Saturday, October 7, 2017
Pakistan - ''The HIV crisis''
WITH HIV infection rates climbing in Pakistan, a new national survey has found that 133,529 people are believed to have contracted the virus. This $1m study — funded by the Global Fund and with UNAIDS support — not only warns of a resurging HIV/AIDS epidemic, but identifies new cases among injecting drug users, who comprise 33pc of all HIV cases in Pakistan, and commercial sex workers.
Meanwhile, on Thursday this newspaper published a report on the rise in HIV cases and the need to scale up national response programmes before the virus spreads. Concurring with the findings of the national survey, our report investigates instances of institutional inadequacies and inequitable fund distribution in the treatment of HIV.
The lack of political will, bureaucratic challenges and the stigma attached to HIV/AIDS not only prevent early diagnosis and treatment but also leave marginalised and poor sufferers — especially drug-users — with fewer healthcare options. Differing levels of treatment offered in the provinces has made it impossible to curb new cases. Halting treatment in KP, for instance, because of the lack of disbursement of funds, justifies the concerns of non-governmental partners working with the national HIV programme. They attribute this failure to poor administration, nonexistent health policies and lapsing funds.
Sexual health campaigns that target high-risk groups such as drug users, transgenders, returning migrant workers and sex workers is one way to address the stigma attached to sufferers of HIV and to mitigate the risk of transmission. Comprehensive control programmes must be integrated with other health strategies so that people have access to testing opportunities in healthcare settings and are provided lifesaving antiretroviral therapy. If accessible, these interventions will improve early diagnosis and fast-track treatment. Preventing further transmission and moving towards eradicating AIDs by 2030, as pledged by Pakistan as part of its SDG commitments, requires political will with a focus on education and treatment for all HIV sufferers.
How War Altered Pakistan's Tribal Areas
By Umar Farooq
''Cultural Change Comes to FATA''
On June 28, Naghma, a 13-year-old girl living in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, was taken by her uncle and five other relatives to an empty room in a house nearby and shot five times with an AK-47. She had apparently brought shame to the family by trying to run away with a young man from her neighborhood and one of his friends. Although her murder was but one of the thousands of “honor killings” that occur in Pakistan each year, it was different in one sense: it was technically legal.Pakistan criminalized honor killings in 2016, making them punishable by mandatory life sentence. But the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)—a 10,500-square-mile strip of land wedged between Afghanistan and the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa—is governed not by Pakistani law but a century-old set of regulations that leaves the enforcement of law and order to locals.
The result is that for centuries, the tribal areas were lawless, run not by a government but by a romanticized system of tribal customs dubbed Pakhtunwali. Pakhtunwali is what was used to explain the Afghan Taliban’s decision not to hand over Osama bin Laden after 9/11; even a mortal enemy is to be kept safe if they show up at your doorstep, the custom ostensibly dictates.
But 16 years of war have torn apart the old social fabric in FATA. Thousands of tribal elders, who have traditionally overseen life in FATA, have been killed in the conflict between the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters and the Pakistani state, and thousands more have been forced to flee for their lives. More than three million have been displaced from FATA, and the tribesmen and women no longer want nor understand Pakhtunwali.
What has enabled Pakhtunwali to flourish is a 1901 law called the Frontiers Crimes Regulations (FCR) that governs FATA. Its original title, when enacted by British colonial officers, was the “Frontier Murderous Outrages Regulations.” Tribal elders and the tribesmen that the English claimed they represented were collectively responsible for any offense against British India. If, say, a tribesman ambushed a British colonial servant on a British colonial road and absconded into the wilderness beyond the control of government troops, an official called a political agent would summon the tribe’s elders and demand they find and turn in the brigand. To ensure compliance, the FCR allowed the political agent to blockade the tribes, bar members from traveling to Peshawar for trade, hold tribesmen hostage, or raze villages until the fugitive was produced.
The idea was to let the tribesmen, aside from any such offense against the British, largely govern themselves. Everything from deciding how to distribute collectively owned land to what to do with an eloping couple was to be decided upon by a jirga, or tribal council. The FCR was kept in place after Pakistan’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1947, during which the British colonial officers who had the power to impose collective punishment were replaced with Pakistani civil servants, often from outside the tribal areas, who continue to hold the romanticized view that locals would never accept the laws imposed in the rest of the country.
Today, Pakistan’s constitution explicitly bars Parliament and the judiciary from having any jurisdiction there, and only the president has the authority to decide where and how any given law is applied in the tribal areas.
The only reforms to the FCR in more than a century took place in 2011, when Pakistan began allowing political parties to operate in the region and introduced changes aimed at upholding human rights. Whipping could no longer be a prescribed sentence, and only men between 16 and 60 years old could be arrested for cases of collective responsibility. A new appellate body consisting of three senior civil servants, the FATA Tribunal, was established, where defendants could lodge an appeal within 90 days of a sentence from a political agent. The tribunal also received a mandate to inspect jails in the tribal areas twice a year. But none of those reforms have been implemented. The tribunal, for instance, cannot even give an accurate count of how many people are held in FATA prisons.
