Archive for October 12th, 2005

Frustration grows bitter in Pakistan

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, October 12, 2005
GRAEME SMITH
With a report from Sonya Fatah in Islamabad ISLAMABAD — As heavy rains and hailstorms frustrate efforts to dig out the last remaining survivors of Pakistan’s earthquake, many residents are hammering the government for responding so slowly to the needs of millions left homeless by the disaster.

The frustration grows bitter as survivors in remote regions have endured five days of sleeping outdoors in frigid temperatures and fending off bandits amid the ruins of their towns and villages.

Mobs attacked aid convoys yesterday and fought in the streets over morsels of food.

On Saturday, a massive 7.6-magnitude earthquake hit northern Pakistan, causing widespread destruction and casualties, especially among children. Although the official death toll is currently 35,000, as many as 40,000 are feared dead, and hopes of finding more survivors are fading. About 2.5 million people are believed to be homeless.

Those hard questions have already started in the pages of two major newspapers, which wrote lead editorials criticizing the government’s lack of disaster planning yesterday.

“The disaster holds quite a few lessons for Pakistan, the foremost being the need for the country to have a nationwide disaster system that can swing into action at a moment’s notice,” wrote the editors at Dawn, a prominent English-language daily.

Others are showing their disapproval violently: Northern villagers threw rocks at helicopters to protest the government’s slow response.

The desperation in northern areas of the country has prompted some villagers to start long journeys on foot, through mountainous terrain, in search of help.

Southerners mobbed airport counters and choked roads trying to bring their own relief to friends and relatives; some of these ad-hoc rescuers said they didn’t trust the authorities to do it.

In Karachi yesterday, Mohammed Imam Kasim, 33, and Mohammed Zahaid, 42, checked onto a flight bound for Islamabad with 71 pieces of luggage between them. The businessmen, who usually export textiles, had decided to help a northern village by donating syringes, instant milk, blankets, painkillers, antibiotics, and other supplies.

They planned to hire four trucks and personally deliver the goods. When asked why they didn’t simply donate cash to the government relief effort, Mr. Kasim chuckled.

“You can’t leave this to the government,” he said.

Moazzam Ali Zahid, general-secretary of the Gujjar Youth Forum, which has launched a donations drive in Islamabad, said the military should play a bigger role.

“We know people are stuck in rural areas waiting for help. Why isn’t the army there?” Mr. Zahid asked.

At the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad, Canada’s high commissioner was more forgiving of the Pakistani response.

“There is a plan, and reasonably good co-ordination,” Mr. Collins said. “The reality of life is that when something this bad happens, it’s hard to deal with.”

Experts recently warned about the need for a better plan. The United Nations Development Program published a 44-page report in January, saying that Pakistan hasn’t established a central authority for disasters and that the agencies involved suffer from neglect.

“Disaster and relief departments and organizations largely remain under-resourced, untrained and not given required importance within administrative hierarchy,” the report said.

The UNDP also criticized Pakistan’s “lack of co-ordination within and between disaster-related organizations,” and suggested that parts of the country with greater clout get protected “at the cost of areas and communities with lesser influence and importance.”

The core of Pakistan’s emergency system is its Emergency Relief Cell (ERC), headed by the cabinet secretary, tasked with co-ordinating federal, provincial and non-governmental aid. The ERC had a warehouse in Islamabad full of medicines, blankets, clothing and tents, and the agency also maintains four rescue helicopters.

These preparations proved inadequate. At the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, assistant director Mansoor Shahid said he’s concerned about what will happen when the bulk of the injured start arriving at the three Islamabad hospitals he oversees.

Patients are already spilling out into tents on the hospital lawns, he said, and he’s been warned that the number of cases will soon multiply by 10 as the injured straggle into his central facilities. Officials expect as many as 60,000 injured.

“We’ll have to make room for them in the laneways,” Dr. Shahid said.

The long list of the hospital’s shortages include everything from oxygen cylinders to cotton bandages. Dr. Shahid says he also needs portable toilets and food.

Dr. Shahid handed the list yesterday to a Canadian diplomatic staffer; many Pakistani media commentators have noted that their country’s response relies heavily on foreign aid.

Canada has pledged $20-million, which ranks among the largest donations. That money has purchased, among other things, 12,000 blankets scheduled to arrive on a Hercules transport plane today.

