Death Lingers in Pakistan

NEW DELHI — A powerful earthquake brought death and destruction to the mountainous northern parts of Pakistan.

Weeks later, relief workers had yet to reach hundreds of villages.

After visiting the areas worst affected around Muzzafarabad and Balakot, the emergency coordinator of Caritas Pakistan, Tariq Raza, said in an Oct. 22 report that 20% of the survivors are “still unreachable” in the mountainous Kashmir region under Pakistani control.

“Across the mountains north of Balakot, an inestimable number of people have died in 1,000 villages that remain inaccessible,” he said. The survivors there remain trapped without an escape, and the rescuers struggle to find a way, his report said.

He predicted that the number of dead and injured would be” substantially” higher than the Pakistani government's count of 55,000 dead and 78,000 hurt.

Provincial governments in the quake-hit region have put the death toll at nearly 80,000, while nearly 1,500 deaths have been reported from the sparsely populated Indian side of Kashmir.

“We are faced with the biggest humanitarian crisis in our nation's history,” bishop Joseph Coutts, director of Caritas Pakistan, told the Register Oct. 26 from his diocesan office in Faisalabad.

“Thousands of people are stranded in their remote villages. But we do not have the means to reach out to them,” said Bishop Coutts, who has made three trips to the disaster zone to put in place the Church's advance relief center at Mansehra, about 62 miles north of Islamabad.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church in India is working on a $6.8 million comprehensive relief and rehabilitation project and arranging for 1,260 special tents for earthquake-hit villages in Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian website NewKerala.com reported.

With more than 80% of the houses and other buildings in the quake zone flattened or unfit for living, Bishop Coutts said that even those within reach of the relief workers are “desperately looking for shelter material.”

According to the Pakistani government, the Oct. 8 earthquake, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, rendered more than three million people homeless and destroyed property and infrastructure worth $5 billion over an estimated 10,810 square miles in the north.

With massive landslides triggered by the earthquake making remote villages perched along high mountain slopes inaccessible except by helicopter, Caritas described the ongoing relief operation in Pakistan as “one of the toughest relief operations the world has ever known.”

Although nearly 100 helicopters are in operation (including those dispatched by the United States), Caritas said that “many more aircraft and tents are needed; these are still too few … to reach more than 1,000 remote villages with life-saving supplies,” the report said.

“Shelter is crucial, and if people don't get that soon there will be a crisis of a different kind — people will start dying of exposure,” cautioned the Caritas report as snowfall has already started in the high mountains in the foothills of the Himalayas.

“The most urgent need is shelter. Thousands of people are freezing in the cold,” Bishop Coutts said.

Mass Graves

Bishop Coutts added that Caritas, along with Catholic Relief Services, has set up emergency relief centers in several of the worst-hit areas to distribute relief material while the international Caritas network is rushing thousands of tents.

“The scenes of devastation are unbelievable. There is hardly anything intact in the villages or the towns,” said John Joseph, executive secretary of the Caritas unit in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.

While the road to worst-hit Muzzafarabad was snarled in traffic, Joseph said even the airports in Islamabad and Lahore are “almost choked” due to the relief material pouring in from across the world.

“This is a calamity of gigantic proportions,” said Bishop Anthony Lobo of Islamabad-Rawalpindi, secretary general of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Pakistan.

Pointing out that Pakistan is not used to such a massive calamity — the last major disaster here was a quake in 1935 — Bishop Lobo said the challenge is how to get the relief material to the neediest people.

Besides helicopters, the bishop said, other means of transport would be donkeys and mules to carry the material along the rugged mountain terrain.

The enormity of the humanitarian crisis and relief work, he said, is symbolized by government officials declaring the site of the collapse of a school with 300 girls near Balakot as a “cemetery,” as no one is prepared to dig up the rotting bodies.

Similarly, with even international relief workers calling off rescue operations in several areas due to the stench of rotting bodies in the debris, entire villages have been declared open cemeteries. The Garan Dheri and Garlaat villages near Balakot, where thousands of people were buried alive, have been converted into cemeteries with local Muslim clerics asking the locals to erect walls around them.

Meanwhile, another major crisis is emerging. Medical relief workers from Caritas Germany reported Oct. 24 that in a desperate bid to save injured people, doctors are forced to perform emergency surgeries without anaesthesia in the remote villages.

Andreas Fabricius, health and nutrition specialist from Caritas Germany, said after visiting several villages in an army helicopter that some people's limbs were amputated “under makeshift circumstances. Many individuals have not received any medical attention at all.”

As a result, Fabricius said, the wounds of many patients have turned septic, and unhealthy living conditions could result in disease outbreaks in the remote villages.

Anto Akkara writes from New Delhi, India.