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Pakistan underwater, Islamabad under fire

As flooding wreaks havoc on large swathes of Pakistan for the second year running, Rahimullah Yusufzai examines both the natural and political repercussions.

By Rahimullah Yusufzai

MAKING WAVES: The recent flooding has impacted on the country's political and economic situation

Pakistan continues to languish under a spell of misfortune as heavy monsoon rains and floods ravage the country for the second consecutive year.

The southern Sindh province and, to a lesser extent, neighbouring Balochistan have been affected again this year while Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa bordering Afghanistan have been mercifully spared. In fact, Sindh has reportedly suffered more in the floods this year than in 2010. It was the hardest hit last year as well and one can imagine the level of suffering the floods have caused in the plains of Sindh by looking at the damage wrought by the current flooding. Observers now refer to Sindh as a constant disaster-prone province for, apart from natural calamities, the province has also suffered from man-made disasters if one were to bring the unabated violence in Karachi into the equation.

All four provinces suffered from unprecedented rains and floods last year in the biggest natural disaster in Pakistan's 64-year history. The floods in the summer of 2010 killed over 2,000 people, made another 11 million homeless and caused losses worth almost $10 billion to the country's already weak economy.

Pakistan has yet to fully recover from last year's floods. Neglect by the government, lack of proper planning and inadequate international assistance are being blamed for the delay in rehabilitating the flood affectees and rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure. Due to this year's floods, the country is now burdened with many more displaced people who have mostly lost their livelihoods and are very critical of the government's failure to come to their rescue.

The floods could have political repercussions in both Sindh and Balochistan. Sindh is President Asif Ali Zardari's home province and is a stronghold of the ruling Pakistan's People's Party (PPP). The Zardari government's inability to rehabilitate the flood affectees could hurt the PPP's chances in the next general election, although other political parties, including the Sindhi nationalists, have never been able to challenge in past elections. However, the PPP was then led by charismatic politicians like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his daughter Benazir Bhutto, who were far more popular among the Sindhis than Zardari. There have also been growing complaints by those affected by the floods both years against the ruling elite for living in style and paying only flying visits in helicopters to the flood-affected towns and villages instead of sharing their suffering.

In Balochistan, a low-level insurgency spearheaded by Baloch separatists has been raging for the last several years due to their grievances against the state. The government's failure to assist the flood affectees in Balochistan to stand on their feet will provide the Baloch nationalists and separatists with another reason to continue their armed campaign for Balochistan's independence. The Baloch separatists have been complaining of denial of rights and usurpation of Balochistan's plentiful mineral and energy resources by the Punjab-dominated federal government. They have also been critical of the military for undertaking operations in Balochistan to crush the nationalists.

According to government officials, this year's floods have killed 369 people, all in Sindh province, and caused injuries to another 740. The number of flood-affected people has reached 8.2 million and is rising. The disaster has forced over 700,000 displaced people to live in makeshift refugees camps with rudimentary facilities. Twenty-three districts in Sindh and five in Balochistan have been affected by the floods. In Sindh alone, 1.5 million houses in 41,000 villages have been destroyed.

The statistics are grim in other sectors too, with the floods destroying about 67 per cent of food stocks. UN officials have noted that 37 per cent of livestock has been lost, or sold to avoid losses. They say that at least five million surviving animals are at risk as they lack feed and shelter and are exposed to diseases.

Along with the livestock, humans in the flooded Sindh province and Balochistan are also at risk of disease. Officials and doctors have noted that diarrhoea, skin and other diseases have hit many affectees as water has inundated towns and villages and is not receding even after days and weeks. Fears of epidemic are growing in Sindh, though the situation is said to be under control.

With more than 6,000 schools damaged by the floods and 1,363 educational institutions currently in use as relief distribution centres in Sindh, the schooling of students in the province has been badly affected. This has turned attention to the situation in the militancy-hit Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where in certain places educational institutions have been closed for more than two years. For different reasons, in the two southern and northwestern parts of Pakistan, children are being deprived of education and thus growing up illiterate or semi-literate.

Need has been so great that the United Nations has launched an appeal to urge donors to contribute to a $357 million fund for helping the Pakistan government's flood response efforts. The money would be used to provide food, water, sanitation, healthcare and shelter for up to six months. It remains to be seen how much money will be donated and used for the relief and rehabilitation of the flood-affected people in view of the slow and inadequate response to the UN emergency appeal during the 2010 floods in Pakistan. There is definitely donor fatigue throughout the world, particularly in the context of countries such as Pakistan, where corruption is rife, public money is wasted and most people don't pay taxes. Pakistan has recently suffered from a number of natural and man-made disasters — the October 2005 earthquake, the huge internal displacement of around 2.5 million people from Swat and other districts in 2009 due to the military operation against the militants, the floods of 2010 and 2011 — and it has received help from international donors to cope with the situation.

As expected, the 2011 flooding is already having a political impact. President Zardari, who is mostly confined to the presidency in Islamabad due to security reasons or can be found abroad on foreign visits, was forced to visit his home province of Sindh and walk through the submerged streets to meet the affectees. All top politicians, including opposition figures Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan, have been visiting Sindh and distributing relief goods. And after widespread criticism from the opposition, civil society representatives and the media, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani had to cancel his visit to the US where he was scheduled to speak at the UN General Assembly session, despite being all set to leave for the US along with an 80-member delegation. The criticism was intense as he had just returned from a foreign visit that was of dubious value to Pakistan. The critics also pointed out that President Zardari too was abroad in the UK for medical tests and other engagements, and that the absence of both the president and the prime minister at the time of the floods in Sindh, the spread of dengue virus in Punjab and renewed terrorist attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and elsewhere in Pakistan could be politically damaging for them and their party, the PPP. Indeed, both the president and the prime Minister have come under strong criticism in recent months for undertaking frequent and often meaningless foreign visits with large delegations at huge cost.

Clearly, natural and man-made disasters have not only been causing hardship for the people of Pakistan. They are also having a powerful impact on the country's political and economic situation

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