanagement. The reason? As floodwaters were washing away whole villages and obliterating roads, bridges, hospitals and schools in northwest Pakistan, Zardari went ahead with a planned trip to Europe, where he met with French President Nicholas Sarkozy in Paris and later headed to London to patch up relations with British Prime Minister David Cameron, who had recently enraged Pakistanis by accusing them of not doing enough in the fight against terrorism. Pakistanis thought their president should be home in Pakistan at a time of crisis. Likening the situation to President George W. Bush's troubled management of Hurricane Katrina, newspaper columnists and commentators said Zardari's presence in Pakistan during the floods would have had symbolic value, even if he wasn't expected to provide hands-on stewardship of the crisis. Criticism is nothing new for Zardari, who has seen his approval ratings plummet since becoming president in 2008. Many Pakistanis view Zardari as corrupt and inefficient, an accidental president who rose to power only because of the 2007 assassination of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, as she was readying her political comeback. However, the extent of anger directed at Zardari may have reached new heights. During a speech in Birmingham, Britain, a heckler threw a shoe at Zardari, which in the Muslim world is a gesture of protest or disrespect. The News, a Pakistani newspaper, quoted Sardar Mohammed Shamin Khan as saying he threw the shoe because "we have a crisis back home and all he can do is take a trip around Europe while his own people are suffering." Editorials in Pakistani newspapers haven't pulled any punches. The English-language daily Dawn, one of the country's most respected newspapers, said in an editorial Saturday that Zardari "appears to have badly miscalculated the impact this untimely visit will have on his image as Pakistan's head of state. He may have managed to come out of desperate situations before, but this is a tough one."

Bad weather hampers Pakistan flood relief effort


Bad weather is preventing the relief effort from reaching hundreds of thousands of the millions of people affected by heavy flooding in Pakistan. The north-western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is particularly inaccessible, the United Nations said today, with up to 600,000 people marooned and rain stopping helicopters flying to some areas that are unreachable from the ground. The devastation continued as the UN said the number of people suffering in the floods in Pakistan exceeded the combined total of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010Haiti earthquake. While the death toll in the three earlier tragedies was much higher than the 1,500 people killed so far in the floods, the UN estimates that some 13.8 million people have been affected – at least 2 million more people than in the other disasters put together. It made the comparison to emphasis the scale of the crisis, which the Pakistani prime minister said today was the worst in the country's history. "The number of people affected by the floods is greater than the other three disasters combined," said Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs. Giuliano said a person is considered affected by the floods if he or she will need some form of assistance to recover, either short-term humanitarian aid or longer-term reconstruction help. "The magnitude of the tragedy is so immense that it is hard to assess," he added. His statement came as the prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, said the floods were a bigger crisis than the both the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, which killed nearly 80,000 people, and the army's operation against the Taliban in the Swat valley last spring, which drove more than 2 million people from their homes. Rescue workers have been unable to reach up to 600,000 people marooned in the Swat valley owing to bad weather, Giuliano said, adding that many residents there were still trying to recover from last year's fight with the Taliban. "All these people are in very serious need of assistance, and we are highly concerned about their situation," he said. Hundreds of thousands of people have also had to flee rising floodwaters in recent days in the central and southern provinces of Punjab and Sindh as heavy rains continued. One affected resident, Manzoor Ahmed, said that although he had managed to escape the floods that submerged villages and destroyed homes in Sindh, the subsequent lack of government help meant dying might have been preferable. "It would have been better if we had died in the floods as our current miserable life is much more painful," said Ahmed, who fled with his family from the town of Shikarpur. "It is very painful to see our people living without food and shelter." Thousands of people in the neighbouring districts of Shikarpur and Sukkur camped out on roads, bridges, railway tracks any dry ground they could find, often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and perhaps a plastic sheet to keep off the rain. "We were able to escape the floodwaters, but hunger may kill us," said Hora Mai, 40, sitting on a rain-soaked road in Sukkur along with hundreds of other people.