Around 200,000 soldiers are now stationed in FATA, an effort by Pakistan to hold regions that were cleared out after scores of military operations carried out there since 2001. Their presence is largely welcomed by locals, who have spent more than a decade watching helplessly as government forces played a cat-and-mouse game with thousands of Taliban and al Qaeda militants. The military had first tried making peace deals with the jihadists, enlisting tribal elders to sign agreements that they would root out the heavily armed Arabs and Central Asians living among them. But since they were outgunned, locals inevitably found themselves being collectively punished when the deals fell through.
Sixteen years of war have torn apart the old social fabric in FATA.
Every IED blast or ambush on soldiers cost the tribesmen dearly, for example. Tens of thousands of homes along with once-bustling bazaars were razed and tribes with hundreds of thousands of members were blockaded or exiled for years. Thousands of tribesmen were arrested by political agents in attempts to punish the tribesmen for failing to uphold their end of an impossible deal. Suicide bombers struck jirgas, as did U.S. drones. In all, at least 1,100 tribal elders were killed in the war.
The majority of FATA’s population are too young to sit in jirgas and have watched the war lay bare the flaws of Pakhtunwali with which they had grown up.
“The youth are against the formal jirga institution in FATA, and they are equally against their elders,” said Naveed Ahmad Shinwari, who heads the Community Appraisal and Motivation Program, an NGO that tracks social change in the tribal areas. “They are not against all the elders, but the young generation understands the elders to be part of the problem. They have, in a way, revolted against them.”
The rebellion stems in part from a cultural awareness among young people from FATA—a realization that even if they themselves are ready to move past antiquated notions of tribal loyalty, the rest of Pakistan seems stuck.
“Before the war, in the settled areas, we used to get people asking if we are from Afghanistan,” said Samreena Khan Wazir, who grew up in South Waziristan but now works in Islamabad and is one of only a handful of female lawyers from the tribal areas. “They wouldn’t know Waziristan was in Pakistan. Then after 9/11, we just got a bad reputation. We never had a chance to show any positive image of ourselves.”
Pakistanis outside the tribal areas, from the general public to the military, still refer to colonial British accounts of life in FATA, said Wazir—accounts that leave little room for recognizing individuality and instead make a person’s tribal affiliation their most important characteristic. “We are still valued based on whether we are treacherous, or brave, or hospitable, or honorable,” she said.
There are practical reasons for discarding the old ways as well. During the war, entire families within FATA were displaced, creating a host of unique problems for women. Literacy rates in FATA, especially among women, are far lower than in the rest of the country, with some surveys estimating that as little as three percent of women can read and write.
“The most suffering in this war on terror was borne by women and children,” said Wazir. “The women didn’t even know how to find their way on the road, how to read signs, how to find where rations were distributed.”
The very act of living in close proximity to strangers, whether in a rented apartment in a city or a tent in a camp for the displaced, has sparked a change in what is considered acceptable behavior for women.
Why provoke Pakistan?
The air chief waxes eloquent about taking out Pakistan’s nukes. Even the tactical ones–the Nasrs–spread across hundreds of field commanders. How are his planes going to do that?
Pakistan’s nukes are its crown jewels. Until 1971, the country was full of braggadocio and machismo, in equal measure, and launched 1948 and 1965, with arguable success. 1971 knocked off its nose. And made it paranoid about India.
PMs since 1971, except Morarji, but Indira and Rajiv certainly, contemplated, seriously, knocking out Pakistan’s nuke program. But both realized that they wouldn’t succeed. Vajpayee did 1998, in part, to ferret out if indeed Pakistan had nukes. To his utter disappointment, and shock, it did, and as efficient or inefficient as India’s.
By then Pakistan had had a successful nose transplant. India could never pull a 1971 on it again.
Donald Trump ranted and railed against Pakistan in August and commanded and commandeered India to do its fair share in Afghanistan. But any man who throws a roll of paper towel at his hurricane-ravaged subjects as if he was throwing a basketball and then eyes it as keenly as if he were in the process of making a three-pointer, is such a man fit enough to be king?
His administration is collapsing. As we speak, one of the mature adults in his cabinet, Rex Tillerson, the foreign minister, is about to quit or be fired. Take your pick. Trump surrounds himself by “winning” generals. Really? All the three generals that he has close to him–McMaster, the national security advisor; Mattis, the defence minister; Kelley, his chief of staff–have fought and failed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Oh, but who cares about the war; each of us won our individual battles. In Anbar in Iraq and Helmand in Afghanistan and the lord knows where else. So we can all claim to be modern-day Douglas MacArthurs. And now that we are finally in charge, we will surely turn the tide and win the war.
Pakistan is not impressed. Especially with its nukes and missiles. It has been hearing warlike rhetoric from American presidents and foreign ministers and defence ministers and ambassadors since 9/11. The fusillade from Trump is one in a series of many emanating from Washington. Empty of course.
Pakistan is as close to military rule without technically being under military rule. The current prime minister is a non-entity. The ousted prime minister is trying to stay alive politically, but he will not be able to do so. The military hates him. In part because the military hates India and Nawaz likes India.
