Simon Hardy
The flooding in Pakistan is still worsening. And already there is a huge humanitarian disaster for the nearly 20 million people displaced by the disaster.
Now there are the first reports of people dying of cholera and various other diseases such as gastroenteritis, while mass starvation too is threatened. There is an appalling lack of food, drinking water, tents, clothing and other essential items.
The immediate threat is rampant disease. But the possibility of a food crisis for the entire country is potentially just as fatal. Around 1.7 million acres of farmland have been flooded with nearly all crops destroyed. The Punjab region is Pakistan’s most arable and much of the country is dependent on its annual crop. With so much of it destroyed a food crisis is imminent. Pakistan will soon be even more reliant on foreign aid and food shipments.
The river Indus, which runs the length of Pakistan has burst its banks in the Sindh region as the water flows south towards the sea – bringing more misery to previously unaffected parts of the country. The Indus is now 25 times its normal size during the monsoon season. In some areas 80 percent of livestock have drowned, ruining the livelihoods of many peasant farmers.
The forecast is for more rain in the coming days – in fact rainwaters are only now expected to reach their peak, it will be some time yet before the flood waters recede.
The rainwater will take weeks to drain from the land, before the task of rebuilding can even begin.
Scandalous government inaction
There is a growing sense of anger among ordinary people against the government. President Zardari – who’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has a strong base amongst the peasants most affected by the crisis – is now hugely unpopular.
Shamefully he prioritised flying to London to meet with David Cameron (in order to heal a rift between the Pakistani and British government over allegations of links to terrorism) rather than working to deal with the crisis at home.
It has taken nearly two weeks for him to even schedule a visit to the affected areas. He eventually did so, only with state-controlled television following him, in a closely orchestrated visit to relatively well catered for refugee camps. Had he visited others, he would have seen the anger and indignation of the millions of starving and desperate displaced people.
But it is not only the government inaction that is the problem. Scandalous too is how they have prioritised the actions they have taken. Ministers from the affected areas – the semi-feudal landowners that dominate the upper echelons of the PPP – have put saving their own lands from the flooding first, as well as securing infrastructure projects in which they have a financial interest, over and above the saving of lives.
It is causing chaos in the relief effort as different politicians vie to get the resources diverted to their regions.
As this elite fight to defend their wealth, no one is suffering more than the Pakistan’s poor.
The poorest villagers have nowhere else to go, and no choice but to load their few possessions into a cart and try to get away to the high ground.
Meanwhile the big landlords and rural petit bourgeoisie were able to drive to the big cities, book into Pakistan’s many nice hotels, and wait for the waters to subside.
Indeed like all similar catastrophes of our recent times – from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the Tsunami in South Asia, the earthquake in Haiti – these ‘natural’ disasters expose in the most brutal way the appalling social divisions in the world, as the wealthy survive and the poor go to the wall.
Some capitalists have also realised that natural – like economic and social, crisis under capitalism – can be an opportunity to get rich too.
The potential shortage of food due to the wiping out of much of the Punjab crop, has led to food prices increasing astronomically, as speculators and big land owners exploit the crisis to cash in and drive up prices.
The rural poor that have have escaped the countryside alive are now at the mercy of these profiteers.
At the same time, as of 13 August, the amount of aid coming into Pakistan from abroad is very little.
China has contributed only $1.5 million, Kuwait around $5 million, with Sri Lanka, Turkey and UAE each contributing tens of thousands of dollars each.
The US has promised $76 million so far – but the State Department’s Deputy Special Representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan Dan Feldman admitted recently that the aid was being promised at a slower rate than after the 2005 earthquake – blaming it on the poor economic situation and “donor fatigue” after Haiti.
The problems of US aid
The US government initially pledged over $100 million to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake – but militarised the aid effort to the extent that Haiti became a country under US occupation with the US Marine Corps acting almost as the de facto government.
After a few weeks the aid ballooned to $379 million, but when the break down of who was getting what was released, it was discovered that only 1 per cent was going directly to the Haitian government. Meanwhile, 33 cents in every dollar was going to the US military for “security”.
The US is now spending between $800 billion and $1 trillion on its military budget as of 2010 (Obama has actually increased the military budget since coming into office).
A lot of the aid money it provides will go to the use of its helicopters or other military equipment and personnel that are flown from Afghanistan to Pakistan to help.
Accounting for such expenditure as ‘aid’ has obviously become a convenient way to disguise the vast scale of US military expenditure in the 21st century.
Currently the USS Peleliu battleship is off the coast near Karachi, with 19 helicopters and 1000 marines to assist with the aid effort. However, even after a week of serious flooding the US has only airlifted 4,000 people out of the flood area.
Compare this inaction with the speed with which the US supplies helicopters and personnel to its various war zones around the world. Indeed if the US had any interest in occupying Pakistan, it would no doubt have responded as quickly to the disaster as it did in Haiti.
The tragedy of Pakistan
Even when we look beyond the current situation, Pakistan is a tragic country – continually beset by war, economic and social crisis and authoritarianism.
Born out of the British partition of India which resulted in the hundreds of thousands of people dying and ethnic cleansing on a collosal scale in 1947 – Pakistan is now a country being torn apart by a civil war undertaken at the behest of the US.
Dominated and subordinated to the imperialist countries, particularly the US and Britain, with a corrupt and subservient political class fostered by these powers, prone to periods of military dictatorship, and with some of most barbaric levels of economic inequality in the world, life for many ordinary Pakistanis is very hard at the best of times.
From its large sprawling cities, suffering from endemic under employment to the under-developed countryside still living with ancient forms of patriarchal and reactionary village rule,
Pakistan is a deeply divided state.
The military, capitalists and landlords live privileged lifestyles, often abroad in Europe or Saudi Arabia in plush mansions for much of the year – whilst the peasants and workers, labour under conditions of serious poverty.
Pakistan is an underdeveloped capitalist country trapped in a capitalist system already dominated by imperialist powers.
The world market sucks the life out of it and creates economic instability and chaos. Already the world recession has affected Pakistan badly, causing a surge in unemployment and forcing the government to go to the IMF and World Bank for a loan.
Hope and possibility lies in the actions of the working class
In these barbaric conditions, hope lies in the Pakistani working class which in the run up to this natural disaster has undergone a profound resurgence.
A strike wave has gripped the country with workers in huge industrial enterprises, taking action over pay after years of high inflation had hit real-wage levels.
Now the working class, youth and socialist activists are building their own workers’ aid efforts in the cities, collecting money and emergency supplies, and organising their distribution into the affected areas.
A number of appeals for international solidarity have been circulated. And the whole international labour movement and left must respond generously to these efforts.
But as well as distributing aid, they must capitalise on the anger amongst the peasants, workers and popular classes with the government, and build new protest movements.
They also must be alert to the reactionary whispering campaign carried out by forces in military against the Zardari regime, with the implication some kind of ‘national government’ is needed with a more prominent role for the military, et al. This is utter hypocrisy when the military – despite the formal restoration of democracy – still wield huge political power behind the scenes.
Most of all, the working class needs to organise a revolutionary political alternative to all the corrupt and pro-imperialist capitalist parties. Natural catastrophes are only ‘natural’ up to a point – who they impact, and how seriously, is determined by the terrible inequalities of the capitalist system. That’s why Pakistan urgently needs the socialist alternative.