SAJAforum

PAKISTAN: An "Impending Humanitarian Disaster"

That's what Audil Rashid and Mian Nazish Adnan sound the alarm about in the July 4, 2009 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, following their recent visits to camps set up to house internally displaced persons (IDPs) fleeing the conflict zone in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. While Americans celebrate the Independence Day weekend with barbecues and fireworks, Rashid and Adnan paint a grim picture of the crisis in Pakistan:

From the very beginning it was evident that the government had underestimated the human cost of the military operation. As several camps were hastily set up to cater to the massive influx of IDPs, reports about the lack of even basic amenities in these camps began to emerge. Excessive heat (daytime temperatures soaring to 40°C and above), no electricity, food and water shortages, poor sanitation, and lack of proper health care are some of the immediate problems being faced by IDPs....

Lack of proper toilets and sanitation, unsafe drinking water, infrequent bathing, high air temperatures, inadequate disposal of solid waste, and the complete absence of a proper drainage system at the refugee camps are the main causes of worry for relief health workers. “This is the making of a disaster. These camps have been established on open tracts of land used for agricultural purposes. There are snakes, rats, and scorpions here. At night, when it is pitch dark because of no electricity, people sleep on the ground and are vulnerable to snakebites”, said M Idrees Mirza, a doctor who runs a private clinic in Rawalpindi city and is working voluntarily in the camps.

“Conditions in these camps make them perfect breeding areas for mosquitoes and many varieties of insects. In my opinion, there is a very high probability of an outbreak of any disease like mumps, measles, scabies, malaria, diarrhoea, polio, and leishmaniasis”, said another health worker working for a respected NGO who spoke to The Lancet on condition of anonymity. “We need medicines, doctors, and qualified health workers. And we need them urgently. Any delays might result in a human catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.”....

Eager to establish its writ over the Swat Valley, the government seems to have created a health crisis which it may not be able to overcome. [link; registration req'd]

Two letters in the same issue of The Lancet offer additional details. But as dire as the situation has become within the camps, K.M. Bile and Assad Hafeez note in one of those letters that the government camps house only 20 percent of the IDPs -- who may now total as many as 2.5 million individuals, almost half of them children:

Without counting the great costs to themselves, families in the local community are looking after more than 1·73 million people, in accordance with the local tradition of hospitality. Most displaced people have been accommodated within family homes; others are in schools, mosques, and other community buildings.... Although a proportion of host families are related to or friends of the displaced people, many have welcomed strangers. [link; registration req'd]

NEPAL: Perspectives on the Political Crisis and the "State of the Maoist State"

This past week, the ongoing peace process in Nepal has experienced perhaps its most serious test to date, as the simmering conflict between and Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal (also known by his nom de guerre, "Prachanda") and Chief of Army Staff Rookmangad Katawal reached a breaking point.

Dahal attempted to fire Katawal -- over the objections of his party's coalition partners, who protested the absence of the consensus required by Nepal's interim constitution -- for alleged insubordination. In response, Nepal's President Ram Baran Yadav ordered Katawal not to leave office, leading to public demonstrations by Dahal's supporters and, ultimately, Dahal's decision to resign as prime minister.

Yadav's response has been criticized as "short-sighted, ill conceived and irresponsible," and arguably unconstitutional. But in a column published today in Republica, former UN official Kulchandra Gautam argues that Yadav "possibly helped prevent a major national disaster by his difficult but thoughtful decision not to lend constitutional legitimacy to a seemingly unconstitutional and unilateral act of the ruling political party."

The constitutionality of Yadav's decision -- and perhaps implicitly, of Dahal's initial attempt to fire Katawal -- is now before Nepal's Supreme Court; the ultimate shape of Nepal's next government remains uncertain.

In a lengthy article written just before the onsent of the present crisis, Kanak Mani Dixit, editor and publisher of Himal Southasian, offers a critical assessment of the state of Nepal's ongoing peace process and the performance of its Maoist-led government more generally:

This past week, the ongoing peace process in Nepal has experienced perhaps its most serious test to date, as the simmering conflict between and Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal (also known by his nom de guerre, "Prachanda") and Chief of Army Staff Rookmangad Katawal reached a breaking point.

Dahal attempted to fire Katawal -- over the objections of his party's coalition partners, who protested the absence of the consensus required by Nepal's interim constitution -- for alleged insubordination. In response, Nepal's President Ram Baran Yadav ordered Katawal not to leave office, leading to public demonstrations by Dahal's supporters and, ultimately, Dahal's decision to resign as prime minister.

Yadav's response has been criticized as "short-sighted, ill conceived and irresponsible," and arguably unconstitutional. But in a column published today in Republica, former UN official Kulchandra Gautam argues that Yadav "possibly helped prevent a major national disaster by his difficult but thoughtful decision not to lend constitutional legitimacy to a seemingly unconstitutional and unilateral act of the ruling political party."

