The stretchers keep coming, bearing bodies out of the rubble left by Algeria’s massive earthquake, adding to a tally of grief and horror that, four days old on Sunday, feels a lot more like rage.
At ”Building 10”, a massive apartment block that was once home to 100 families, the bodies emerge every 20 minutes or so from what is now a mound no more than a few metres high.
Across the earthquake-stricken zone stretching eastward from the capital Algiers, hopes of finding more survivors were all but extinguished as the plight of the newly homeless, the risk of disease and public anger over the heavy loss of life took centre stage.
Since the death toll has passed the 2 000 mark, standing at 2 162 with hundreds left unaccounted for, Wednesday’s temblor may break a record death toll of 3 000 set in 1980, in the Chlef area west of the capital.
”It’s easy to do the math,” Unicef’s Cherif Benadouda said resignedly, adding that many isolated villages and hamlets not covered by the media were devastated.
Algerians are refusing to put the staggering loss of life down to a wanton act of God, blaming most of the deaths on greedy developers who ignored quake-proofing rules that have been on the books since the 1980 disaster.
Many of the buildings that crumpled in the quake, measuring up to 6,8 on the Richter scale, were thought to have been built with inferior methods and materials, and in disregard of architects’ plans and recommendations, not to mention the building code.
In comparison with Wednesday’s quake, a temblor of greater force — with a 7,1 magnitude — that hit quake-prone California in 1989, claimed a mere 62 lives.
”In a country where seismographs are never idle, when you go around putting up buildings without regard for para-seismic norms, architectural rules or even simple common sense, a natural phenomenon quickly becomes a national disaster,” Algerian magazine Le Soir wrote.
”Generally, whatever the cataclysm, nature’s fury is not really devastating except when it is joined to human idiocy.”
Survivors are also enraged at what they see as a bungled government response to the crisis, with ill-equipped rescue services arriving too late or not at all to save many lives, and a widespread failure to provide emergency lodging.
The government has made repeated calls for patience, with Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni saying the situation would be brought under control in the coming week.
Protesters in Boumerdes, hardest hit in the disaster with their dead accounting for more than half of the death toll, took their fury out on President Abdelaziz Bouteflika when he tried to visit the area on Saturday.
Seeing his visit as a callous bid to make political hay of the tragedy as presidential elections approach in less than a year, they chased him out of town under a hail of insults and projectiles scraped up from the rubble.
The United Nations (UN) co-ordinator for Algeria closed ranks with the government on Sunday, saying its handling of the crisis had been far better than during the flooding that engulfed parts of Algiers in late 2001.
During a visit to Boumerdes, Paolo Lembo said the government had done a good job of managing international aid, although he said there were too many search and rescue teams in the field and too few medical and sanitary workers.
The UN official said water was of particular concern, while state radio warned that the risk of epidemics was increasing. The aftermath of the earthquake has awakened an undercurrent of discontent over enduring socio-economic problems facing the north African country, where half the population lives under the poverty threshold and the official unemployment rate hovers around 30%.
Islamic radicals have also seized on the opportunity to connect with the victims, bringing their help — and their message — to quake-stricken areas.
”The bearded ones”, as they are dubbed, have been seen helping to distribute international and government emergency aid, pitching in with rescue and recovery efforts, and even digging graves.
”It feels like 1989 all over again,” a local journalist said in Zemmouri, the quake’s epicenter, referring to an earthquake that struck the town of Tipaza with the loss of hundreds of lives.
The newly formed Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was building solidarity networks at the time, and gained such a following that it became a serious electoral threat to the military-backed government.
The FIS was poised to win a second round of parliamentary elections in 1991 when they were called off, the spark to the civil war that has raged in Algeria ever since, claiming upwards of 150 000 lives, though it has abated with a blanket amnesty introduced by Bouteflika in 1999.
Still, eight people were reported killed Sunday near Chlef in an attack blamed on the hardline Armed Islamic Group (GIA). ‒ Sapa