Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Bhoja Air crash

Bhoja Air crash: Volunteerism, voyeurism; vandalism


ISLAMABAD: Spread out in long grass, with the smell of spent jet fuel hovering in the air, burning plastics and a sea of corpses covering, the similarity to the Air Blue crash was eerie.

Millions worth of cellphones, jewellery and other luggage
items were strewn across the bloodied, burning field.

A plane wheel (C) lies amongst debris at the scene of a plane
crash as Pakistani rescue workers search for victims in 
the outskirts of Islamabad on April 20, 2012.

With 127 feared dead and village houses covered with smoldering remains, the traffic jams en route to the disaster site were unimaginable.

Thousands of people had dropped everything they were doing, rushed out of their homes and rushed to the crash site to help save the survivors of Bhoja Air flight 213.

They saved thousands.

Just not people.


Not a single person was alive by the time the ill-fated aircraft came to a stand in Hussainabad village. But there were survivors.
Just not the human kind.

Millions worth of cell phones, jewelry and other luggage items were strewn across the bloodied, burning field. While most were damaged, there was still money to be made by the unscrupulous, and we are blessed with more than our fair share of those.

Before rescue services could even get to the tiny hamlet, villagers started sifting through the debris in a futile search for survivors. Help soon arrived, or so they thought. Unfortunately, it was the kind they and the victims’ families could do without.

At the site, a crowd of gawking voyeurs had collected, seeing the opportunity to take a couple of pictures of the crash site or pose with the wreckage. They were squealing with laughter and joking around. When our news team was stuck in traffic – mostly other gawkers – along the narrow road to the site, one twenty-something gent returning from there, laughing like he was leaving the cinema after watching a comedy, advised us to turn around because the scene was “boring”.

He then stopped in the middle of the road, got off his bike, went and stood in front of an ambulance and had his friend take pictures. It wasn’t until a soldier got to the site and ordered him to return to the rock he crawled out from under that traffic got moving.

Once the army moved in and started organizing things, gawkers were told to turn around and traffic flow improved. Unfortunately, with nowhere else to embarrass themselves, they converged on the media assembled at the nearby gas station-cum-temporary relief organizing area. Here, while some volunteers attempted to help the traffic police, arguing with the voyeur crowd, dozens of cars, bikes, vans, pedestrians and even a tractor kept trying to get to the site, creating havoc.


Somewhere along the line a scuffle broke out among the spectators – one group was talking so loud it was apparently drowning out the other’s shameful ‘jokes’. All the while, a small group of victims’ relatives standing nearby was trying to stay composed.

It wasn’t until the classic laathi-charge threat that the jokers left.


Still, many ‘tamashais’ who made it to the site managed to pick up stray cellphones and jewellery. One such group left in a luxury sedan.

All this while our dear interior minister raced into action to get to the hospitals and then the crash site. Fortunately, army men, remembering Malik’s inability to tell apples from bananas, decided it would be better if he did not help them look for human remains in the mud. Malik’s dozen-car motorcade raced back, cutting off ambulances and other emergency vehicles as it did on the way to the scene. A bunch of local political leaders also showed up and left without even getting their shoes dirty.

Death is not supposed to be a joke. But in a poverty and hunger-stricken land where words like tsunami inspire hope, atomic weapons are a source of pride, and soldiers are sent to die in frozen wastelands, what is wrong will always be right.



Monday, 7 May 2012

Siachen tragedy (Part2)

Siachen tragedy: Is a glacier worth their lives?

The death of so many young men was indeed a tragedy
beyond all measures, but could it have been avoided?

This is not only true for Pakistan, but also for Indians;
there is an equal possibility that the tragedy could have
taken place on the Indian side of the border.

Over 1,300 Pakistani soldiers died in Siachen between
1984 and 1999. Almost all of the casualties on both
sides have been due to extreme weather conditions.

Once again, we are lamenting the death of soldiers; the brave sons of the soil who were tragically killed at the highest battlefield in the world, while we slept comfortable and warm in our cozy beds.

It is indeed a great tragedy to hear that such young men have been crushed under tones of snow – men who could have done so much for their country and for their families. What a painful way to die, and what an unjust way to reward all that they have done for us.

They, of all people did not deserve this. Yes, the casualties may be 135 (124 soldiers and 11 civilians) but the loss is so much greater than this number as each amongst them was undoubtedly a son, a father, a husband, or even a lover.



However, as a country we have become more or less indifferent to such tragedies. When a bomb explodes, all we ask for is the death toll; we feel a bit of remorse, discuss it, and that more or less sums up our debate. Whatever this may be, a gift or curse of humanity – we forget all with time and move on to another day. But today, this time around, I am not going to just forget.

Why were our soldiers there in the first place?

Why do we continue to invest so heavily in protecting a block of snow, with no human inhabitation, except the soldiers who so precariously guard it against foreign intruders?

This is not only true for Pakistan, but also for Indians; there is an equal possibility that the tragedy could have taken place on the Indian side of the border. Both the Indian and Pakistani army units could have been buried in the snow.

Why are we just standing here, dedicating our BBM and Facebook statuses to the soldiers who died? Why aren’t we demanding the reason behind why they were stationed there?

According to careful estimates by defense analysts, Pakistan spends approximately Rs15 million a day to maintain three battalions at the Siachen Glacier. This translates in to Rs450 million a month, and Rs5.4 billion a year. On the other hand, the deployment of seven battalions at the glacier costs India Rs50 million a day, Rs1.5 billion a month, and Rs30 billion a year.

According to an Indian expert:

The economic cost of maintaining an infantry brigade group at Siachen to guard the desolate, super-high altitude, mountain passes and approaches leading to it from the Saltoro Range to its west, has been estimated to range between Rs3 crore to 3.5 crore per day – Rs1,000 to 1,200 crore annually.

