Pakistan factory fires kill 310

By Hasan Mansoor
KARACHI: More than 310 Pakistanis perished in horrific fires that destroyed two factories in Pakistan, an unprecedented industrial tragedy that prompted calls Wednesday for an overhaul of poor safety standards.
   At least 289 people died at a garment factory in Karachi, Pakistan's biggest city and the capital of Sindh province, just hours after 21 died at a shoe factory in Lahore, close to the Indian border.
   In scenes of horror, relatives watched as loved ones jumped from windows of the four-storey building in Karachi where hundreds were working in a bid to escape the blaze, which began late Tuesday.
   Karachi fire chief Ehtesham Salim said rescue workers were facing problems retrieving more bodies from the basement as it was filled with hot water after efforts to extinguish fire.
   "There are places in the basement which are still smouldering. Water we used to extinguish the fire has made a pool of hot water in the large area of basement and we are trying to cool it down."
   "There is no electricity in the factory. Our operation has slowed down but we have not suspended our effort."
   Karachi's top administration official, Karachi Roshan Shaikh, told AFP that more victims were being recovered and that he expected the toll to rise.
   The toll rose rapidly during the day as firefighters extinguished smouldering embers and found dozens of dead huddled together in the basement and ground floor of the factory, where they suspect that the fire began.
   "We didn't find bodies in ones or twos, but in the dozens, which is why the death toll is increasing so alarmingly," said Salim.
   Many of those on the upper floors of the building were rescued or jumped to escape the inferno, although dozens broke limbs on impact with the street.
   Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said he had ordered an inquiry into both fires. Officials said the factory in Karachi in particular was in poor condition and lacked emergency exits.
   "The building has developed cracks and there is a danger it can collapse any time," Shaikh told Pakistan's private Geo TV channel. "Owners of the factory have been absconding and raids are being conducted for their arrest," he said.
   Officials said two brothers who owned the company had been barred from leaving the country. "Their names have been put on exit control list," a senior government official told AFP.
   Irfan Moton, chairman of the Sindh Industrial Trading Estate, told AFP he believed there were 600 to 700 people in the factory when the fire broke out. "We believe many people have come out, but still there are fears the final toll could be higher," he said.
   In January 2009, 40 people were killed, more than half of them children, when a fire engulfed dozens of wooden homes in Karachi's impoverished Baldia neighbourhood, but Tuesday's tragedy was considered the deadliest in Pakistani industry.
   "It was terrible, suddenly the entire floor filled with fire and smoke and the heat was so intense that we rushed towards the windows, broke its steel grille and glass and jumped out," said Mohammad Saleem, 32, who broke a leg after jumping out of the second floor.
   "I saw many people jumping out of windows and crying in pain for help," he said.
   According to workers, the factory produced underwear and plastic utensils.
   The garment trade is vital to Pakistan's shaky economy.
   According to central bank data, the textiles industry contributed 7.4 percent to Pakistan's GDP in 2011 and employed 38 percent of the manufacturing sector workforce. It accounted for 55.6 percent of total exports.
   Noman Ahmed, from the NED University of Engineering and Technology in Karachi, said few industries and businesses implement the law on safety and fire exits, finding it easy to avoid because of lack of effective monitoring.
   "Most of our shopping centres and markets too have no safety mechanism, which the authorities should review seriously, otherwise it could cause graver tragedies in future," he said.
   Officials said the cause of the fire was unknown but Sindh industry minister Rauf Siddiqi said the owner could face negligence charges.
   "We have ordered an inquiry into how the fire erupted and why proper emergency exits were not provided at the factory so that the workers could escape," Siddiqi said.
   In Lahore, flames also trapped dozens of workers in a shoe-making factory, killing 21 and injuring 14 others, where Tariq Zaman, a government official, blamed a faulty generator.
   The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan expressed "grave concern" over the fires and demanded immediate attention to ensuring safe working conditions for factory workers.
   It called on the government to initiate criminal proceedings against the factory owners and also initiate effective monitoring of workplaces to prevent such tragic incidents in the future.
AFP September 12, 2012

