Two weeks on, many quake survivors still cut off

By David Brunnstrom

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) – The engineering
battalion promised by NATO to help reach untold numbers of
quake survivors in the rugged hills of northern Pakistan cannot
arrive soon enough, an international aid official said on
Saturday.

“At the moment, the emphasis is on the need for road
engineers. If we can open the roads, that would solve
everything,” World Food Programme spokeswoman Mia Turner said.

“We’re thinking more than 2,000 villages have to be reached
and they have to be reached by roads,” she said two weeks after
the shattering earthquake killed more than 50,000 people and
wrecked the few roads which wound high into the hills.

“If these people were connected, we wouldn’t be carrying
stuff up and down mountains on mules,” she said as more mule
trains set off up into the hills from the destroyed Pakistani
Kashmir capital of Muzaffarabad.

They are laden with food and, most crucially, tents in
hopes of getting people under shelter before the harsh
Himalayan winter descends in just a few weeks.

More than 74,000 people are known to have been injured and
opening the roads would also allow the many, many more in
cut-off villages to get medical treatment without which they
face death.

The helicopter aid fleet, fewer than 100, cannot deliver
enough or reach everywhere and pilots report villagers waving
red or orange flags to signal they needed help, Turner said.

Some were even trying to clear areas for helipads and
marking them with an H, the international symbol for such
landing spots.

ROUND THE CLOCK

The Pakistani army is working around the clock to open
roads broken, covered by landslides or swept away by the
October 8 quake in Pakistani Kashmir and adjoining North West
Frontier Province.

Lieutenant-General Salahuddin Satti said he hoped the road
up Pakistani Kashmir’s Jhelum valley would be re-opened in a
week, but it would take six weeks for the nearby Neelum valley.

Hopes of a massive airlift to bring survivors to safety
were dashed on Friday when NATO turned down a United Nations
appeal.

The U.S.-dominated military alliance said it would send up
to 1,000 troops to help, but would not stage an airlift to
rescue survivors on the scale of the 1948-49 Berlin operation
for the beleaguered people of Soviet-blockaded West Berlin.

“This is the first time NATO has done something like this
on this scale,” NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer
said after the alliance agreed to the deployment.

Aside from a battalion of Spanish, Polish and Italian
construction engineers, NATO will send a multi-national medical
unit to back up U.N. efforts and a water-purification team.

The WFP’s Turner welcomed the decision. “Right now, there’s
a feeling we need all the help we can get. We need whatever
they are providing and more,” she said, echoing other aid
officials who complain the world is not doing enough to help.

HELICOPTERS, TENTS

But NATO will send only a few more helicopters to join the
40 that members of the alliance have sent.

“NATO is not a humanitarian organization. NATO is playing
its role within the framework of what it is,” de Hoop Scheffer
said.

Helicopters are the only means of getting quickly deep into
the hills. The nearest are in India, where the quake killed
1,300 people on its side of Kashmir, but it has fought two of
its three wars with Pakistan over the region, which both claim.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told India he would
accept helicopters, but only if they came without crews given
the enormous political sensitivity. India said no.

Musharraf told the BBC he was ready to accept all other
help, and talks had to be held with India on how the de facto
border dividing Kashmir could be opened for the benefit of
survivors.

But he also expressed disappointment that the world had not
come forward with pledges of money to rebuild the shattered
region, where the quake wiped out entire towns and villages.

“I know we have been donated about $620 million or
something, which is totally inadequate,” he said. The cost
should be more than $5 billion, he added.

The United Nations has received just $57 million in firm
commitments and $33 million in promises toward its $312 million
appeal for Pakistan, a spokeswoman said in Geneva.

An estimated 2 million or more people are homeless but
tents able to withstand the bitter Himalayan winter are scarce
and Pakistan pleads daily for the world to send more.

U.N. coordinator Jesper Lund said international aid
agencies planned to send 83,000 tents — “all they have in the
world.” “But it’s still a drop in the ocean,” he said.

“We need hundreds of thousands — at least 450,000, but
that’s only a rough estimate.”