MULTAN - President of Multan Chamber of Commerce & Industry (MCCI) Khawaja Jalaluddin Roomi has appreciated the government’s efforts to promote the concept of safer charity practices among the masses to avert inadvertent donation practices.
Addressing an awareness seminar organised for business community of Multan here Thursday, as part of a wider outreach campaign on Safer Charity Practice being run by the Ministry of Information Broadcasting and National Heritage, he said people at every level needed to exercise caution while donating. He said that the campaign itself is part of the National Internal Security Policy to apprise people about risk of unintended terror financing due to blind donations with little care to check background of the donation recipients. Jalauddin Roomi said the business community in particular should be made aware of this hidden threat, since they are among the most generous donors. Majority of the donors do not know the recipient’s profile, thus the level of vigilance should be the same as in any other business transaction. The participants generally agreed that while Pakistanis as a nation donate generously, they should be careful as there still are some outfits which under the guise of charity organization collect huge sum of donations which are then directed towards anti state activities. The government has taken a good step by starting an awareness campaign to create awareness among the people not to give charity to organisation that might use the donations for terrorism, extremism and militancy. Federal Ministry for Information, Broadcasting and National Heritage is organising ‘Haq, Haqdaar Tak’ a month-long public awareness campaign in Ramazan encouraging the public to be vigilant while giving charity. According to official sources, the objective is that the public should thoroughly check before giving donations to those organisations that deserve charity, and not to those that are misusing the aid for their own purposes. The campaign will focus on organisations that might be sponsoring home-grown extremism and terrorism. The media campaign will advocate public vigilance, raise awareness on safer charity practices and highlight plight of the victims of terrorism by influencing public to give their donations to reputed charities. The Seminar was also addressed by Prof Khalid Saeed Khalid, Aapa Zohra Sajjad Zaidi, Sarfraz Claimant and Khurram Javed.
Our Staff Reporter