Waste disposal in Lae
IF the report from Lae yesterday is true – and there seems no reason to doubt it – we can only react in disgust at what appears to be a situation straight out of medieval Europe.
The National carried a story of “dead babies and animals, and waste water from the Angau Memorial Hospital morgue … meandering their way down the storm water drains in Lae to the beach”.
To this appalling collection of waste is added household refuse, oil slicks from Lae’s maritime role and human waste form the many villagers who use the coastal verges as a convenient latrine.
Is there any wonder that Papua New Guinea’s child mortality rate is the worst in the South Pacific?
Should we be surprised at the steady growth in tuberculosis and malaria and a host of other air- and water-borne illnesses?
It is a great irony that even as health authorities struggle to contain endemic diseases that periodically develop into epidemics, the rest of the community continues to pollute the environment whenever and wherever it so chooses.
How is it possible for any material, liquid or solid, to be discharged from Angau into open drains and storm water channels?
Why are dead babies and animals allegedly shoved down the nearest drainage system?
And what has happened to our morals and beliefs?
There can be little point in expending hundreds of thousands of kina in mounting immunisation and health campaigns designed to contain diseases if basic hygiene and health rules are simply being ignored.
The report should lead to a new focus, one which seeks to stop the spread of disease at its source, in tandem with attempts to protect our newborn from infection.
At independence, there was a workable network of monitoring and inspection of factory discharges, hospital and medical waste disposal and the removal of dead animals from urban areas.
In company with those duties came responsibilities carried out by the Health Department and others to ensure that fast food outlets, institutions and kitchens serving the public were regularly inspected.
A negative report from those sources would see the offending outlet or mess closed until necessary repairs were made or higher standards of hygiene in kitchens and food preparation areas were imposed.
Such inspections today are so few and far between as to be meaningless.
Yesterday’s report that took the trouble to seek inputs from a number of authorities must have been an eye-opener for many.
The PNG Waterboard states that rubbish disposed of through the city’s manholes reach their pumping station, are filtered and separated, with the liquid content being pumped out to sea and the solid waste retained, dried and burned.
Not so, claim spokesmen from the Department of Environment and Conservation, who say that the discharged water from the Waterboard facility is not treated to required environment and water quality standards.
One of the spokesmen added: “The facility is not working. If it is, the required standards are not met … you do not need a trained eye to see that the area is highly polluted …”
The department spokesman denied that Environment and Conservation was responsible for the general cleanliness of the affected area.
“We’re responsible for ensuring that users of the environment – mostly companies – comply with their environmental permits and penalise them when there is a breach.”
That’s all very well – and we would be interested to know how many companies have been so penalised in, say, the past five years – but we are puzzled by the suggestion that “users of the environment” are mostly companies.
Judging by the wastes detailed in the news report, it is a major hospital, street cleaners and villagers who are making the gravest input into the problem.
What powers does the Environment and Conservation Department have over their activities and how are they enforced?
It should be obvious to all concerned that this level of pollution affecting our second biggest city cannot be allowed to continue.
Once again, we urge all involved in the situation to sit down and devise proper methods of waste disposal that will ensure a decline in urban contagious diseases and provide a more pleasant environment for residents and visitors alike.
 
India fears Musharraf exit may unleash tension

By Alistair Scrutton
Coincidence or not, as Pakistani ex-president Pervez Musharraf’s influence waned this year, there was a spike in firing across the Indian border, a bomb attack on India’s Kabul embassy and diplomatic spats over Kashmir.
Now he has been forced to resign, India fears that relations between the two nuclear rivals could now get even worse. While many Pakistanis despised Musharraf as a dictator, India enjoyed some of its best diplomatic relations in decades during his rule.
New Delhi’s fear is that a weak civilian government in Islamabad will be unable to exert the same muscle that Musharraf did over Pakistan’s army and the powerful military spy agency, the ISI, which India suspects has a hand in most attacks on its soil.
“How the vacuum is handled by the civilian government, how much control they can exercise on the radical elements remains to be seen,” a senior Indian foreign ministry official, who asked to remain anonymous, told Reuters.
The Indian government reacted cautiously to Musharraf’s resignation. “We have no comments to make on the resignation,” it said in a statement. “This is an internal matter of Pakistan.”
The two countries have fought three wars since independence in 1947 and nearly came to a fourth one in 2002.
But since a peace process began in 2004 under Musharraf, there has been a string of improvements from a cross-border bus service to more trade and some progress over border disputes.
That peace process could now be dumped, with a return to the hostilities that dogged South Asia for decades. Some Indian experts fear more Pakistan-backed militant attacks in Kashmir and the rest of India if Islamabad’s new civilian government fails to assert control over the military.
“After four good years in which India had high hopes for the peace process, in the last four months, the opposite has happened,” C. Raja Mohan, an Indian foreign affairs analyst based in Singapore, said.
“Musharraf was seen by India as decisive and ready to engage, compared with the chaos and division of the last few months.”
This month’s mass protests in Kashmir, for example, sparked some of the sharpest diplomatic spats in years between Islamabad and New Delhi. India accused Pakistan of interfering in its internal affairs after Islamabad talked of UN intervention.
There has been a spate of clashes in the past few months along the line of control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir, after relative calm that followed the start of the peace process.
India’s government said in July the peace process was “under stress”. The statement came soon after a bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul killed at least 58 people. Both India and Afghanistan blame the ISI for that bombing.
“The ISI enjoyed greater autonomy since Musharraf’s wings were clipped,” said Ashok Mehta, a security analyst and former Indian army commander, referring to the coming to power of Pakistan’s new civilian government in March. “Once he is removed from the scene, ISI may have even greater autonomy.”
Pakistan has denied any role in the attacks. Some analysts see a worst case scenario in which Pakistan’s military or ISI persuade militant groups on its Afghan border to switch attacks away from that frontier and towards India.
That strategy, Indian analysts say, could ease US pressure over the Afghan border, as well as make Indian troops, and not the Pakistani army, the victims of militants.
Earlier this month Indian national security adviser M. K. Narayanan gave the government’s clearest expression yet of its worries about Musharraf leaving.
“Whether he is impeached or not is not important from the Indian point of view,” Narayanan said. “But it leaves a big vacuum and we are deeply concerned about this vacuum because it leaves the radical extremist outfits with freedom to do what they like, not merely on Pak(istan)-Afghan border but clearly our side of the border too.”
But it is early days in Pakistan, and few are willing to predict the outcome of the civilian government.
“We’ll have to wait to see how the dust settles,” Mohan said. – Reuters

Editorial