The constitutionality of Yadav's decision -- and perhaps implicitly, of Dahal's initial attempt to fire Katawal -- is now before Nepal's Supreme Court; the ultimate shape of Nepal's next government remains uncertain.

In a lengthy article written just before the onsent of the present crisis, Kanak Mani Dixit, editor and publisher of Himal Southasian, offers a critical assessment of the state of Nepal's ongoing peace process and the performance of its Maoist-led government more generally:

OBAMA: "Did you have something to do with that?"

Times Now correspondent Simrat Ghuman was "walking on air" after President Obama called on her to ask a question during his news conference at the G-20 summit in London. (Is it just me, or does that number seem to change every year, and entirely without warning?) Apparently, Ghuman was so high in the clouds that she couldn't help but interrupt Obama's answer:

QUESTION: Hi, Mr. President.

OBAMA: How are you?

QUESTION: Thank you for choosing me. I'm very well. I'm (inaudible) from the Times of India.

OBAMA: Wonderful.

QUESTION: You met with our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. What did you -- what are you -- what is America doing to help India battle terrorism emanating from Pakistan?

OBAMA: Well, first of all, your prime minister is a wonderful man.

QUESTION: Thank you. I agree.

(LAUGHTER)

I agree.

OBAMA: You know, did you have something to do with that?

(LAUGHTER)

You seem to kind of take credit for it a little bit there.

(LAUGHTER)

QUESTION: We're really proud of him, so...

OBAMA: Of course. You should be proud of him. I'm teasing you. I think he's a very wise and decent man and has done a wonderful job in guiding India, even prior to being prime minister, along a path of extraordinary economic growth that is a marvel, I think, for all the world.... [link]

Must-see video of the entire exchange (including Obama's full response) is above, and the rest of Obama's answer appears after the jump. No word on whether Prime Minister Singh is now "walking on air" as well. However, the next time someone tells me that Sree Sreenivasan and Arun Venugopal are "wonderful men," I'll be tempted to interrupt and say "thank you."

Unfortunately, Ghuman's pride in her Prime Minister stole some of the media oxygen from the actual response to her own question. However, as the Associated Press notes, in his response Obama said that "in a nuclear age, at a time when perhaps the greatest enemy of both India and Pakistan should be poverty, ... it may make sense to create a more effective dialogue between India and Pakistan."

HUMAN RIGHTS: UN Official Alleges War Crimes in Sri Lanka's Escalating Civil War

The civil war in Sri Lanka has attracted greater international scrutiny within the past week, with UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay suggesting that both the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) may have committed war crimes:

Warning that the loss of life may reach "catastrophic levels," [Pillay] urged the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels to halt hostilities to allow the evacuation of civilians trapped on the northeastern coast.

Pillay said the government had repeatedly shelled the designated "no-fire" zones for civilians and also cited reports the separatist guerrillas were holding civilians as human shields and had shot some as they tried to flee.

"Certain actions being undertaken by the Sri Lankan military and by the LTTE may constitute violations of international human rights and humanitarian law," Pillay said in a statement.

"The world today is ever sensitive about such acts that could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity," added the former U.N. war crimes judge, who is a member of the Tamil ethnic group and grew up in South Africa.

Pillay called on Sri Lanka's government to grant full access to U.N. and other aid agencies to monitor human rights and humanitarian conditions amid reports of "severe malnutrition" among those trapped. [link]

Pillay stated that as many as 2,800 civilians have been killed and over 7,000 injured since January, and that as many as 180,000 civilians may be trapped in the conflict zone.

Others in the international community have raised similar concerns. According to the International Committee for the Red Cross, the humanitarian situation faced by civilians in the conflict zone is "deteriorating by the day." Former special advisor to the UN Secretary General Lakhdar Brahimi says that the humanitarian crisis places Sri Lanka "on the brink of catastrophe." In a phone call to to Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed "deep concern" about escalating civilian deaths and urged the Sri Lankan Army "not [to] fire into the civilian areas of the conflict zone." The European Union has also called for a cease fire to permit trapped civilians to escape the fighting.

Sri Lanka disputes the UN's figures — the LTTE, the government asserts, has "infiltrated certain personalities into these agencies" — and has rejected calls for a cease fire. More details are available in two stories from the BBC World Service's Evening Report, linked above (and here and here). However, according to the Christian Science Monitor:

[T]he sensitive data aired by Ms. Pillay were based on firsthand daily reporting by UN national staff and aid workers trapped in the no-fire zone. A copy of a recent UN briefing paper that was obtained by the Monitor listed similar casualty figures and described mounting casualties in the squalid, densely packed coastal strip. "Daily incoming artillery and mortar fire has caused large number of casualties with a noted increase since 26 Feb," it said.

