------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION: Alternative Publishing - Is it viable to traditional publishing?
WHERE: Art Lounge - Sunaparanta, Near Lar de Estudantes, Altinho, Panaji WHEN: September 30, 2009 - 5:30pm http://www.facebook.com/n/?event.php&eid=146588805806&mid=12a68daG1df3c3d3G2ac936fG7 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THREAT ON GOA'S SEMI-LAWLESS BEACH BELT By Vivek Menezes vmin...@gmail.com The Counter-Terrorism Bureau of Israel's National Security Council warned last week that there is an "imminent and concrete, very serious" threat of terrorist attacks on Westerners in India, with Israelis and places that they usually congregate in more serious danger. It is an unusually strong and specific warning from the Counter-Terrorism Bureau, which routinely mentions Arab countries but rarely India. After all, Israel has excellent diplomatic relations with this country, and there are tens of thousands of its citizens in India at any given time. If its elite intelligence agencies are going so far as to warn its citizens to avoid the country completely, you can be sure that the threat is real and should be taken seriously. At the same time, the Australian government also issued a severe travel warning for India to its citizens, urging them to avoid places where foreigners are prevalent. The Premier of Victoria state, John Brumby, actually cancelled his scheduled trip to Mumbai this week, and has changed his itinerary to include longer stays in better-secured Delhi and Bangalore instead. Further adding to the tension, the UK's Foreign Office has also updated its travel advice -- while the threat level remains at "high" -- to warn British citizens in India to be "extra vigilant" especially on days of national significance including Diwali on October 17. It took a couple of days for the Indian government to react, but Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has now made some reassuring statements. "We are increasing our level of preparedness to meet any terror threat or terror attack," he told worried reporters who questioned him about the Israeli and Australian intelligence reports. "Don't present an alarmist picture," he said, "we are fully aware of the threats from across the border." But just a day earlier, Israel Radio had quoted the head of Mumbai's Anti-Terror Squad saying that the warning from the Israelis had come as a surprise. Despite this confusion, there can be no doubt that Mumbai has been considerably hardened as a target, and is significantly better defended than less than a year ago, when just 10 men held South Bombay hostage and wreaked havoc for three full days from November 26 until the last commando-style attacker was killed at the Taj Mahal hotel on the 29th. In between, however, these 10 terrorists swaggered across an astonishing expanse of the city, killing at least 173 people and wounding at least 308, besides causing huge damage with explosives. Most of the time on those dark November days, the armed gunmen faced no resistance whatsoever -- they methodically murdered their way across the city with total impunity. But if Mumbai is better defended than last year, let us think the unthinkable and consider Goa's preparedness in the event of such an attack. If ten terrorists ran amok for a full three days in the nation's financial capital, which is full of military personnel and armed policemen, what horrors could unfold here? After all, this is an entirely realistic scenario -- the intelligence warnings from the Israeli and Australian governments specifically mention threats to Westerners and places that Westerners congregate. This means Goa, where tourists from all over Europe, N. America and Australia gather in huge numbers all through the tourist season, and there are as many as 15,000 Israelis alone in the peak period that extends over the New Year, besides an outpost of the Chabad House that Kasab and company specifically targeted in Mumbai. The truth is that Goa is a soft, and extremely vulnerable target. Tens of thousands of Western visitors mass together at several individual beach tourism hubs: Arambol, Anjuna, Candolim, Palolem. Most of these areas have long since become semi-lawless and mostly beyond the control of state authorities. Earlier this year, the Calangute MLA told the legislative assembly that even he is scared to enter some parts of the beach belt at night, and that the drug trade has become endemic and rampant to the point where the local police is intimidated to inaction. Further north, in places like Chapora, Anjuna and Arambol, it is rare to ever see a uniformed policeman, even as every kind of illegality flourishes in broad daylight with total connivance of local authorities. Eight years ago this month, I stood with my baby son in my arms and watched an unspeakable disaster unfold right in front of my eyes across the Hudson River in New York as the twin towers of the World Trade Center burned and then crashed into dust in the course of just a few hours. That event, right at the cusp of a new millennium, ushered in an age of permanent anxiety, the new era of constant terrorist threat that we live in today. It is true that India had faced such attacks many times before, but since 2001 they have become much more frequent, an unending backdrop of violent mayhem that we simply have had to learn to deal with as part of everyday life. But even as Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore have been attacked by cross-border terrorists, and Punjab, Kashmir and the North East has burned with armed resistance movements, and huge swathes of the country have had to endure the military standoff between Naxals and the state, our precious little homeland of Goa has been spared. Our democracy may be flawed but it has held, our identity may be under threat but it still survives. Almost miraculously, Goa has actually flourished in many important ways in the recent decades -- the state's economy has grown satisfactorily, and one could argue that all of us have better and more democratically accessible health care, education, and job prospects right here in the state than at any other previous time in our history. The date speaks for itself, Goa is at the top of the national charts for every aspect of human development. The price we have to pay for all of these positive developments is vigilance, and preparedness. The tourism industry has grown from a trickle to a flood in just two decades, and it could easily go to a trickle again if there is a disastrous incident of any kind. The state has to ensure that there is ample rapid response facility built into the police infrastructure, which can react decisively even if there are multiple incidents occurring in different parts of the coastline. A lesson needs to be learned here from what unfolded in Mumbai -- if terrorists can elude the authorities for anything like days on the coastline of Goa, the mayhem could be far greater than we have seen ever before in India, and the tourism sector will simply disappear overnight. Most important of all, it is finally time that the state exerts its authority, and extends its visible presence onto the beach belt which has long operated as a series of thug-ruled fiefdoms. There can be no doubt that much of the criminal activity in Goa has its genesis there, in the territory where officials fear to tread and violent drug mafias hold sway. This state should have learned its lesson with the horrific, tawdry rape and murder of Scarlett Keeling early last year, when we learned about an extraordinary nexus of criminality that governs the coastline. We found out that the take-over of Goan territory by organized criminals isn't really so very different from the Naxal usurpation of authority in many other parts of India. This disgraceful situation is converging fast with the very real threat of terrorist action on Goan soil, and it is a recipe for unprecedented disaster. http://www.oheraldo.in/pagedetails.asp?nid=27785&cid=14