WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 (UPI) -- Like the horrendous tsunami catastrophe in South Asia last December
www.thebootsstockists.com, Saturday's massive earthquake in the Hindu Kush region of northern Pakistan, has led to a rallying of human solidarity and compassion at its very best. But after the dead are buried and the period of immediate grieving is passed, the fallout from the tragedy may weaken the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharref with unpredictable implications for the war on terror.
For the catastrophe that killed at least 19,000 people and injured 43,000 more
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www.danmark-uggboots.com, registering 7.6 on the Richter scale, killed with its immediate effects and there could be no warning. Still, it may create the sense of an ill-starred fate hanging over Musharref who has already incurred the hatred of Islamist extremists and survived at least two major assassination attempts because of his support for the United States in the international war on terror.
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, all thoughts of human conflict have been swamped by the colossal horrors inflicted by an uncaring Nature. But it would not take much to revive suspicions that aid was being given to other, more favored regions first or that the government was simply uncaring and incompetent in dealing with the huge scale of the catastrophe to stir up new resentments. The same issue of the New York Times that reported the aftermath of the quake and the growing international relief efforts for it Monday also advertised a story about Islamic extremism spreading in nearby Central Asia.
There is plenty of precedent in South Asia for natural catastrophes being the harbinger of wars and revolutions. The great Bengal famine of 1943 cost the lives of 2 million to 4 million people. Historians agree the main cause of the huge death toll was a combination of complacency, incompetence and lack of compassion by British wartime officials who were criminally negligent in waking up to the scale of the disaster. But the immediate political result was to destroy Hindu-Muslim community relations in Bengal with many people in each community convinced the other one was hoarding food and deliberately increasing their suffering.
Within four years, Bengal was torn apart by ferocious Hindu-Muslim clashes at independence in 1947 that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The province remains divided between India and the independent Muslim nation of Bangladesh to this day.
Natural disaster triggered war and revolution again in the same area only a quarter of a century later. The inhabitants of the region
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There is more recent precedent too for a terrible natural disaster catalyzing long festering resentment at an entrenched and incompetent government that was soon after swept out of office.
The great swathe of urban squalor and misery that sweeps crescent-like north of Istanbul and then eastward for 80 miles across the southern shore of the Black Sea is home to 10 million people. This usually forgotten region of Turkey briefly hit the international headlines in 1999 when the terrible Izmit earthquake killed 23
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The death toll was so horrendous because, as we noted in UPI Analysis at the time, developers had run up hundreds of shoddily built apartment blocks in defiance of building codes.
On Aug. 20, 1999, we warned in these columns
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And sure enough, the anger and despair fostered by this event funneled a new wave of support to the Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP
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There was, it must be said, a positive aspect to the aftermath of the 1999 Turkish tragedy. The efforts of neighboring Greece to help with the rescue and relief efforts led to an unexpected and most welcome thawing in the historic hatred and distrust between the two neighboring nations.
Similarly, U.S. security officials have noted far more enthusiastic support from within Indonesia's regular police and security services following the massive and effective U.S. role in leading rescue and relief operations in Aceh and other parts of Sumatra following the tsunami catastrophe there last December.
Nevertheless, Musharref in Pakistan will soon be made aware of how closely the survivors and relatives of the dead will be scrutinizing the record of their actions both before and after the unprecedented events of Saturday. However long he stays in power and whatever achievements he completes or attempts, from now on everything he does will be under the shadow of that judgment.