The briefing paper said several weeks of food and medicine shortages had led to deaths from malnutrition and from preventable diseases. [link]

Meanwhile, SAJAer Angilee Shah has published a feature article in the Far Eastern Economic Review (which was reported from Colombo, Singapore, and Los Angeles with the support of a SAJA Reporting Fellowship) critically examining the consequences of the Rajapaksa government's aggressive approach to prosecuting the civil war:

UK: BBC Journalists to Strike Over Proposed "Offshoring" of South Asia Services

Journalists from across all services of the BBC have resolved to hold two one-day strikes next month, prompted in large part by plans to "offshore" operations for the BBC World Service's Hindi, Nepali, and Urdu programming to Delhi, Kathmandu, and Islamabad. From the Guardian:

TV, radio and online news will be disrupted on Friday 3 April and Thursday 9 April after nearly 800 members of the National Union of Journalists chapel at the BBC today voted in favour of industrial action in a national ballot.

More than 1,100 of the union's nearly 4,000 members at the corporation took part in the vote, 77% of whom voted in favour of a strike.

The most urgent threat of compulsory cuts is at the World Service's South Asian section, where up to 20 members are at risk, the union has said. Staff in Scotland are also understood to be under threat.

The NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear, said: "Journalists at the South Asian services have been fighting a heroic struggle against the outsourcing of their jobs ... now they have the weight of thousands of NUJ members at the BBC behind them." [link]

In late February, journalists within the South Asia services held their own one-day strike to protest the proposed restructuring. In addition to worrying about lost jobs in London, the journalists fear that shifting operations to the subcontinent would compromise the quality and independence of the BBC's coverage:

Staff are concerned that moving production of these BBC language services abroad will result in poorer output and a loss of independence which is integral to the BBC World Service.

One member commented: “If the BBC’s succeeds in imposing change, the tendency will be for the output to become more and more India-centric, in the case of the India service, as they try to compete with local FM broadcasters.

“This moves away from the World Service’s USP: impartial news with a global perspective. Why should the British taxpayer end up paying for a local Indian radio station?” [link]

The International Federation of Journalists has echoed these concerns, asserting that "the BBC management's off-shoring plans will put at risk seventy years of first-class journalism and expose their journalists to political and commercial pressures beyond their control." On the eve of last month's one-day strike, John McDonnell, a Labour MP for west London, elaborated upon these concerns even further:

BREAKING NEWS: Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry Reportedly to Be Restored as Chief Justice of Pakistan

UPDATE (10:58pm ET): Text (in Urdu and English) and video of PM Gilani's speech now available online. Gilani announced that Chief Justice Chaudhry would be restored to his position following the retirement of Abdul Hameed Dogar on March 21, and that provincial governments have been asked to lift the emergency measures imposed earlier this week under Section 144. Gilani also announced that the government would request the Supreme Court to review the decision holding Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif ineligible for public office.

No details were given about the "constitutional package" that reportedly was to accompany Chaudhry's restoration. Some links to early coverage:

• Daily Times
• Dawn
• Guardian
• The News
  
• New York Times

In consultation with Nawaz Sharif, Aitzaz Ahsan and other leaders in the lawyers' movement have reportedly postponed the Long March for the time being. However, another leader in the lawyers' movement, the Chief Justice's spokesperson Athar Minallah, responded cautiously, stating that the Long March would end only when the Chief Justice "takes his place in courtroom number one" in the Supreme Court building and warning the government against curtailing Chaudhry's constitutional term of office, which is not scheduled to end until 2013.

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UPDATE (8:50pm ET): PM Gilani's speech now beginning. Live streams below, and live discussion at Chapati Mystery.

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UPDATE (7:56pm ET): Join a live discussion on Gilani's speech at Chapati Mystery at 8pm ET.

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Via Reuters (and Sadia Abbas), some breaking news from Pakistan:

The Pakistan government agreed on Monday to reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry as Supreme Court chief justice to end a political crisis that has gripped the Muslim nation, a government official said.

The official added that a constitutional package would also be presented.

President Asif Ali Zardari had hitherto stonewalled calls from the opposition led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and a lawyers' movement to restore the judge.

Chaudhry was dismissed in late 2007 by then-president and army chief Pervez Musharraf, but Zardari regarded the judge as too politicized and feared he could pose a threat to his own presidency if restored. [link]

No solid confirmation as yet, but Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani is scheduled to address the nation shortly.

Watch a live stream from Samaa TV here:

PAKISTAN: Geo TV Blocked, Sherry Rehman Resigns

Everything old appears to be new again in Pakistan. The latest: government bans on independent television news coverage.

