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PKPolitics Discuss » Current Issues
President Zardari Surprise everyone by Spending X-Mas Day with the flood Victims
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Posted 1 year ago on 25 Dec 2010 15:51 #
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11974818
Venezuela's Chavez to move into Gaddafi tent:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says he is going to govern temporarily from a tent so that families made homeless by recent floods can take refuge in his office.
Mr Chavez said he would have a Bedouin tent given to him by the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi put up in the garden of the presidential palace.
Twenty-five families are already living in the palace after losing their homes.
The floods have made more than 100,000 people homeless across the country.
"Put up Gaddafi's gift," said Mr Chavez during a visit to a refuge for flood victims close to the Miraflores palace in Caracas.
"You can install it in the garden at Miraflores because I'm going to move into the tent. We can put some beds in my office."
Mr Chavez is an admirer of Col Gaddafi, who lives in a huge Bedouin tent in Libya, and brought one with him when he visited Venezuela last year.
The Venezuelan leader has been personally supervising relief efforts in response to the floods.
The worst rains in a decade have caused widespread destruction and killed more than 30 people.
Some of the worst damage has been in poor hillside neighbourhoods of Caracas, where landslides have swept away precarious houses.
Mr Chavez has promised a massive home-building programme, and on Friday appointed culture minister Francisco Sesto to the new role of minister for reconstruction in Caracas.
Neighbouring Colombia and much of Central America have also suffered from one of their worst May-November rainy seasons in decades.
Posted 1 year ago on 25 Dec 2010 15:52 # -
CARACAS, Venezuela — Miraflores Palace, designed in the 1880s by an Italian count for one of Venezuela’s 19th-century dictators, has been home to presidents here for more than a century. In recent years, it has welcomed a lively medley of foreign leaders, including Presidents Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.
But on Wednesday, Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, opened the doors of the neoclassical building to a new set of residents: flood victims.
Appearing on state television at Miraflores clad in an olive drab military uniform, Mr. Chávez welcomed 26 families who had been displaced by torrential rains in recent weeks. The rainfall has caused flooding and landslides that have killed 25 people and forced more than 30,000 Venezuelans to flee, civil defense officials said.
“I have a proposal for you families: stay here for a year,” the president told the refugees who became his housemates on Wednesday. He then led them on a brief tour of a palace wing where beds and cribs had been set up next to a barbershop. “When you leave,” he said, “it will be to an apartment of your own.”
Beyond offering a helping hand, Mr. Chávez was once again displaying his facility at taking hold of the public discussion during a time of crisis, and he blunted criticism over his government’s handling of flood-prevention measures and its response to the rains.
His offer to allow families into Miraflores also plays into the fierce debate over a housing shortage that has forced many Venezuelans to live in hillside shacks that are vulnerable to the rains.
Mr. Chávez has seized housing tracts to alleviate the shortage. Private developers, in turn, have been hesitant to invest in new projects out of fear that they could be taken by the government.
If the rains continue, a great deal more could be at stake. A similar period of rainfall in 1999 led to landslides near Caracas, the capital, killing thousands of people. Ruins of buildings near the Caribbean coast that were destroyed in 1999 serve as testament to the destruction.
The president’s critics, pointing out that thousands of the flood victims will not have the chance to move into the palace, responded to his move with reactions varying from amusement to outrage. “Philanthropy can be virtuous,” the columnist Simón Boccanegra wrote in the newspaper Tal Cual, “but it can also be demagogic, exhibitionist and when taken to its extreme, truly grotesque and tacky.”
Mr. Chávez first raised the possibility of taking in refugees at Miraflores during his regular television broadcast on Sunday, saying that the palace kitchen alone had space for “about 20 families,” and that the chambers where his cabinet convened could be remodeled into about two apartments.
Fuerte Tiuna, a top military garrison, and Telesur, the regional Spanish-language television network supported by Venezuela, have also opened their grounds to flood victims. Officials have closed schools, opened more than 250 shelters and deployed 10,000 troops to provide aid.
Posted 1 year ago on 25 Dec 2010 16:00 # -
Thanks Khan_Sahib, that was timely and excellent. See Zardari in a tent, even a bullet-proof one?
And see Pakistan recognising the Palestinian State as Ecuador, along with several other SouthAm States, has just done and Venezuela is just about to do?
There's leadership on the one hand and champions of deliberate misgovernace on the other.
Posted 1 year ago on 25 Dec 2010 17:00 # -
I was shocked when is saw the title I thought Zardari spent Christmas day with victims and surprised everyone.
Posted 1 year ago on 26 Dec 2010 7:00 # -
Assalam-o-Alaikum-Warahmat-ULLAH ALL,
The title of this thread is 'misleading'.
Posted 1 year ago on 26 Dec 2010 8:38 # -
truths
Memberpolitical game
Posted 1 year ago on 26 Dec 2010 9:19 #
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