“There’s a lot of criticism now: Where is the help?” Mr. Collins asked. “But everybody is pitching in as best they can.”

More than 50 international rescue and medical teams have landed in Islamabad, and most have travelled north to the affected areas.

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‘All the children in our village are gone’

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

Small border towns like Kashmir’s Pahal among districts hit hardest by quake

Wednesday, October 12, 2005
SONYA FATAH AND MASSOUD ANSARI
Special to The Globe and Mail ISLAMABAD, BAGH — The body of Mir Hasan’s 11-year-old daughter was pulled from the crumpled heap of what was left of the building where she was learning to read and write.

Mr. Hasan joined others in Pahal — a tiny village of about 1,000 people, straddling the boundary of the Pakistani and Indian-controlled areas of Kashmir — in the frantic search through the rubble of what had once been a school but became, in the violent seconds after the earthquake shook this mountainous region last weekend, a mass grave for the countless young children caught inside.

By one of those fickle tricks of fate, Mr. Hasan’s six-year-old son, Owais, survived. He was outside the school, filling up a bottle with water from a tap when the earthquake tore through Pahal.

But his little boy’s survival was the tragic exception in the village, where an entire generation has largely been wiped out. “All the children in our village are gone,” Mr. Hasan wept, tears streaming down his cheeks.

Four hundred people, about 40 per cent of his town’s population, died, he said.

There are many little towns like Pahal spread across the mountainous landscape of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, which bore the brunt of the earthquake’s wrath and where, in many places, help has yet to arrive.

School buildings appear to have been particularly vulnerable. Tariq Mahmood, minister of works and communication, estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 primary, high-school and college buildings were destroyed in the Kashmir region and school-aged children represent a disproportionately high part of the death toll, now approaching 23,000.

Without proper equipment, many grieving residents have been forced to dig with shovels or by hand through the heavy debris, in an effort to rescue trapped loved ones, or recover bodies for burial.

Shahida Mughul, 40, doesn’t have a shovel, but has been scooping out the wreckage with her hands, uninterrupted for the past three days. Silently, she lifts concrete slabs one by one, shoving them aside, searching for her two daughters who, along with their schoolmates, were trapped under the building here.

For a while, after the building’s collapse, they could hear crying from deep within: “Mai Hamain Bacaho [O mother save us].” But for the past day or so, the cries for help have been replaced by an eerie silence. Mad with grief, survivors in the town can be seen beating their heads and chests, the air broken by haunting sobs of mourning.

The bloodied head scarves of the schoolgirls can be seen in the rubble, as well as books and school bags. Some bodies can be seen, eyes and mouths open. The stench of decomposing flesh fills the air.

“It’s the biggest natural disaster. It has totally paralyzed Kashmir,” Sikandar Hayat, the Prime Minister of the disputed Kashmir region under Pakistani control, told Reuters in a tent on the lawn of his official residence in Muzzafarabad. “For the first two days, we have been either digging ground to recover bodies or digging to bury them. . . . Kashmir has turned into a graveyard.”

Fifteen members of Mr. Hasan’s family in Pahal lost their lives in the earthquake. But among those of his family and neighbours who survived, several have waited for days to receive treatment and aid.

When Mr. Hasan heard the sounds of rotor blades slicing the thin mountain air on Sunday, the day after the earthquake, he thought rescuers had arrived to bring relief to Pahal’s residents. But on closer inspection, Mr. Hasan realized the helicopters weren’t headed in his direction. The helicopters he sighted were Indian ones on their way to provide relief on the Indian side of the line of control. It would be two more days before a rescue operation would reach his town.

Brought to Islamabad by Chinook helicopters, about 20 residents of Mr. Hasan’s town lay under an army tent on multicoloured makeshift bedding, awaiting transportation to local hospitals. Among them was Sabina, 15, Mr. Hasan’s niece, who wanted to walk even though her right leg had just been amputated below the knee. Six-year-old Owais sipped slowly on a carton of apple juice as flies clung to the blood-clotted wound on his forehead. His left leg, injured when the school collapsed, had swollen to three times its size. But he was one of the few children alive.

“No one knows the extent of the damage,” Mr. Hasan said. “Ours is only one town. We saw them. They are all destroyed.”

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