NO WORDS, no pictures could capture in its full measure the enormity and the magnitude of human pain and suffering that descended on Pakistan and Azad Kashmir on October 8 by one of the worst earthquakes in world history. The death count is still mounting and may eventually go beyond 200,000 lives — the toll that Asian tsunami of December 2004 had extracted from 12 countries. The weeklong rescue efforts mounted by the people of Pakistan and the world capitals has so far proved to be too inadequate for the survivors and those thousands who are still trapped in the rubble and debris.
A bigger challenge is to bring the emotional drained survivors out of their trauma and help the living dead back to a normal life. Just imagine a girl of 13 who all through her life had known nothing but the loving care of her parents and the cheerful company of her brothers and sisters, knowing nothing about how her father managed to feed her and from where did come her fine dresses. Now this girl is standing all alone in bitter cold with no shelter over her head and not knowing from where she is going to get her next meal or a change of cloth.
She is now on her own to fend for herself in this cruel world. Can she cope with this challenge? Do we have the capacity to help her through? There are thousands of young children like her, children who have lost their limbs along with their parents. There are fathers who are still searching the debris for their children. Women weeping for their husbands. There are many men of means who have been rendered completely destitute and do not know how to provide for their dear and near ones.
Hospitals, relief camps, roadside shelters are overflowing with seriously injured but unclaimed children, women and men. Most school and college buildings are in ruin with most teachers and students buried under the debris. This is the state of affairs in a country where nearly 40 per cent of the people are already living below the poverty line, where an un-estimated number of women and children live on alms, where health cover is so poor that thousands die because they cannot even get clean drinking water let alone a doctor or a hospital bed. To this population another at least about three million has been added.
The plans being announced almost on daily basis by the government for reconstruction and rehabilitation are heart warming. But if one were to go through all the plans and development programmes the governments in this country have announced year after year and then compared these promises with the reality on the ground one would surely find it impossible to give any credence to the latest promises.
Therefore, sustained efforts at the level of the world, especially the rich world led and coordinated by the UN is needed to overcome the short and long term reconstruction and rehabilitation challenges. And it would help immensely on many fronts if the armies deployed on the opposing sides of the LoC were to jointly underpin these efforts with the administrative structure across the affected region. It would have helped reduce the tragedies considerably if the two countries had allowed each other’s armies to cross over to the other side of the LoC to save lives and provide relief.
The speed with which the Pakistani nation responded to the tragedy defies words. It appeared as if people from Karachi to Khyber stood up like one and marched towards stricken regions with whatever relief goods they could carry. Within 24 hours many were in Muzzafarabad and Balakot doing whatever they could do to alleviate the suffering. The rescue and relief specialists from all over the world were also on the spot in no time from Islamabad’s Margallah towers which had collapsed at the first jolt of the earthquake to Azad Kashmir’s capital and Mansehra’s ravaged towns. And relief goods rescue equipment and cash started pouring in immediately.
Earthquakes do not announce their arrivals. No matter how prepared you are for such calamities, you are always caught by surprise when they strike with all their fury. But then when you are fighting a war for over 50 years in the region, when you have 100,000 troops stationed in the locality with all the paraphernalia like earth movers, bridge making equipment and mobile hospitals, tinned food and thousands of tents to cope with all kinds of emergencies and have also been trained to meet natural calamities like earthquakes why has it taken the Pakistani Army to respond to the disaster longer than even the world and the local media persons some of whom reached the affected locations within 24 hours?
The President in his address to the nation on Wednesday indicated that the army stationed in Azad Kashmir was also seriously affected. But his spokesman Major General Shuakat Sultan while denying that the Indian Army personnel had crossed over to Pakistani side of the LoC to help rebuild a bunker claimed that Pakistani bunkers were artillery proof. Another question is why did it take almost five days for the Army to reach Balakot when one can feel its presence all over Pakistan as cantonments are spread over the country at short distances.
These questions are being asked not because the people of Pakistan had expected the Army to accomplish miracles, but because the Army itself had with its rhetoric over the last 50 years created the fiction of its omnipotence. It, however, accomplished a political miracle though, by exploiting the tragedy to get the NWFP chief minister to attend a belated National Security Council meeting. This gives a face saver to the MMA and allows its leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman an opening to attend the next meeting of the NSC which the religious alliance had been opposing since its inception terming it as being a supra constitutional body.