The military is convinced that India is up to no good in Balochistan. To what extent and of what kind, no one really knows. One Jadhav doesn’t a summer make. Or make India the mother of South Asian terror.
I mean, if India is the mother of South Asian terror, and Pakistan the father of South Asian terror, imagine how pugnacious the baby will be. But let’s not bring love-jihad in between jihad-jihad.
Pakistan sees red whenever India and Afghanistan are mentioned together. All this air talk from India makes it seethe further and gives it a potent handle to show the world that India is eternally hostile to it.
The air chief claimed that India can win a two-front war. That is entirely debatable. He said that he has a Plan B. Well, his Plan B, obvious as it is, is Pakistan’s Plan A.
The Soviets fled Afghanistan in 1989 in part because half their army was opiated by Afghan poppies. They also faced a decade-long war by proxy by the then-other superpower, the US. The Soviets had lost all appetite for war. Yet the puppet Afghan regime left behind by them lasted three years.
The Americans have been beaten and bruised but haven’t fallen as yet. They are not going to just up and leave. The trick for them, and for India, is to fatigue out the Taliban as much as they can. Who knows in three to four years the balance will tilt somewhat towards the Yanks and the Taliban will be ready to negotiate?
But this Pakistan doesn’t want. It wants the Taliban to grab Kabul now. That would be disastrous for America. And India. So what should India do? Instead of boots on ground in Afghanistan, send military “advisors” and trainers to support the Americans and keep propping up the puppet regime in Kabul until the Taliban sees sense.
And keep all the airy-fairy talk to itself.
SHIA GENOCIDE IN PAKISTAN - Death toll rises to 24 of Shia shrine suicide bombing
By Abdul Sattar
The death toll from a suicide bombing at a Shiite shrine in the country’s southwest increased to 24 after four victims died at a hospital overnight, police said Saturday.
A suicide bomber struck the shrine packed with worshippers in a remote village in Jhal Magsi district, about 400 kilometers (240 miles) east of Quetta in Baluchistan province on Thursday.
Senior police officer Mohammad Iqbal said that more than 20 victims were still receiving treatment, some with critical wounds.
The bomber detonated his explosives vest when he was stopped for a routine search by a police officer guarding the shrine. Five children, a woman and two police officers were among those killed.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack. The IS has claimed responsibility for several past attacks in Baluchistan, which has been the scene of a low-level insurgency by Baluch nationalists and separatists demanding more autonomy and a greater share in the region’s natural resources of oil and gas.
Sunni extremists and the IS perceive minority Shiites as apostates and have carried out many such attacks across the country.
At least 75 Shiites were killed in twin bombings at a market in Parachinar in the country’s northwest In June this year. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a sectarian Sunni extremist group, claimed responsibility. In February, an Islamic State group suicide bomber struck inside a famed Sufi shrine in southern Sindh province, killing 88 worshippes engaged in ‘Dhamal,’ a devotional dance.
Also on Saturday in Baluchistan, at least 13 people were killed and 20 others wounded when a passenger van collided head on with a bus on a highway near the provincial capital of Quetta.
Muqeem Baig, a spokesman for Quetta’s main hospital, said victims were brought to the hospital from the accident site some 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of the city. Such accidents are common in Pakistan, where motorists often disregard traffic rules and safety standards.
There is no justice for Bhuttos; courts have failed us once again: Aseefa Bhutto.
Aseefa Bhutto Zardari, the daughter of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has said that there was no justice for Bhuttos and the courts had failed them once again.
”There is no justice for Bhuttos. The courts have failed us once again” Aseefa tweeted.
http://www.thesindhtimes.com/sindh/no-justice-bhuttos-courts-failed-us-aseefa-bhutto/
I want every kid in school, Bilawal Bhutto tells Sindh Govt
Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has said that he wants every kid, whether boy or girl, should be enrolled for education in Sindh and rest of the country.
“Education is the only weapon to defeat evils spread by ignorance and illiteracy and for grooming a harmonious society,” Chairman Bilawal Bhutto stated while presiding over a meeting about efforts being made by Sindh government for improving education and literacy in the province.
The meeting was attended by Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah, Minister Education Jam Mehtab Dehar, Managing Director of Sindh Education Foundation (SEF) Ms. Naheed S. Durrani and others.
Team led by Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah briefed the Chairman about steps and actions taken by the Sindh government in education sector and improvement in enrolment of out-of-school children.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said that education has always been a key priority in the Party manifesto and urged Sindh government to play more proactive role in achieving the goals.
PPP Chairman said that though Sindh government has reopened thousands of closed schools but he wants this syndrome should be completely eradicated.
He pointed out that World Bank has appreciated the smart solutions adopted by the Sindh government to improve education.
It may be recalled that World Bank highlighted in a report that the Sindh School Monitoring System, which spreads across 15 districts and to the remotest parts of the province. Plans are underway to expand it to the entire province. This first digital system in the education sector in Pakistan allows transparent and effective monitoring of staff, students and school infrastructure. More than 210,000 teaching and non-teaching staff have been profiled using biometric information, covering more than 26,200 schools.