Relief teams raced food and supplies into earthquake-hit areas of northern Pakistan on Wednesday as desperate survivors readied for a fifth straight night of cold and hunger.
Amid scenes of men and women punching each other over blankets and clothes, the government said it has received international aid pledges of $350-million but acknowledged it needs to do more to relieve the suffering.
Against long odds of survival since being buried by the quake’s destructive power on Saturday morning, a child, a mother-of-three and an elderly man came out of different areas of devastated Pakistani-held Kashmir alive.
”I’m so happy because my life partner is coming back to me,” Mahmood Farooq Marchal said in Muzaffarabad after Turkish rescuers pulled his wife, Rashida, out of the rubble to safety. ”Thank you, thank you, thank you, Turkey.”
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said his nation is facing a ”human catastrophe” but praised the international community for offers of aid and assistance that continue to flow in.
”If you see how the world has reacted, how our people have reacted, it is really a miracle. But we have to do more,” Aziz said.
He visited a relief centre and later met United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who broke off from her Central Asian tour to show support for Pakistan, a close ally in the US-led ”war on terror”.
”The US, like many other people in the world, has been through natural disasters,” Rice said. ”Our support is not just for today but tomorrow as well.”
Aziz said both Rice and Japanese Senior Deputy Foreign Minister Shuzen Tanigawa, whom he also met in Islamabad, pledged more helicopters to help remote areas. He said ”close to 40” choppers are now bringing relief.
Remote areas still to be reached
Pakistan has said the confirmed death toll is about 23 000, with 60 000 injured, but those figures are expected to rise once all the remote areas of Pakistani Kashmir, where entire villages were wiped away, are reached.
The rains that lashed north-east Pakistan on Tuesday, halting the delivery of desperately needed aid, have dried up but the misery continues for many of the estimated 2,5-million homeless facing the approach of winter.
”That was the fourth night we slept in the open,” said Khurshid Bibi, pointing to her family of 15 camped on the roadside outside their collapsed house in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan’s side of divided Kashmir.
”We were very, very cold. We need tents and blankets,” she said after waking up to see snow had fallen on the peaks surrounding the ruined city of 125 000, which has been reduced to piles of wreckage.
Towns and villages across northern Pakistan and parts of Kashmir have turned into makeshift refugee camps, with shocked survivors huddling under whatever they can find as they wait for aid that many say has been too slow coming.
Aid effort
The thumping twin rotors of giant US army Chinook helicopters could be heard over Muzaffarabad from shortly after sunrise on Wednesday, bringing vital relief to some of the worst-hit regions.
”We are bringing in food, blankets, tents, and rescue teams. The weather has cleared, so we’re going full ahead now with the relief operations,” Pakistani army spokesperson Major Farooq Nasir said in Muzaffarabad.
The United Nations resident coordinator for Pakistan, Jan Vandemoortele, said most roads in the quake zone have been cleared after landslides but remote areas of the rugged region remain inaccessible.
”We are reaching further, but still not to all the locations,” he said. ”The government is doing a very good job … but many places are yet to be reached.”
Along with the choppers, lorries painted in brightly coloured Pakistani-style murals started streaming into Muzaffarabad, clogging up the streets but bringing cheers from survivors.
Distribution of goods ranging from water, biscuits and milk to blankets and clothing sparked fighting that police had to subdue with clubs.
Youths swarmed on one truck and looted it as soon as it stopped, throwing clothing and blankets to hundreds of outstretched hands. Men and women struggled for the goods, slapping, punching and throttling each other.
Two women went sprawling in the mud before police waded in and began beating the crowd.
The UN’s emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, left for Pakistan on Wednesday to meet officials and aid personnel.
On the Indian side of divided Kashmir, where the death toll has hit 1 300, officials said more than 40 000 homes were razed by the 7,6-magnitude quake.
An army spokesperson, meanwhile, said six Indian soldiers carrying relief aid were killed in a landslide. — AFP
