Quake-hit town waits to collect corpses

CHINARI—While the world dithers over how much it can afford to give to help survivors of the deadly earthquake Pakistan’s killer earthquake, nearly three weeks on the people of Chinari are waiting to bury their children. The tiny town, 50 km (35 miles) southeast of Muzaffarabad, the devastated capital of Azad Kashmir, is still cut off by landslides which the Army is struggling to clear. Reaching it involves a trek high up above the blocked road, past children tending cows and goats next to flattened farms and through a pine forest.
The town looks as if the quake happened only yesterday. Crushed cars still litter the main road through the largely flattened market and the smell of death hangs in the air. “You can’t imagine the misery we’re living in. It’s terrible, it’s terrible,” said Abdul Aziz, returning to Chinari with a load of food from a town lower down the Jhelum valley. The 7.6 magnitude quake on October 8 knocked the Al Falah school off its foundations. The two top floors of what used to be a four-storey building have collapsed and lie precariously perched on a steep slope above the Jhelum river.
Residents say about 180 children were killed there. A Russian rescue team did a survey but determined there were no survivors and a team of doctors later pulled a few bodies out. The residents have no equipment to clear the debris and the rest of the children lie where they died. Three bodies could be seen crushed in the ruins on Thursday. “A huge number are still in there. Little children of five, six and seven are trapped there,” said Abdul Jabbar, with tears in his eyes. The earthquake killed at least 54,000 people across northern Pakistan, most of them in Azad Kashmir. A huge aid operation is under way but with many mountain roads swept away or blocked by landslides, access to hundreds of thousands of survivors has been nearly impossible. Aid donors met in Geneva on Wednesday but the amount pledged is short of what aid officials say they need to ensure survivors can make it through a bitter Himalayan winter, only weeks away.
Helicopters have brought Chinari’s survivors basic supplies and many people walk the several kilometers down the valley to where the aid trucks can reach and where the army and relief groups are distributing food and tents. Some tents have been put up amid the ruins but many people have made their own shelters out of pieces of wood and tin roofing, salvaged from their ruined homes. Some better off residents said they would be able to help themselves once the road is cleared. “If they only open the road we wouldn’t need anything. We have the resources to buy things,” said Mohammad Farooq, head of the town shopkeepers’ association. “We’re Pakistanis, not looters. Just open the road and we can manage,” said Haji Sharbat Khan, an old man with a bandage over one eye.—Agencies