All this expenditure is incurred despite the ostentatious amounts of poverty stricken people living in each country – people who don’t even have enough money to afford one meal a day.

According to unofficial figures, over 3,000 Pakistani soldiers have lost their lives on the blood-laced Siachen Glacier between April 1984 and April 2012. Over 5,000 Indian casualties have also been documented. At one point, one Pakistani soldier was killed every fourth day, while one Indian soldier was killed every other day.

Over 1,300 Pakistani soldiers died in Siachen between 1984 and 1999. Almost all of the casualties on both sides have been due to extreme weather conditions.

Many of us will remember the seminal drama “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie” which clearly depicted the hopelessness of those fighting in such a woe-begotten territory. The drama depicted the glory and honor of a soldier standing proud on a mountain peak, holding the country’s flag staff, standing on the heaps of his fallen enemies. What it also depicted was the gory triviality of it all, when the same hero had to have his limbs cut-off due to constant exposure to inhumane conditions.

The question that one should really ask is, is Siachen really worth all this fuss? Why do our soldiers continue to stand eye-to-eye defending hopeless territory? Many of them will actually never return to see their sons, wives, daughters or beloved. And the others who will be fortunate enough to return may be handicapped or suffer permanent mental damage.


The death of so many young men was indeed a calamity beyond all measures, but could it have been avoided?

This tragedy also gives us a chance for introspection and to question the real need for Siachen. Maybe the time has now come for the two leaderships to de-militarize Siachen, and take it back to the pre-1984 times when both armies refrained from coming to the area. By doing so, the Indian and Pakistani Army may lose out on some strategic gains, but the question to be asked is whether all this strategy is more important than human lives.

Sunday, 6 May 2012

Siachen Tragedy

Siachen tragedy - day 5 : Bad weather dogs avalanche search efforts


Search for people buried under avalanche will last at least
another 24 hours, senior meteorological official says.



ISLAMABAD: Harsh weather conditions hampering the search for 138 people buried under a huge avalanche at Pakistan Army camp will last at least another 24 hours, a senior meteorological official said Wednesday.

A huge wall of snow crashed into the remote Siachen Glacier base high in the mountains in disputed Kashmir early on Saturday morning, smothering an area of one square kilometer (a third of a square mile).

As more than 450 rescuers worked in sub-zero temperatures, experts said there was little chance of finding any survivors at the site, which is at an altitude of around 4,000 meters (13,000 feet).

The site of the Gayari camp has been hit by heavy snow in recent days and Arif Mahmood, the head of the Pakistan Meteorological Department said the bad weather was likely to last another day.

“The harsh weather conditions in Gayari will begin to improve from midday Thursday,” Mahmood told AFP in Islamabad.

“However, it will remain overcast today with thunderstorms and snowfall in Gayari and its surrounding areas.”

Rescuers have been using mechanical diggers and shovels to dig through the vast expanse of snow, rock and ice dumped by the avalanche, but efforts to fly in more heavy equipment have been hindered by the weather.

Mahmood said flight operations to Gilgit and Skardu – the two nearest towns – should be able to resume late on Thursday or early on Friday.

Another weather official, who was supervising weather forecasts for the area, told AFP that the temperature at Gayari would be around minus eight to 10 degrees Celsius.

Photographs released by the military Tuesday showed diggers and rescuers at work on an almost featureless expanse of dirty grey snow and ice, with no trace visible of the camp that had been the 6th Northern Light Infantry headquarters.

The site is surrounded by some of the world’s highest peaks and lies near the de facto border with India in the militarized region of Kashmir, which has caused two of the three wars between the two countries since independence in 1947.

The nuclear-armed rivals fought over Siachen in 1987, but guns on the glacier have largely fallen silent since a slow-moving peace process was launched in 2004.

Siachen standoff taking heavy environmental toll:

Pakistan and India’s military standoff in the frozen high mountains of Kashmir is not only costing soldiers’ lives, experts say – it is also wreaking havoc on the environment.

Environmental experts say the heavy military presence is speeding up the melting of the glacier, one of the world’s largest outside the Polar Regions, and leaching poisonous materials into the Indus river system.

Faisal Nadeem Gorchani of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad said the glacier had shrunk by 10 kilometers (six miles) in the last 35 years.

“More than half of the glacier reduction comes from the military presence,” he said.

Hydrologist and Siachen specialist Arshad Abbasi gave an even more alarming assessment of the glacier’s decline, and said that non-militarized areas had not suffered so badly.

“More than 30 percent of the glacier has melted since 1984, while most of the Karakoram glaciers on the Pakistani side expanded,” he said.

Troop movements, training exercises and building infrastructure all accelerate melting, Gorchani said.

Waste from the military camps is also a major problem, harming the local environment and threatening to pollute the water systems that millions of people across the subcontinent depend upon.

“Indian army officials have described the Siachen as ‘the world’s biggest and highest garbage dump’,” US expert Neal Kemkar said in an article for the Stanford Environmental Law Journal.

The report quoted estimates from the International Union for Conservation of Nature saying that on the Indian side alone, more than 900 kilos (2,000 pounds) of human waste was dropped into crevasses every day.

Kemkar said that 40 percent of the military waste was plastics and metal, and as there are no natural biodegrading agents present, “metals and plastics simply merge with the glacier as permanent pollutants, leaching toxins like cobalt, cadmium, and chromium into the ice.”

“This waste eventually reaches the Indus River, affecting drinking and irrigation water that millions of people downstream from the Siachen, both Indian and Pakistani, depend upon,” the report said.

Kemkar also warned the conflict had affected wildlife, with the habitat of animals such as the endangered snow leopard, the brown bear and the ibex — a type of wild goat — all threatened.