Pakistan blighted by Afghan drugs in transit

by Hasan Mansoor

Cheap Pakistani heroin is the curse of Rubina Naz’s life. Her marriage to a violent and abusive addict, during which she had to work to feed their four children, ended when he died of AIDS — but not before he infected her with the HIV virus.
“Such a huge punishment without doing anything wrong crushed me,” said 28-year-old Naz as she sat in a Karachi hospital.
She was 16 years old when her labourer father married her off to Ghulam Punjtan, then an apparently respectable driver for the Pakistani government.
“A few months after the marriage I discovered Ghulam was a heroin user. I tried to help him kick the habit but all I got were beatings and abuse,” she said.
Pakistan has more than four million drug addicts in its population of 170 million, according to figures compiled by the country’s Anti-Narcotics Force, which is responsible for investigating and prosecuting drug offences.
Opium poppy is grown on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a region infamous as a hideout for Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremists and branded the most dangerous place in the world for Americans by US President Barack Obama.
Pakistan shares a 2,500-kilometre (1,560-mile) porous border with Afghanistan, which supplies 90 percent of the opium used to make heroin worldwide.
As such, the largely lawless region is the key transit point for heroin, morphine and hashish heading west to Iran, Turkey, the Balkans and Europe, and east to China.
As it passes through what has become the central theatre of the “war on terror,” cheap supplies are left behind for the locals, with one gram costing as little as 80 rupees (one dollar) in Karachi, the southern port on the Arabian Sea and Pakistan’s commercial hub.
Here anyone can afford a hit. And many, like Rubina Naz’s husband, do.
Her life lurched from bad to worse as her husband’s addiction spun out of control. When he lost his job, she took factory work to ensure the family had an income.
“My husband fell seriously ill three years ago. His father took him to a hospital where tests confirmed him HIV positive,” she said.
But her in-laws didn’t tell Rubina about the disease, and she continued to have sex with her husband. Weeks after he died, she fell ill and was diagnosed HIV positive.
Pakistan’s chronically underfunded and crumbling health system offers little help for drug users to conquer addiction — let alone deal with its devastating consequences.
Because of the enormous quantities of drugs that pass through the country, abuse and addiction are on the rise, without the health services and anti-drugs squads needed to adequately combat the scourge.
Pakistan’s understaffed and under-equipped Anti-Narcotics Force has around 2,000 personnel policing the snaking mountainous border with Afghanistan and the 900 kilometres (563 miles) it shares with Iran, the main smuggling routes.
Border control duties are shared with paramilitary troops already struggling with a deadly counter-insurgency campaign in the tribal belt.
“Even though the challenges facing a transit country like Pakistan are increasing with every passing day, the resources available to counter the threat of narcotics continue to remain meager,” the Force said in a report.
The majority of drug users in Pakistan smoke hashish, experts say. Heroin, alcohol, tranquillisers and pain killers are the other most common drugs.
A joint study released last year by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the Paris Pact Initiative, an international partnership to counter trafficking and consumption of Afghan opiates, found that trafficking of Afghan opiates through Pakistan towards lucrative markets abroad is on the rise.
Seizures are also on the rise, it said — but both figures just reflect an increase in the cultivate of poppy in Afghanistan.
“Trafficking of opiates into and through Pakistan increased dramatically during the period 2001-2006 corresponding roughly to the increase in opium production in Afghanistan from 185 metric tons in 2001 to 6,100 metric tons in 2006,” the report said.
In 2005, Pakistan seized 24 tonnes of heroin and morphine, accounting for 27 percent of total seizures worldwide, it said, adding that in 2006, that figure leapt to a record 35 tonnes.
UN experts have said that the easy availability of narcotics is compounded by general ignorance among Pakistanis about the consequences of taking them.
A report earlier this decade found that more than 80 percent of Pakistanis did not believe narcotics to be harmful, and that many addicts were introduced to drugs by friends and relatives.
One of those who learnt the hard way was 25-year-old Shabana.
Introduced to heroin by classmates, she thought it was fantastic, she said.
It quickly took over her life as she graduated from smoking to sniffing and, finally, injecting. She lost weight, dropped out of college, and her family abandoned her.
“I began to take drugs with my friends for fun, but as time passed it became a matter of life and death,” she said, refusing to give her full name.
A photograph of her a few years ago shows a tall girl with fair skin and striking features — barely recognisable as the girl now lying on a bed in a Karachi rehabilitation centre.
“I started smoking heroin-filled cigarettes and found myself in heaven,” she said.
Only an older brother saved her from the hell that addiction can leads to.
“My brother brought me here for rehabilitation. For me he is more than my father. I will not take drugs again, I will not let him down,” she said.

Filed October 2011

Domestically cruel!

By Hasan Mansoor  
To support her bedridden father and younger brother, Bano, a young girl from a lower- middle class family, worked at a bungalow as a housemaid.    One day when she was busy in her work the house owner asked her to clean his room. The employer’s wife and other servants were out of the house. She considers that day the most horrifying in her life.    “When I entered the room, he asked me to compromise on my modesty and when I refused he tried to assault me,” she says.    Bano thinks herself  lucky to have narrowly escaped the worst. She did not turn up again for work there. This is not a solitary incident. There are more. In fact, a lot more.    It was for the sake of a mere Rs1,000 per month that 10-year-old Sonia silently endured beatings at the hands of her employers for over two years.    She did not cry whenever her employer gave her a beating, as that would provoke her into hitting her more,” according to the girl.    In a past incident, Saleem was a servant at a house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. One day while serving tea to his master he broke cutlery by mistake.    “He beat me with a stick so severely that I was unable to return home,” says Saleem, who lives in a one-roomed flat along with his parents in Machchar Colony.    A neighbour saw him bleeding outside the apartment and had him shifted to a government hospital. “When my parents went my employer’s home, he pushed them out of his house and warned them not to report the incident to police,” Saleem says.    Both these incidents went unreported. Bano now works at a local vocational centre and Saleem is a “Chhota” (apprentice) at an automobile workshop in Saddar.    Another previous incident reported young housemaid, Asiya, was brought to Civil Hospital Karachi with fatal burns. She had allegedly been molested by son of her employers and was later set on fire.    These incidents are only tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of cases in which domestic workers were subjected to torment. This menace has now become a norm in our society. Thousands of women and children work as domestic employees and are victims of violence at workplaces.    Ironically, despite the fact that the domestic servants work more than other labourers and employees, the local labour laws are too weak to protect them.    “And there is no policy to safeguard the rights of these workers,” says a lawyer. He says due to lack of a proper regulatory system to protect the rights of domestic workers the incidents of violence against them are on the rise. “The government has made no protective legislation for domestic workers and thus the employers have been given a free hand to unleash a rein of terror against the hapless people,” says the lawyer. Hundreds of thousands of young maids in the country are suffering the worst kind of atrocities, including sexual assaults by their employers, but they do not muster enough courage to speak out, due to fear of social stigma, as well as the influence and clout of their employers. For safety of these vulnerable individuals, a law needs to be promulgated. “The current labour laws fail to define domestic workers,” says the lawyer.