Utterly Helpless

With over 42,000 people dead, more than three million homeless and relief efforts falling far short, Pakistan is overwhelmed by the crisis and needs aid urgently from international agencies.

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UNENDING AGONY: A child receives medical aid in PoK

As the twin-rotor American Chinook helicopter landed with a deafening clatter at a makeshift helipad in the town of Chakoti along the Line of Control, a swarm of people surged towards it. Young and old, women and men, they all came, through a muddy field still wet from the rain that had grounded all chopper flights for two days. Some hobbled, some supported others with bandages on their heads or arms, still others carried the injured on beds used as makeshift stretchers. As the accompanying armymen attempted to keep them away from the dangerous swirling blades of the chopper, the desperation of the wounded was entirely palpable.

It was nine days after the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that devastated Kashmir and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan. And this was probably the last chance these people would have that day to be ferried to medical help in Islamabad from this remote town, still accessible only by air. Most of them had, in fact, managed to make their way by foot to Chakoti from the surrounding mountain villages that very day. And most of the injured were suffering from infections, septic shock and advancing gangrene.

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STRUGGLING TO FIND THEIR FEET: Victims wait for relief as a UN helicopter brings injured people from remote areas to Muzaffarabad

As the people waited-carrying their remaining possessions in small bundles-for the Chinook to unload its cargo of relief supplies, Major Bilal stood watch over the operation in the windswept field, leaning on a small wooden walking cane that provided support to his own injured leg. Through the roar of the Chinook's rotors and engines, he shouted out his own frustrations to me in a voice choked with emotion. "Utter human helplessness, sir. Utter human helplessness. There is nothing we can do for them."

As soon as the cargo-bags of weekly rations of flour, rice, lentils, biscuits and matches-was unloaded, the waiting crowd clambered on to the chopper. There were almost 60 people, many of whom had to be pulled in obvious pain off their twine beds into the cavernous hold of the helicopter on blankets serving as stretchers. It was, simply, a harrowing scene and soon the inside of the Chinook resembled a refugee camp. Mothers clinging to their babies, the severely injured lying crowded on the floor of the chopper, people grabbing whatever space they could find wherever they could find it.

In the areas surrounding Chakoti, the town made famous as the crossing point between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir, it is estimated that 5,000-6,000 people died in the earthquake and, in the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Chiragh Haider, the general officer commanding of the area, "Hundred per cent of the houses were flattened." Whatever structures that remained standing, he said, were so damaged that they were unusable. Before the Chinook airlift on the ninth day after the quake, more than 2,000 injured people had already been ferried out by choppers. And yet they continued to come.

The problems of Chakoti are a microcosm of the greater devastation that the earthquake has wreaked on this beautiful landscape and the problems with the relief effort undertaken after it. Even as the relief operation focused initially on the larger towns that were destroyed such as Muzaffarabad, the capital of "Azad Kashmir", and Balakot in NWFP, themselves cut off from the mainland, it was the smaller, remoter villages, where supplies and rescue teams had not reached, that began to provide greater casualties.

NUMBING NUMBERS

42,000 is the official death toll of the earthquake in Pakistan. 2,20,000 houses were destroyed and 8,000 schools damaged. 3.5-4 million people have been affected by the quake. 22,500 crore rupees is the cost of rehabilitation of the victims.

Many of these remote villages and abodes are not even connected by proper roads by which relief supplies can reach them. And some, like the mountain dwellings around Chakoti, are not even accessible by helicopter. The only way relief can reach the affected is by foot over steep hillsides. In some areas, convoys of mules have been pressed into service to carry supplies up the mountains. In most cases, the lack of rescue and relief has also meant that many more have died under the debris of their homes, from a lack of prompt medical care and from exposure to the elements. The ones who have made it down to the larger towns are the lucky ones and yet they too often face the prospect of amputations of infected limbs to save their lives. In the newly set-up Muzaffarabad field hospital, for example, a doctor counted over 6,000 amputations that surgeons there had performed in just six days.

