US vows to boost quake relief efforts
World failed to imagine intensity of quake disaster - Money can’t buy time: Vandermoortele
By Zulfiqar Ahmad

ISLAMABAD—Disappointed by the slow international aid response to Pakistan’s recent earthquake, the UN Saturday urged the world community to come up with a matching response to the scale of disaster that has so far killed over 51,000 people.
“Immensity and magnitude of the disaster is still becoming clear and the task of providing relief to the affected people is colossal,” UN Relief Coordinator in Pakistan, Jan Vandemoortele told a press conference here.
“We need everything, winterised tents, sleeping bags, medicines, lots of helicopters. All these things money can buy, what it (money) can not buy is a time,” Vandemoortele said.
The UN has called on international donors community to act swiftly as winter is fast approaching in Azad Kashmir and NWFP, where the October 8 earthquake has left nearly three million people without shelter.
The international donors have so far contributed just 90 million dollars to UN relief efforts.
Three days after the disaster, the UN launched an appeal of 272 million dollars but immediately revised it to 312 million dollars as the extent of the disaster became clear.
A UN-sponsored conference of international donors has been convened in Geneva on October 26 to discuss reconstruction and rehabilitation requirements of Pakistan.
“It is a race against time. We all have to scale up efforts on all accounts. We need much more and we need it much faster,” Vandemoortele said.
The UN has set up ten clusters to work in coordination with the government and NGOs in the areas including health, nutrition, water and sanitation, shelter and camp management.
Head of shelter cluster, Michael Zwack, told reporters the international community and the Pakistan government has delivered more than 32,000 tents and up to 150,00 are on the way.
“But we still need between 330,000 to 540,000 tents as the demand is rising,” he added.
Bill Fellow, heading the Water and Sanitation cluster, all people have now some source of water supply. International agencies have set up 10 water plants in the affected areas and access to safe water was increasing daily,
he added. He, however, warned against the poor or no sanitation arrangements saying, the situation was running the risk of “second human disaster that can be averted”.
Head of Food cluster, German Valdaman, said the UN was providing food to one million every people every day but they were facing difficulties in accessing the people in remote areas. But, he stressed, funds were needed to keep the food pipeline during the next six months. He appealed to the world community to come forward with budget to fund the requirements.
Representative of Health cluster, Ms. Rachel said the UN was working in coordination with the health ministry and NGOs to deal with an immense number of wounded which has not climbed to over 74,000. Responding to a question, Vandemoortele said the Flash Appeal was for six months but international donors were required to fulfil their pledges.
He said NATO has announced to provide four helicopters but the UN was hoping for more choppers to deal with the tragedy. To a question, he said, based on population censes and information available about the areas, some 20 per cent of the affected people had not been accesses yet.
The United Nations says it remains one of the major concerns of the world body as to whether the full magnitude of this calamity and its impact on Pakistan has been fully grasped by the international donors community.
Agencies add: Two weeks after the gigantic South Asian earthquake, the United Nations warned that all the money in the world could not buy time for survivors and called for still more tents and helicopters. NATO on Friday approved plans to send up to 1,000 troops and a small number of helicopters to Pakistan as part of a beefed-up aid package, following a desperate appeal by the United Nations. The first of three British Chinook choppers was due to arrive on Saturday and the World Bank pledged more cash to aid the cost of rebuilding regions devastated by the October 9 disaster.
But Jan Vandemoortele, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Pakistan, painted the grimmest picture yet of the threat still facing tens of thousands of people in the devastated mountains of northern Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir. “The scarcest commodity at this time is time. Money cannot buy time, and the weather is against us and winter is closing in,” Vandemoortele told a news conference in Islamabad. The aid effort needs up to 200,000 more tents, 50 more helicopters and extra sanitation equipment, and has to get enough food near mountain areas to feed one million people for six months, UN and aid agency officials told the conference.
The United Nations Children’s Fund warned that sanitation was a “ticking timebomb”, although the World Health Organisation said there had been no mass disease outbreaks so far amongst the 3.3 million left homeless by the quake. Vandemoortele blamed the poor response by donors — already blasted by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf — on a lack of graphic video footage to grip the world’s imagination.
“We saw the tsunami happening, we saw the airplanes flying into the Twin Towers in New York, these impact on the minds of people,” he added, referring to the December 2004 Asian Tsunami and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United Stats. “Here we only see the consequences. This is definitely one of the reasons the response has been slow and inadequate so far”. While there has seen some return to normality, with a handful of shops and public services reopening in quake-hit Muzaffarabad, the situation remains dire in cut-off villages where tens of thousands remain without help.
Officials say between 10 and 20 percent of affected areas have not received supplies or medical care despite up to 100 relief flights daily by Pakistani, US, German and Japanese helicopters.
A simple appeal scribbled on a page of a torn notepad offered a glimpse of the nightmarish conditions the survivors and injured are still facing. “Please help us,” said the note handed to passing vehicles by a man who said he walked for days to reach the highway near the town of Ghari Dhopatta, some 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of Muzaffarabad.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization said Friday it would send 500 engineers to help clear roads and set up facilities, a mobile medical unit and a deployable headquarters to help with planning, command and control.
NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer underlined that the operation was of an unprecedented scale for the 26-nation alliance. “NATO is not an international aid agency, but the situation is so serious,” he told reporters after the extra measures were agreed by NATO ambassadors in Brussels.
India — where 1,300 were killed by the quake in its sector of Kashmir — poured more cold water on a proposal by Musharraf that people be allowed to cross the border dividing the Himalayan territory to help stricken relatives.
Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee said India would not allow the unchecked flow of people through the Line of Control border, the Press Trust of India reported Friday. But he added that some places could be identified along the ceasefire line where relief material for quake victims could be sent across freely.