{"id":20000922,"date":"2010-08-18T12:12:16","date_gmt":"2010-08-18T12:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/184.172.177.95\/~chinad\/?p=922"},"modified":"2010-08-18T12:12:16","modified_gmt":"2010-08-18T12:12:16","slug":"not-just-a-natural-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/nature\/not-just-a-natural-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Not just a natural disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pakistani state has failed its people, writes Kamila Shamsie. Environmentalists have long warned of the power of the illegal timber mafia and the susceptibility of deforested areas to flooding, landslides and soil erosion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"First came the Taliban. Then\u00a0the army. And now the floods. The people of the\u00a0Swat valley<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 synonymous with\u00a0beauty and peace<\/a>\u00a0just a\u00a0few years ago \u2013 have cause\u00a0to wonder if they are the most benighted people in the world.<\/p>\n

The oppressive and murderous rule of the Taliban, who had almost total control of the north Pakistan valley by the end of 2008, followed by the army’s retaliatory operation last year, which seemed to consider civilians entirely incidental to the matter of military strategy, forced 64% of the inhabitants of the Upper Swat region to join the numbers of internally displaced persons. By March this year, nearly 90% of those had returned to Upper Swat, badly in\u00a0need of assistance to restart their lives, but at least with some hope that the worst was behind them.<\/p>\n

And then the rains\u00a0came.<\/p>\n

Villages have been swept away entirely. It is almost beyond emotional comprehension \u2013 the idea that the homes you were forced out of by violence and terror a year or more earlier, and to which you have only recently returned, are now gone completely, no trace remaining. And the floods are continuing \u2013 the death toll is already\u00a0around 1,600, and yet more rains are expected. There is no province of Pakistan that is expected to remain unaffected \u2013 a grim irony given how rare it is for any event to draw together all of Pakistan’s feuding\u00a0parties.<\/p>\n

It is possible to regard the floods as separate from the first two horsemen of the Apocalypse \u2013 the Taliban and the army. Floods are, after all, “natural disasters” or “acts of God” (take your pick \u2013 in Pakistan, most people will choose the latter). No one is culpable, no one could have prevented it. The truth is, the death toll could have been much lower, assistance much more quickly and efficiently at hand. Instead,\u00a0report after report\u00a0talks of the inadequacy of the state’s response to the crisis. This is made more maddening by the fact that much of the flooding took place in parts of the country that were\u00a0already a humanitarian disaster\u00a0zone.<\/p>\n

The Swat valley should have been crowded by institutions of state helping rehabilitate those returning to their homes, and switching focus to flood relief should have been a fairly speedy process. After all, NGOs such as\u00a0Oxfam<\/a>\u00a0and its local partners in Swat have made precisely that switch.<\/p>\n

The fact that a pre-existing disaster meant NGOs were on the ground and able to respond swiftly to the flooding is the thinnest of silver linings. But, while assistance from the state has not been wholly absent in the Swat valley in the last year, many of the proposed aid projects are yet to materialise and assistance has been slowed down by a tug-of-war between the military and civilian authorities for who has control of the rehabilitation.<\/p>\n

But it is not only the matter of response but also that of cause which implicates the state of Pakistan. In the last few years, environmental groups, activists and journalists have talked repeatedly of the power of the timber mafia, which has a particularly strong hold on the areas now affected by flooding.<\/p>\n

One of\u00a0the most powerful and ruthless organisations within Pakistan, the timber mafia engages in illegal logging, which is estimated to be worth billions of rupees each year \u2013 the group’s connection to politicians at the local and federal level has been commented on in the media for years. The constant warnings about the timber mafia almost always include mention of the increased susceptibility of de-forested regions to flooding, landslides and soil erosion.<\/p>\n

But, in the way that horror tends to pile on horror in Pakistan, not only has the flooding been intense in areas where the timber mafia is active but the felled trees, hidden in ravines prior to smuggling them onwards, have caused havoc. Dislodged by torrents of water, they have swept away bridges and people and anything else in their\u00a0path.<\/p>\n

There has been some suggestion that the high volume of timber transported along the rivers has been\u00a0a factor in the weakening of the\u00a0dams and retaining walls that are\u00a0supposed to protect the land from\u00a0flooding but have proved unequal to the task. Their failure to function has also brought up comparisons to the poor construction that resulted in collapsed government schools during the\u00a02005 earthquake<\/a>; then, blame landed on corrupt practices and lack of oversight by the authorities in the allocation of construction contracts.<\/p>\n

That the timber mafia reportedly gave active support to the Pakistan Taliban when they controlled Swat seems to have done nothing to diminish their influence with the state. Corruption transcends political difference. Where action is taken against the timber mafia it is often in the form of local villagers coming out to defend their trees. Pakistan’s citizens, time and again, find it falls to them to fill in the vacuum where there should be a state.<\/p>\n

So it’s fitting in a perverse way that while the number of those affected by the flood\u00a0climbed by millions, Karachi\u00a0burned in retaliatory violence following a\u00a0political assassination in the city\u00a0on August 2, and families wait for the DNA identification of the victims of the July 28\u00a0air crash<\/a>\u00a0near Islamabad, Pakistan\u2019s president,\u00a0Asif Ali Zardari<\/a>,\u00a0\u00a0was on a grand tour \u2013 first France, then the United Kingdom. Some in Pakistan asked why he\u00a0was so far away in a time of disaster. But there is no place further away from the rest of Pakistan than the self-enclosed and self-serving world of government-dominated Islamabad. No doubt, during president Zardari’s visit to the UK, pundits\u00a0weighed in on the crises in Pakistan and the term “failed state” \u00a0was bandied around, either in defence or criticism of prime minister\u00a0David Cameron<\/a>‘s\u00a0“clear and frank” comments<\/a>\u00a0about terrorism.<\/p>\n

But in Pakistan, amid floods and ashes and yet more funerals, people live with the crushing awareness of a somewhat different formulation \u2013 not the state that has failed, but the state that fails its citizens.
\nwww.guardian.co.uk\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited 2010<\/p>\n

Homepage image from\u00a0Muslim Community Care<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pakistani state has failed its people, writes Kamila Shamsie. Environmentalists have long warned of the power of the illegal timber mafia and the susceptibility of deforested areas to flooding, landslides and soil erosion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20000119,"featured_media":20003080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[764,760],"tags":[20000187,531,559,50029826],"hashtags":[],"country":[20000112],"class_list":["post-20000922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nature","category-pollution","tag-corruption","tag-deforestation","tag-land-rights","tag-timber","country-pakistan"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNot just a natural disaster | Dialogue Earth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Pakistani state has failed its people, writes Kamila Shamsie. 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