The bleak side of Europe…Abbas Nasir
BY the time parliament is dissolved and a caretaker government is installed in Islamabad, one would hope to be at the workstation in full working mode as, like most good things, a holiday must also come to an end, and ours is in its final days.
We have had a magical time in Florence, despite very high temperatures. It is a treasure trove of art and architecture with no parallel. Leaving Florence is always a bit of a wrench. Last weeks column got some very nice, warm feedback. It was reassuring.
With the state of the economy in Pakistan and runaway inflation having eroded incomes to a crippling level, it is always a tough call to write about a good holiday one is fortunate enough to have had somewhere. Someone could find such a column insensitive or offensive given their own travails.
You can google Florence and find every detail of what is to be found in one of the most significant centres of the Renaissance in Europe. Let me also share some facts that may not easily be found in written literature on the Tuscan capital.
Tragedies abound as overcrowded boats sink with a chilling regulatory.
Almost all food delivery services, such as Uber Eats and Glovo, use, almost exclusively, young immigrants in this case, mostly Pakistanis and a sprinkling of Bangladeshis. In the high heat, they pedal with vigour to deliver warm food to customers who have ordered online from restaurants and cafes they service.
Although the excellent Tuscan cuisine predominantly met our culinary needs, I was surprised to find a large number of Indian restaurants. I suppose Googles algorithms found me, because I am always curious about what kind of desi food is available in different parts of the world.
One restaurant even had Lucknow Galawati kababs on the menu. Now, how many places apart from Lucknow are you likely to find those on the menu? It turns out the restaurant is owed by Rashid Ali Khan, a Lukhnawi settled in Florence.
His young manager, Mohammed Bilal, who is a graduate from Kanpur, says that there is no tension between Indians and Pakistanis in Florence because there is no politics. We have four restaurants, and all our staff save one, including cooks, are Pakistani.
Almost without exception, the Pakistanis here have come from Gujrat or, literally, within a few miles of Gujrat. This Gujrat-centric immigration is said to owe itself to the kindness of the Chaudhry family, whose senior member, Shujaat Husain, was interior minister in the Sharif governments of the 1990s, with full control of the FIA immigration department, and facilitated it.
What was a trickle 30 years ago, developed into a flood over the years. No denying that many of these young Pakistanis from that area brave serious threats to life and limb to undertake the often hazardous journey to Europe, as the recent tragedy of the capsized boat off the Greek coast underlined. But they take that risk to seek a better, different lifestyle denied to them at home.
What appears inexplicable to me is that by no stretch do the areas they mostly come from constitute the poorest or most deprived in Pakistan. I guess stories of life in Europe by friends, family and acquaintances who have made it create a magnetic pull.
The story repeats itself in Milan, which we drove into via Pisa (home to the Leaning Tower). Most food delivery is done by Pakistanis. So much so, that a young Pakistani couple who are completing their Masters degree at the University of Milan told me that some of their more educated (read: affluent) acquaintances say they have difficulty in recognising them as Pakistanis.
Of course, that remark is not a light-hearted observation but indicative of the politics that is being played out in Italy as we speak, with neo-fascists in government. France is no different, with the conservatives having moved so much to the right that Macron is often indistinguishable from Le Pens politics.
This manifests itself in anger and violence spilling over into the streets every now and then, as those at the receiving end of discriminatory treatment can take it no more. The world has witnessed that rage bubbling over in recent weeks across France.
Spain has had a left-of-centre coalition government for about three and a half years. The government weathered the Covid crisis quite surefootedly. The countrys economy is picking up and so is the number of those in employment. It has the lowest inflation rate in Europe. The coalition has considerable social legislation to its credit.
Yet the one-sided, hostile, right-wing-controlled media has sold the government as the mother of all evil and it may well lose the election today to a conservative-far right combine whose leaders have misrepresented facts most of the time. But, given the medias support, their lies have not been called out in any significant way.
Before the weekend is over, we start our homeward journey with just a few stops en route, including one in France, whose erstwhile president Nicolas Sarkozys obsession with regime change in Libya was bought by Britains prime minister David Cameron. Barack Obama acquiesced.
The resultant mess in Libya, vast swathes of which have been rendered ungovernable ever since Col Muammar Qadhafi was ousted from power and killed, has paved the path for the arrival in Europe of thousands of immigrants using rickety, often leaking boats operated by human traffickers from obscure sites on the Libyan Mediterranean coast. Tragedies abound as overcrowded boats sink with a chilling regulatory.
When the Western economies are doing well, compassion is not in such short supply. But when blundering governments allow greedy bankers to gamble billions on dodgy deals and ventures in the hope of making a quick buck and they lose and the economy plummets, the illegal immigrant is to blamed, to be scapegoated. That is what most of Europe is doing today.
Courtesy Dawn