On the heels of an emergency crackdown earlier this week, in which the government of President Asif Ali Zardari responded to the "Long March" organized by the lawyers movement by banning public gatherings and reportedly detained hundreds of opposition lawyers and political workers, Zardari has also moved to block transmission of Geo TV throughout the country:

On the direct order of President Asif Ali Zardari, the transmission of the Geo News was blocked by cable operators in various parts of the country on Friday, which drew flak from across the country.

The transmission was blocked in some parts of Karachi, Hyderabad, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Quetta, Multan, Rawalakot, Muzaffarabad, Deepalpur, Sargodha, Nawabshah, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Dera Murad Jamali. [link]

Geo and other TV news channels were previously blocked -- for much the same reasons as the present ban by Zardari -- by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, first as the lawyers' movement was gaining momentum in the spring of 2007 and later after Musharraf declared a state of "emergency" in November 2007.

HUMAN RIGHTS: Quantifying India's Encounter Deaths and Disappearances

In recent weeks, human rights violations in India have slowly been seeping into the mainstream Western consciousness — and not just because of Sergeant Srinivas. A flurry of media stories and human rights reports draws attention not only to particular extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and incidents involving torture at the hands of Indian police and security forces, but also to the prospect that such incidents may be part of more systematic patterns of abuse than is typically assumed.

Both the New York Times and Time have published stories within the past month discussing the prevalence of so-called "encounter killings" in India:

Numbering in the thousands every year, "encounters" or "encounter killings" are shootouts between the Indian police or army and any criminal element, from terrorists to petty thieves. Many Indians believe that at least some are stage-managed — with, say, a police officer placing a gun in the hands of a dead person — leading to the popular phrase, "fake encounter killing."...

In almost all, India’s limited forensics capabilities make investigating the claims of either side hard to verify. But the national news media often accept the police’s version,which puts them in harmony with many in their middle-class audience who fear rising crime and terrorism. Meanwhile, Bollywood and Indian media lionize “encounter specialists” — soldiers or policemen who, like Dirty Harry, specialize in shootouts. [NYT]

* * *

Human rights activists have for years protested the growing incidence of encounters, some of them allegedly staged. "Encounters have become the norm," says Vrinda Grover, lawyer and human rights activist. "They have become the police's preferred method to deal with not just terrorists, but criminals of all kinds." Legends of "encounter specialist" cops abound, and one of them was even the subject of the Bollywood film Ab Tak Chhappan ("So far 56", implying the number of people he had killed).

OBAMA INAUGURATION: Religious pluralism and our new president

In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama made a point of proclaiming:

"[the United States's] patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth."  [link]

This morning, at the Washington National Cathedral, the Inaugural Prayer Service extended Obama's message of spiritual pluralism by including participants from a variety of different religious traditions. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, and Uma Mysorekar, president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, were two of the six participants to give responsive prayers during the service.

SAJAforum readers may recall Mysorekar from her appearance on The Colbert Report and her efforts to have Diwali placed on New York City's official "parking holiday" calendar. Mattson, who is a professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary, is "the first woman, the first nonimmigrant and the first Muslim convert" to be elected as ISNA's president.

The video of the service is available here, and the text of both Mattson's and Mysorekar's responsive prayers appears in the official program for the service:

OBAMA ADMIN: Neal Katyal to be appointed Deputy Solicitor General

SCOTUSblog and Legal Times have reported that Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal will be appointed principal deputy solicitor general and will begin work in his new position tomorrow. From Legal Times:

Legal Times has confirmed that Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal, who successfully argued the landmark detainee rights case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld before the Supreme Court, will serve as principal deputy solicitor general, the office’s No. 2 spot, starting Tuesday.

Katyal's appointment is another strong signal of President-elect Barack Obama's intentions to depart sharply from the terrorist detention and interrogation policies of the Bush administration. In Hamdan, the Supreme Court found that the Bush administration's military commissions for trying suspected terrorists violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. The case, which marked Katyal's first appearance before the high court, was a stinging rebuke to the president's broad assertion of wartime power. [link]

Legal Times also provides some background on the role of the principal deputy:

The principal deputy is also known as the the "political deputy," though, as Legal Times pointed out in this 2005 story, the exact nature of the job is a matter of dispute. Some principal deputies have been pegged for White House moles, while others have defended the office's positions when they were at odds with the administration's. [link]

Last week, Katyal talked to students at Northwestern University about his work on Hamdan:

Although Katyal promised that he would follow the advice of his mother, who was in the audience, and not try to be "funny or charming," he kept the tone congenial. He said to the crowd that, given previous court rulings and current statements by the Obama administration, his subject was one of history.

"Guantanamo is now a relic, and this will be a look back," he said....

[H]e said that the entire process reminded him of the strength of the American legal system.

"The system corrects itself," Katyal said. "The lowest of the low can bring a case against the world's most powerful man and win." [link]