THE policy maintained by Islamabad vis-à-vis Balochistan can be likened to the Iron Curtain.

There is very little prospect of the centre’s powerful security apparatus permitting international humanitarian organisations such as the UN Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs to conduct a standard survey and assistance exercise to assess the havoc wreaked by Cyclone Phet in the coastal areas of the province.

This is not the first time that the Baloch people have been left to the mercy of a natural disaster. In July 2007, the then prime minister Shaukat Aziz announced that “Pakistan will not take foreign aid from any country to overcome the losses and devastation caused by Cyclone Yemyin in Balochistan”.

The Musharraf regime ignored the situation that year and hampered access to national and foreign donors. Meanwhile, the operation at Lal Masjid distracted the local and foreign media from the appalling humanitarian crisis in Balochistan. Flash floods damaged infrastructure to the tune of Rs1tr, affected more than 6,500 villages and destroyed 80,000 houses.

The recent widespread torrential rains, accompanied by the cyclonic winds of Phet, lashed the Makran coast and parts of central Makran on June 4. Many are dead or injured, and hundreds of fishing boats have been reported missing from the Gwadar, Pasni, Jiwani and Peshkan areas.

The rain submerged all the roads and development projects in Gwadar district. The coastal highway, which was constructed by the Frontier Works Organisation, was badly damaged at several points and a bridge linking Gwadar with Jiwani was washed away. Thousands were rendered homeless as hundreds of mud houses belonging to the impoverished Baloch collapsed due to heavy rains.

According to the initial survey and information collected by the Balochistan Institute for Development, hundreds of villages have been badly affected in Gwadar, Lasbela and Kech districts. Gwadar’s Mullah Band locality, near the deep sea port, has been badly hit and around 5,000 people moved without any governmental support to nearby localities.

More than 4,000 people were affected as a result of flooding from the Aakrra Kaur Dam near Gwadar. In Lasbela district five people died in rain-related incidents in the Damb, Sonmiani and Gaddani areas. According to local experts the situation in certain areas is critical and affected communities are vulnerable to malaria and dengue fever epidemics.

Despite warnings issued by the United Nations and the meteorological office, the government has more or less failed to establish makeshift camps in coastal towns and evacuate people from vulnerable areas. This has resulted in heavy losses of property of communities that were already underprivileged.

An alert issued by UN offices in Pakistan on June 2 said that the flash floods could cause a repeat of the 2007 floods in Sindh and Balochistan following Cyclone Yemyin. Those floods affected 1.5 million people, 250,000 of whom were made homeless and another 300,000 displaced.

Balochistan has not yet recovered from the drought that ravaged the province between 1999 and 2003. It is still reeling from the effects of the ongoing military assault that started in 2005 and that resulted in killings, disappearances and an economic blockade. It still bears the scars of Cyclone Yemyin. This year’s cyclone has only added to existing miseries and will have a continuing and devastating impact on the socio-economic conditions of the province.

In the early phase of the 2007 cyclone, the central government initially dropped a few relief packages. Later, however, it refused all international aid and assistance without providing Balochistan with any reason or justification. The flood-affected people in western Balochistan are still in self-constructed shelters in and around Turbat city, and are exposed to extreme weather conditions.

Prime Minister Gilani recently conceded that mistrust exists between the Baloch people and Islamabad. The former have been disregarded and treated as subjects rather then citizens. The previous government also ignored the resolution passed by the Balochistan Assembly for mobilising resources by organising a large-scale donor conference in Quetta along the pattern of the Earthquake Relief Donors Conference held in Islamabad in 2005.

The province is a high-risk zone for disasters that include drought, earthquakes and tsunamis. The lack of disaster-risk management strategies is causing immense loss in terms of lives, infrastructure and livelihood in the disaster-prone Balochistan region. Suffering as a consequence of floods has been exacerbated by dams and dykes whose designs are flawed. The overflow of water from the Mirani Dam triggered by Cyclone Yemyin caused severe flooding in Turbat in 2007, for example.

No useful information, flood risk mapping or communication tools have been disseminated by any government agency to create awareness among the inhabitants about probable floods and rescue strategies.

Flood-risk mapping is one of the key factors in flood-risk management and should be readily available to the public as well as to emergency response agencies. Mapping defines the areas at risk; maps become the common element in terms of the identification of flood-prone areas, identifying the risk for individuals and lending institutions, the preparation of emergency response plans and designs of flood-protection or flood-proofing measures.

When it comes to stifling dissent, Islamabad uses modern weaponry and technologies; but it does not bother to use supportive technologies to reduce and minimise disaster risks through forecasting droughts and floods in Pakistan’s resource-rich but impoverished province.

Many governments across the world make use of disasters as an opportunity to reach out to marginalised masses and address their grievances. But Islamabad’s confused and biased establishment exploits disaster as an opportunity to further suppress communities under the pretext of national security.

The situation in the western parts of Balochistan is appalling, with hundreds of thousands of people unable to reconstruct their mud houses. They need assistance, attention and opportunities to rebuild their homes and resume their normal economic activities. The central government must take immediate steps to seek UN assistance to plan modern housing and social infrastructure in the region.

The government also needs to expand the House Building Finance Corporation, agriculture and commercial banks’ branches and provide long-term and interest-free loans to communities to rebuild houses and small-scale businesses. All schools, hospitals and healthcare centres must be rebuilt on a priority basis. (Courtesy: Dawn)

The writer is a former senator balochbnp@gmail.com