What explains the tight-fisted Pakistan floods response
The steady drip of negative 'terror'-obsessed media coverage has done Pakistanis a great disservice
Catriona Luke
guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 August
Compare and contrast: within days of the 2004 tsunami, £100m had poured into Oxfam, the Red Cross and other charities, and by February 2005 when the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) closed its appeal, the total stood at £300m. The Haiti earthquake appeal closed with donations of £101m. The DEC total for the Pakistan floods appeal has just reached £10m. .
The reasons for this disparity aren't complex. There has been a slow steady drip of negative media coverage of Pakistan since the 1980s, and if it lessened a little in the 90s as civilian governments went in and out of administration, it became inevitably tougher with the return of a military government, 9/11, the "growth" of Islamic extremist organisations in Pakistan, and the ins and outs of apparent ISI-sponsored terrorism in both Mumbai and Afghanistan. At home, Pakistan's image has been affected by debates about burqas, the bombings in London in 2005 and the country's perennial linguistic association with "terror".
British readers and viewers know little of Pakistan and with the exception of writers such as the Guardian's Declan Walsh and Saeed Shah, as well as Aleem Maqbool, who has given sensitive coverage for the BBC in Islamabad, and exemplary analysis and comment on the BBC World Service by Owen Bennett-Jones and Lyse Doucet reporting of the country is poor and superficial.
BBC News online is not exempt from criticism. In its old format, the BBC online South Asia site had always run features and good news stories about India, but Pakistan coverage was pretty much limited to bombings, violence and hardship. This is despite the fact that "India Shining" has a huge population of citizens living in poverty see Chris Morris's shocking report in May for the BBC and that hunger and neglect by government is the daily lot of 35% of the population or 450 million people.
India also has its own homegrown insurgency. The Naxalite/Maoist "terrorists" in the north-east are a dangerous challenge to Indian stability, but this extremism and its causes, which lie in poverty escapes international censure. In July the UN index showed that there are more people in poverty in eight states of India than in the 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. There are finally suggestions in the press that the responsibility for lack of resolution of conflict in Kashmir over 60 years at present lies more firmly with India.
Back in the UK, the communities of Pakistan descent, a large proportion of Mirpuri origin, have behaved in an exemplary fashion over the last decade. When David Miliband commented in the Guardian, at the time of the incoming Obama administration, that the "war on terror" had been a mistake, I wrote to him to say that as he well knew, the "war on terror" had been a gross and disingenuous overstatement and that British citizens were tens of thousands of times more likely to die from car accidents, alcohol, obesity and heart disease than from terror attacks.
Young Britons of Pakistani origin tend to grow up in in settled and productive communities. Many achieve high marks in school and a proportion go on to university. Family life is generally taken very seriously and the success of efforts within communities to help young people through difficult pressures of the culture and politics of faith both external and internal to their communities are frankly miraculous.
For this they have to put up with an unending diet of "terror", "extremist" and anti-burqa rants from the press, while seeing their grandparents' and parents' home country torn often apart in foreign policy analysis. The most unnecessary headline the Evening Standard has run (quite a competitive field) was "What Londoners think of Muslims" (14 November 2007). It was beyond reason and beyond taste and had it been phrased differently what Londoners think of Jews, or perhaps even what they think of Catholics, it would have been referred straight to the Press Complaints Commission.
In April I went to hear Ali Sethi, Kamila Shamsie and Moni Mohsin, writers well known in Pakistan, speak at the National Portrait Gallery. If they were dismayed at the coverage and levels of ignorance about their country, such dismay was expressed with humour and warmth. Moni Mohsin, particularly, told how on a recent visit to Lahore in February, while at the hairdressers and with some bombing recently in the city, her two stylists were chattering away above her head about the real worry, that it was Valentine's Day and you could not find little gold hearts anywhere but anywhere, as they had sold out in all the shops and bazaars.
Pakistanis are subcontinental people, and are in many ways similar to their neighbours in India. They share cultural ties, history and a personal view here a great warmth of character that is unique to this part of the world. We are spectators to the difficulties that the subcontinent and particularly Pakistan is going through, but we could perhaps wonder at the wretched and unfounded image of Pakistan when viewed through the lens of the British media. And perhaps not be so surprised that having swallowed this over many years, the public find it hard to overcome their misgivings and to give.