Efforts to deliver aid in remote areas of earthquake-ravaged Pakistan descended into chaos on Tuesday night as survivors mobbed relief convoys grabbing whatever food they could after days of going hungry.
In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, where 11 000 people died, aid workers struggled to prevent the distribution collapsing into anarchy. People clambered on to trucks brought in by the Edhi Foundation, Pakistan’s largest private relief organisation, and grabbed essentials that were waiting for distribution.
”I can’t wait for the food to be distributed properly,” said Ali Khan, a construction worker who has barely eaten for days. ”I need it desperately and I’ll take it.”
It is estimated that up to 40 000 people died in Saturday’s 7,6 magnitude earthquake, and millions are in need, mostly in the mountainous region of Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan. Most of the dead were on the Pakistani side. Many areas remain cut off, with aid only trickling through, and there is growing anger among survivors.
In south-western Pakistan, about 380km south of Quetta, a 5,1 magnitude earthquake sent people rushing from their homes in panic on Tuesday, but there were no reports of damage or casualties.
Torrential rain hampered relief efforts in the north. At Chaklala airbase in Rawalpindi, dozens of helicopters carrying relief supplies stood in the downpour awaiting news of the weather.
There were still some signs of hope. On Tuesday Maha Bibi (75) and her daughter, Kahlida Begum, were recovering after being pulled alive from the wreckage of an Islamabad apartment block. Bibi’s son, Mahmood Tariq Khan, told Reuters of the family’s joy at the news. ”For 72 hours we prepared for a funeral. Everybody came to offer their condolences, then the news came that they are alive.”
However, these stories are increasingly rare. In ruined towns and villages, people are still picking over rubble with their bare hands, but there is little hope of finding anyone alive three days after the quake.
Aid agencies also voiced concern over the growing risk that measles and waterborne diseases such as cholera could spread quickly among victims of the disaster. About a thousand clinics and hospitals were destroyed in Pakistan, severely hampering medical treatment for thousands of injured people, the UN said.
The tragedy appears to have brought long-time rivals India and Pakistan closer together. Although they dispute each other’s claim to Kashmir and their armies face each other across the frontier, the earthquake has brought unprecedented cooperation.
Pakistan has accepted India’s offer to fly 25 tonnes of food, tents and medicine to Islamabad. New Delhi, meanwhile, has allowed Pakistani army helicopters to fly near the line of control that divides Kashmir to drop essential items. To the relief of the international community, both states confirmed their nuclear warheads and installations were safe.
New Delhi has also made a point of refusing US aid for Indian Kashmir, where 1 244 people lost their lives. Instead the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, visiting the region, pledged 5bn rupees (about $111-million) to rebuild the devastated area. The Indian leader faced crowds angry about inadequate relief distribution.
Fighting between militants and soldiers trying to reach survivors continued. Eight separatist guerrillas were killed in a gunbattle in Kupwara, on the Indian side of the border, one of the areas worst affected by the earthquake, just hours before the prime minister spoke.
‘We will die of cold’
In Muzaffarabad, many people spent a shivering fourth night in the open, too afraid to use what is left of their damaged houses.
The lucky ones managed to find themselves blankets and some even tents to protect against the cold. Others made do with pieces of cardboard and slept between mounds of rubble on the pavements.
All emerged from the freezing night to find that snow had fallen on the peaks surrounding the once-picturesque Kashmiri city.
”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 Gulshan street. ”We were very, very cold. We need tents and blankets.”
During Tuesday’s rain they had sheltered in the only room left standing of their home, but they had been afraid it would collapse.
Miraculously, she said, no one from their family died in Saturday’s quake — though rubble had fallen on her bedridden 80-year-old mother, now lying in a cot out in the street.
”It’s hard living on the street. My mother is very ill. We are scared of robbers and of aftershocks,” she said.
Like many others, she and her family want to rebuild their home but they need government aid.
”We’ve seen the foreigners sending in help, but nothing from our owngovernment,” said Bibi, as a US Chinook helicopter flew overhead marking the first mercy flight of the day.
Down at the University Stadium, where a haphazard camp of makeshift tents is springing up, survivors huddled around fires to keep warm.
They said truckloads of food — rice, eggs and wheat — had arrived during the night and that for now the hunger they had suffered for the past three days had been sated.
”But we need tents and blankets. No one will die of hunger but we are weak, some of us are injured. We will die of cold,” said Said Mohammed, a local trader.
He said he had lost all five of his sons in the devastation and his two daughters had been injured — one of whom was lying on a small bed next to their plastic-sheeting tent with a bandage on her head and cuts to her face.
A fire made from plastic bottles, two scrounged planks of wood and some items of discarded clothing was all the heating they had.
”We want to rebuild our home but we have no means. The government needs to send in experts,” said Mohammed.
Another man, who would not be named because he said he is in the army, complained that the government had done little for the people whose lives had been demolished by the quake.
”We’ve seen the Japanese, the Russians, the Americans here but not the Pakistanis,” he said, referring to relief teams which have managed to set up bases in Muzaffarabad since the roads were unblocked on Tuesday.
”The prime minister came here yesterday [Tuesday] but just for five minutes and then he left again,” he said, referring to Sikandar Hayat, the Pakistan Kashmir leader.
”We feel abandoned.” – Guardian Unlimited Â