generalspeaking

Avertible Catastrophy

The colonial past comes back to haunt Pakistan. Of course the colonial past pre-dated Pakistan. It was in what was then India that the British Raj reigned, and it was the British, who while ruling their vast colonial empire, took it upon themselves to enrich the country by building an extensive irrigation system to modernize the country and aid it in its agricultural sufficiency in the Indus River basin. Oops, somehow it slipped the minds of the British engineers to co-design an adequate drainage system.

And this is what appears to be coming back now to haunt Pakistan. The Jindi River has run horribly amok, swollen by the torrential rain that has assaulted the country to an extent not seen in 80 years. The Jindi broke its banks, and smothered the farms and villages, livestock and growing fields with mud and stagnant brown water in which float the carcasses of animals and rotting vegetation. The villagers are desperate for assistance to help them outlive stalking death.

The floods have managed to kill close to two thousand people, and made refugees of twelve million. Of course the floods present as one scourge that nature has invested the landscape with, but the people have had to cope with other catastrophes, those brought upon them by the Pakistani Taliban, and by the Pakistani army, coming head-to-head with the Taliban that they themselves and the Pakistan Secret Service helped found, arm, train.

The Indus waterway has broken its banks and floodwaters roar freely downstream. Seventy villages flooded and evacuated within the space of a full day, as the waters rush pell mell to the Indian Ocean, with 200,000 people fleeing their homes, and a half-million oblivious to what is barrelling down on their farm fields and homes, as advance warnings have not gone out, as they logically should. The Pakistani army is out in force, rescuing people, competing with the 'charitable' arms of terror groups funded by Saudi Arabia.

This unmitigated disaster of gigantic proportions threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of Pakistan's 160-million population might have been averted. Should have been. The funding was there, but it, like all other targeted projects for which money was made available, was set aside for other purposes. Corruption reigns proudly. The $1.02-billion that the Pakistani Federal Flood Commission claims to have spent on remediation and flood prevention projects appears to have gone elsewhere; embezzled in large part.

In the past three decades not one single dam has been built. "We've known about this flooding for 20 years now", said a water control expert in the country. "We can see how the monsoon weather patterns are changing. We've just not been able to marshal the facts to formulate a proper policy. Every year ... we all get shaken up, then we go to sleep again."

Labels: Corruption, Pakistan, Political Realities

posted by Pieface @ Monday, August 09, 2010