The scale of the disaster is so vast-and it seems growing still-that government relief efforts seem like a drop in the ocean. Officially the death toll is put at 42,000 and continues to rise. It is now estimated that the number could well be over 1,00,000, most of them women and children, killed in their homes or schools when the roofs collapsed. Sardar Sikandar Hayat, the prime minister of what Pakistan terms as Azad Kashmir, estimates that the death toll could top 80,000 just in his region. Over 2,20,000 houses and 8,000 schools have been destroyed. The overall number of people rendered homeless is estimated by the Pakistan Government to be above three million.

After a sluggish start, due in large part to the lack of disaster management preparedness and an inability to comprehend the severity and scale of the crisis in the first two days, the entire official machinery is now fully devoted to the relief effort. The army has been put in direct charge of the coordination, and the office of a Federal Relief Commissioner has been established as an Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority. Hundreds of millions of dollars are coming in as aid from outside the country while billions of rupees have been volunteered by ordinary Pakistanis moved by the plight of their brethren in the quake-affected zones. Thousands of young men and women, doctors, NGO workers and engineers are volunteering to help in the relief effort and hundreds of trucks of relief goods are making their way north, especially from Karachi and Lahore. Medical equipment, medicines and teams have arrived from India and Japan in the east and Cuba, Germany and France in the west. And yet, for all the work, donations and international assistance, the complexity of the problems is such that they continue to defy easy prescriptions.

The immediate and urgent need, now that the rescue effort has been called off with little hope of finding any more survivors, though miracles continue to happen, is to provide shelter to the millions of victims living under the open sky.

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ELEMENTS OF TRAGEDY: A survivor finds shelter from the rain under the roof of a house destroyed in the quake in Balakot

This need has been made more urgent by the onset of winter, which has already been heralded by rains, hail and even snow in some parts. It is feared that unless some sort of shelter is provided to the survivors, thousands more may die from hypothermia and resulting infections such as pneumonia.

There is now a shortage of tents in Pakistan, one of the world's largest exporters of tents, if not the largest. Tents, which can be used as temporary shelters for families, have almost disappeared from the market as thousands were purchased and sent for the victims of the quake. In response, the Government banned the export of tents from Pakistan and told the manufacturing units to produce tents first for the internal crisis. However, as this correspondent discovered at the Chaklala Air Base in Rawalpindi, where the entire air relief effort is being coordinated, there are other logistical issues to contend with as well.

Each of the larger, winterised tents is 4 m long and weighs 93 kg. The smaller choppers, which are involved in air dropping relief supplies to the remote mountain villages, simply cannot take them because they do not fit into these helicopters. They can only take the smaller tents that are not available at all at the moment. And even the Chinook-the largest chopper available that can carry a load of 4,450 kg-could only carry some 25 tents and a few hundred blankets in one sortie.

Now consider the fact that the Government has pointed out that some 2,00,000 tents are required for the earthquake survivors and only five Chinooks have been provided by the US Government for the relief effort and one can understand the magnitude of the logistical problem. In fact, only about 20,000 tents have so far been airlifted to the affected areas. It is a race against time and the Government is losing.

The UN now calls the relief operation under way in Pakistan one of the largest in its history. "In terms of the devastation of infrastructure and the number of people rendered homeless, this is a bigger tragedy than even the tsunami," says Jan Egeland, UN relief commissioner. Perhaps the only silver lining, if one can call it that, in the entire tragedy is that it may have given some fresh impetus for both India and Pakistan to move towards the resolution of their dispute over Kashmir. India's prompt offer and supply of relief aid were immensely appreciated in Pakistan and many questioned the Government's refusal to accept the Indian offer of choppers with Indian pilots. But General Pervez Musharraf's proposal to throw open the Line of Control for Kashmiris to cross over for help-and the fact that the Indian Government has welcomed it-may yet be the abiding ray of hope in this catastrophe. Could the earthquake actually jolt the intractable Kashmir issue towards some sort of a resolution?

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