The challenge of Balakot
Pervez Hoodbhoy

Along with a group of faculty, staff and students from my university in Islamabad, I journeyed to Balakot, close to the centre of the Kashmir earthquake. This mountainous town, situated on the banks of the Kunhar River, has been destroyed. There is rubble and the gut-wrenching smell of decaying corpses. The rats have it good; the one I accidentally stepped upon was already fat. If there is a plan to clear the concrete rubble in and around the town, nobody seems to have any clue. But the Balakotis are taking it in their stride — nose masks are everywhere.
But there is good news. We were just one of countless groups of ordinary citizens that were on the move after the enormity of last Saturday’s earthquake became apparent. The Mansehra to Balakot road, finally forced open by huge army bulldozers, is now lined with relief trucks bursting with supplies that were donated by people from across the country. This is one of those rare times that I have seen Pakistan’s people feel and move together as a nation. Even the armed bandits who waylay relief supplies — making necessary a guard of soldiers with automatic weapons, standing every few hundred yards — cannot destroy this moment.
Islamic groups from across the country have also arrived. Some bring relief supplies; others simply harangue those who have lost loved ones and livelihoods, lecturing that their misdeeds brought about this catastrophe. None seem to have an explanation for why God’s wrath was especially directed to mosques, madrassas, and schools — all of which collapsed in huge numbers. None say why thousands of the faithful have been buried alive in this sacred month of fasting.
Aid from across the world is making its way towards the destruction, and the US is here too. Double bladed Chinook helicopters, diverted from fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, now fly over the heartland of jihad and the militant training camps in Mansehra to drop food and tents a few miles beyond. Temporarily birds of peace instead of war, they do immensely more to calm angry Islamists than the reams of glossy propaganda put out by the US information services in Pakistan.
Their visibility makes relief choppers terrific propaganda, for good or for worse. This is undoubtedly why the Pakistani government refused an Indian offer to send in helicopters for relief work in and around Muzzafarabad, the flattened capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. Sadly, in spite of a much celebrated peace process, Pakistan refuses visas to Indian peace groups and activists that seek to help in the relief effort. It is still not too late to open this door and let Pakistanis, Indians and Kashmiris help each other.
The challenges are many. The aid remains too little. There are not enough tents, blankets, and warm clothes to go around. Hundreds of tent clusters have come up, but thousands of families remain out under the skies, facing rain and hail, and with dread in their hearts. These families have lost everything but the tattered clothes on their backs. Some even lost the land they had lived upon for generations — the top soil simply slid away, leaving behind hard rock and rubble.
Worst of all, aid is not reaching those most affected. Hundreds of destroyed communities are scattered deep in the mountains. We saw helicopters attempt aerial drops; landing is impossible in most places. But people told us that they often miss and the supplies land up thousands of feet or below in deep forests. Distribution is haphazard and uncoordinated, done with little thought. We saw relief workers throw packets of food and clothes from the top of trucks, causing a riot. Hustlers thrive, the weak watch passively.
The clock is ticking. In two months, the mountains will get their first snowfall and temperatures will plummet below zero. Millions may have been made homeless. Those without shelter will die. Tents will not do. From a special university fund, we pledged to rebuild the homes of a dozen families. But ten-thousand or more families will need homes in the Mansehra-Balakot-Kaghan area alone, not to speak of adjoining Kashmir. The task of saving lives has barely begun. For me personally, there is a sense of deja vu. Nearly 31 years ago, on Dec. 25, 1974, a powerful earthquake flattened towns along the Karakorum Highway and killed nearly 10,000 people. I travelled with a university team into the same mountains for similar relief work. Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had made a passionate appeal for funds around the world, had taken a token helicopter trip to the destroyed town of Besham, and then made fantastic promises of relief and rehabilitation.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funds received from abroad mysteriously disappeared. Some well-informed people believe that those funds were used to kick off Pakistan’s secret nuclear programme. Will today’s government do better? This will only be assured if citizens organise themselves to play a more direct role in relief and rehabilitation for the long term. Civil society groups must now assert themselves. They must demand a voice in planning and implementing the reconstruction effort and, along with international donors, transparency and public auditing of where aid is spent.

The geopolitics of disasters
Patrick Seale
 
The terrible Pakistan earthquake has added greatly to the woes of the Muslim world. Quite apart from the incalculable human misery it has caused with more than 35,000 killed, hundreds of thousands wounded and 2.5 million made homeless in Pakistan-held Kashmir it has tilted the balance of power on the subcontinent ever more firmly in favour of India and robbed the Arabs of a once-powerful ally. Pakistan has been weakened for a generation. All its energies must henceforth be directed at reconstruction. Not only must it rebuild Pakistan-administered Kashmir where hundreds of villages have been razed from the map and not a single town has been left standing. It must also deal with the tens of thousands of Kashmiris who are trekking south into Pakistan in search of food, shelter and medical care.
Pakistan will need massive amounts of aid in the billions of dollars, not just in the tens of millions to cope with these enormous challenge and try to get back on its feet. Pakistan has contributed manpower to building the prosperity of the Arab Gulf. It has also, in the not so distant past, sent troops to the defence of Saudi Arabia. It is the only Muslim power to possess nuclear weapons. It is in the interest of the Arab Gulf states and of Saudi Arabia to dig deep in their pockets and help Pakistan recover as quickly as possible. Now is also the time for the international community to pressure both India and Pakistan to settle their long-standing dispute over Kashmir, which over the past half century has bequeathed a ghastly legacy of poverty, divided families, terrorism, military atrocities and war.
Reconstruction must serve to end the misery of the Kashmiris and produce an honourable settlement in which neither India nor Pakistan can claim victory but from which both would greatly benefit. The earthquake which devastated Kashmir was the result of a clash between two tectonic plates along a fault line on the earth’s crust. This was a natural disaster, which was no doubt made worse by poor planning and by the flimsy structures in which most Kashmiris lived. Iraq, in contrast, is the victim of a wholly man-made disaster, but with equally far-reaching geopolitical consequences. The American and British occupation of the past 30 months has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, shattered the state, and torn the country apart on ethnic and confessional lines.
History is likely to judge it to be a great crime, equal to the dispossession and destruction of the Palestinian people by Israel. It is one more disreputable episode in Western imperial history, not unlike the carve-up by Britain and France of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. The question now is whether Iraq can ever be put together again as a viable state.
Severe blow
The blow to Arab interests and to Arab security is severe, since Iraq, which has traditionally been the guardian of the eastern frontier of the Arab world, can no longer serve as a counterweight to Iran. Just as the Pakistan earthquake has shifted the balance of power on the subcontinent in favour of India, so the destruction of Iraq has shifted the balance of power in favour of Iran. It has also given a boost to the Shiite sect in Islam, causing the Sunnis considerable concern. Instead of uniting the country, the constitution on which Iraqis voted in a referendum on Saturday has polarised the country on ethnic and sectarian lines. The Kurds dream of secession; the Shiite political parties seek more power for themselves regardless of the interests of others; while the Sunni minority fights to protect what little influence it has left. In the absence of a national consensus, the slide to civil war is likely to continue leading to the violent break-up of the country.