Zardari Says Opponents Shouldn't Politicize Pakistan's Flooding Disaster

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari called on his opponents to avoid playing politics over the “calamity of floods” that have struck the country, submerging villages and leaving more than four million people stranded.

The international community and political parties at home should come together to help victims of the disaster, Zardari told a meeting late yesterday in Birmingham, U.K., the official Associated Press of Pakistan reported on its website.

Zardari has been criticized by opponents for undertaking his visit to the U.K. and France last week while Pakistan is coping with the worst floods in 80 years that have killed more than 1,500 people and left 1.8 million people needing food supplies, according to the United Nations World Food Programme.

Heavy rains in the past days in the northwest have renewed the threat of floods in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region where villages and farms were inundated, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the provincial information minister, told APP yesterday. A flood alert is in force and troops have been deployed in the southern province of Sindh where 1.5 million people in 2,000 villages may be affected, according to the provincial government.

The floods first struck the western province of Baluchistan on July 22 and also affected Punjab province.

Zardari, addressing a meeting that included supporters of his ruling Pakistan Peoples Party, called on Pakistan to stand united as it did during the 2005 earthquake that killed more than 80,000 people, APP reported.

Protesters

A group of protesters gathered outside the International Convention Center in Birmingham denouncing the president’s visit, AAP said. The protesters were from opposition parties and were exercising their political rights, APP cited Qamar Zaman Kaira, Pakistan’s minister for information and broadcasting, as saying yesterday.

Communication networks in Pakistan have been disrupted and ground access is limited in the northwest because highways and roads have been destroyed by the flooding, according to the UN.

Cotton planted on 1.4 million acres was damaged in the Punjab and may lead to higher imports, according to the Pakistan Kissan Board, a farmers’ group. As much as 5 percent of the rice crop may be damaged, threatening the nation’s export target of 4.2 million metric tons, Malik Jahangir, president of the Rice Exporters Association of Pakistan, said by telephone last week.

While in the U.K., Zardari eased a dispute prompted by Prime Minister David Cameron, who said during a recent visit to India that Pakistan mustn’t be allowed to “look both ways” in the fight against terrorism or to “promote the export of terror whether to India, whether to Afghanistan or to anywhere else in the world.”

‘Unbreakable Ties’

The leaders declared the countries had “unbreakable” ties after they met Aug. 6 at Chequers, the countryside retreat of British prime ministers. Cameron said he recognized the “sacrifices” made by Pakistan in the fight against terrorism and the two leaders pledged to deepen security cooperation.

“Storms will come and storms will go and Pakistan and Britain will stand together,” Cameron said, standing alongside Zardari.

“It’s a friendship that will never break no matter what happens,” Zardari said.

The dispute raised concerns Pakistan may curtail intelligence sharing, seen as vital in preventing acts of terrorism in the U.K. The previous Labour government said that three quarters of terrorism plots investigated by British authorities had links to Pakistan.