Quake survivors desperate for tents, food

NEELUM VALLEY—The people of the Neelum Valley say they are at breaking point two months after the quake that razed their mountain homes. The lifeline road from Muzaffarabad, into the picturesque valley was severed on October 8 and remains strewn with outsized boulders that look like they were hurled by giants for sport.
As the approaching winter threatens to cut the area off completely, some villagers say they have enough food but do not have tents, others have shelter but lack nourishment and many are desperately in need of both. At Arlian Dabbar village, a bone-jarring 27km drive northeast of Muzaffarabad, 50-year-old Mohammad Arif said he had not received a single tent and got only a little food. Sitting on top of the rubble of a collapsed tea house, the bearded man said he had been going daily to an army relief camp for a tent for his family but had had no luck yet. “Every day I walk many kilometers only to return empty handed and I think my turn will never come,” he said. The United Nations warned last week that aid efforts after the disaster that killed more than 73,000 people and left around 3.5 million homeless were on a “knife edge” as the snows draw closer.
Ninety per cent of the hundreds of thousands of tents handed out are unsuitable for winter and relief workers and the Pakistani army are racing against time to help survivors build their own shelter. In the Neelum Valley, military engineers struggle to keep the erratic flow of road supplies to tens of thousands of survivors in the highlands along the disputed border with Indian-controlled Kashmir. Helicopters including heavy-lift US Chinooks have been bringing supplies daily but the number of affected people exceeds the supply. People like Arif have been innovative, making a room with sticks on which they spread maize chaff, but others are too tired or cold and wait for handouts.
Dozens were seen lined up at a few handout outlets set up by the army and the World Food Programme alongside the Neelum Road. At the centre a two-week ration for a family includes 25 kilograms of wheat flour, five kilograms of pulses, five kilograms of cooking oil, one packet of sugar and salt. “This quantity is not enough and then some people get more than the others because the distribution system is flawed,” said 51-year-old school teacher Mohammad Yaqub at the WFP’s outlet in the village of Patikka. “The tough ones get more than those who do not create scenes,” he complained
The Neelum Valley road was a constant target of Indian artillery fire until November 2003 when New Delhi and Islamabad agreed to a ceasefire on the heavily-militarised de facto border, ahead of launching a peace dialogue. “That was a horrific time for us yet the relief that the ceasefire brought in the past two years has been washed away by the earthquake,” said farmer Syed Ishtiaq Kazmi at Chaliana, a village overlooking Indian Kashmir’s Titwal region. “This is even worse than living under Indian fire,” Kazmi said. On both sides of the 50-kilometer stretch up to Chaliana from Muzaffarabad, more than 200 villages were ruined.—INP