Quotes of the Day
After 72 hours, hope rapidly fades of finding anyone buried alive after an earthquake. Yet more than four days after a massive temblor leveled the Pakistani town of Muzaffarabad, workers pounded a hole in a collapsed house and, to their amazement, out crawled five-year-old Zarabe Shah. Her shiny red dress and spiky hair were caked in dust, and she was scared and thirsty, but otherwise Zarabe was unhurt. By then, even her mother had given up hope, and had left the ruins of Muzaffarabad, a once-boisterous river town of some 150,000 that is the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, to grieve elsewhere for her lost daughter.
Zarabe won her race against time, but for millions of others the race to survive is just beginning. Any large-scale natural disaster poses enormous logistical problems, but the 7.6-magnitude earthquake that hammered northern Pakistan and India on Oct. 8 is especially challenging. In Pakistan, which bore the brunt of the damage, officials expect the final toll to exceed 50,000 dead, with many thousands injured and some 2 million people made homeless. In India, the quake killed 1,300 and left at least 100,000 without shelter. Many victims were children—the quake struck as kids were in their morning classes, in shabbily built schools that crumbled like sand castles during the first shock waves, crushing thousands of boys and girls. "A whole generation has been lost," laments Pakistani army spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan.
The quake has generated severe political aftershocks that will continue to jolt the region for months to come. So far, there is no sense that a shared tragedy is going to enhance the likelihood of India and Pakistan learning to live in peace. And worryingly, Islamic radical groups were the first to bring aid to Pakistani villages, which may boost their popularity—and undermine the position of Washington's embattled moderate ally, President Pervez Musharraf. True, aid is pouring in, especially on the Pakistani side of the border. But getting food, medicine and tents to remote yet heavily populated mountainous regions is a daunting task. Soon the snows will come, bringing more misery to those who have little shelter.
The relief effort is complicated by politics. Most of the destruction took place in Kashmir, a stunningly beautiful land of rivers, lakes and valleys wracked by decades of conflict and tragedy. India and Pakistan each control part of Kashmir, separated by a de facto border called the Line of Control—but both claim all of it. The two nuclear rivals have fought twice over the disputed territory, and nearly went to war again in 2002. Along the Line of Control, Indian and Pakistani armies face off across minefields and a maze of trenches, sometimes just a few hundred yards from each other's guns. New Delhi accuses Islamabad of using Islamic militants based on the Pakistani side of Kashmir as proxy fighters. To date, the conflict has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Kashmiris. If the border were open, say relief officials, aid could reach disaster victims much quicker.
The two sides declared a cease-fire in November 2003, and later began peace talks, but progress has been tortuously slow. Last week, in the wake of the quake, India flew more than 25 tons of medicines, blankets and tents to Pakistan, and there were tales, later denied by Islamabad, of Indian soldiers rushing across the front lines to dig Pakistanis out of their collapsed bunkers. But the decades-long mutual suspicion that New Delhi and Islamabad have of each other is hard to overcome. The tsunami was a tragic catalyst in bringing peace to Aceh, where a separatist insurgency had been under way for 30 years. But in neither Islamabad nor New Delhi is there any sense among officials that the earthquake may end hostilities in Kashmir. The conflict is too deep-seated, and involves two proud nations that find it hard to give ground. Prem Shankar Jha, a political columnist for the Indian magazine Outlook, argues that the cooperation between India and Pakistan during the tragedy "will undoubtedly help," but adds: "The earthquake is a very, very small thing in the entire peace process." Others don't even hold out this tiny hope. Says Ajai Sahni, executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management: "There will be some tokenism, but six months from now, there will hardly be a memory of it." Indeed, the Indian army said it had killed eight militants who tried to cross over the night after the temblor struck, and another eight two days later.
With fighting so common, locals at first misunderstood what had happened on the morning of Oct. 8. Indian Kashmiri Mussadiq Hussain Manhas, 54, heard a deep cracking inside the earth, and thought, "Maybe the war has started again." But then the ground "bounced," he says, "and it was clear this was not the work of men." Recounts Manhas: "I threw myself onto the ground, but the walls began toppling on me. So I ran to a walnut tree and clung to it. It was swinging like a pendulum in a clock. I could see walls and houses falling all around me, and cracks were appearing in the earth beneath my feet. Rocks were breaking off the mountains and crashing down."
On both sides of the border, villagers wondered where the soldiers were when they were most needed. "If they want us to be their people, if they think this is their place, then their priority should be their own people," says Manhas, a village elder in Kamal Kote. "If they don't help us, if they don't give us what we need, it's going to be in our hearts for a long time." Yet five days after the quake, the Indian Kashmiri mountain village of Skee, which was flattened, had received no help, even though it overlooks Uri, a base for thousands of Indian troops. There had been no air-drops of food, water or medicine, and no search and rescue teams that might have found survivors in the debris, say Skee villagers. All too often, say residents near the garrison posts, the army took care of its own casualties before it ventured out into the towns and villages. "We had to look after ourselves," admits Indian army spokesman Colonel Hemant Juneja. "Guaranteeing the nation's security is never less than our first priority."
In Pakistan, Musharraf's military regime prides itself on discipline and efficiency. But it took 30 hours for Musharraf to request extra helicopters from the U.S. (five Chinooks and three Black Hawks were summoned from combat duty in neighboring Afghanistan). His hesitancy, says Samina Ahmed, director of the Islamabad branch of the International Crisis Group, was a mixture of hubris and ignorance—at least in the early aftermath of the quake—over how calamitous the damage was. "The earthquake shows that the military lacks management skills," says Ahmed, faulting the slow pace of the army's response. "They can get boots on the ground, but that's about it."
It took Pakistani soldiers three days to reach Balakot, a town of 20,000 people that was reduced to a muddy smear, even though it is only 40 km up the road from their base in Mansehra. And when the military got to a collapsed school building to help dig out some 200 students trapped inside, enraged parents hurled stones at the soldiers. "For two days there were helicopters flying over us," says Javed, a shopkeeper whose son was one of the children entombed in the school. "We waved at them with red pieces of clothes but they just went by." In some places, British, French, Turkish and Iranian rescue teams arrived days before the Pakistani army did. When choppers eventually touched down in wrecked mountain hamlets, survivors mobbed the crews and fought each other for blankets and packets of biscuits. Some Pakistani officials reported that several times, stranded earthquake victims clung to helicopters as they lifted off, nearly causing crashes. In many cases, people didn't wait for the army. Thousands of volunteers began flooding up into the mountains, carrying shovels, pickaxes and iron rods to dig for survivors. Down in the main cities, collection centers popped up, and well-wishers donated tents, blankets, food and even cloth for burial shrouds.
The government's delayed reaction has played into the hands of militant Islamic groups. Organized and hardworking, the jihadis seized on the catastrophe to blame Musharraf's alliance with the U.S. in the war on terror for incurring Allah's wrath. The quake may have helped the radicals' cause. In Chehla Bandi village, members of an outlawed organization known as Lashkar-e-Taiba, sympathetic to al-Qaeda, were the first rescue workers to arrive. They cooked food, helped to bury the dead and shoveled through the debris to find the living. "They saved us when nobody came from the government," says one survivor, Ali Geelani, 28, "and if they ask me, I will go for jihad with them. Musharraf has given us the earthquake; they have given us life."
To be fair to Musharraf, the quake's epicenter was just 95 km north of the capital Islamabad, which also suffered damage, and the impact was cataclysmic, especially for a poor nation such as Pakistan. Stung by criticism, Musharraf pointedly told one Pakistani TV interviewer that his government had reacted a lot faster to the temblor than the Bush Administration had to Hurricane Katrina. But those factors probably won't lessen the political fallout for Musharraf, who faces the daunting task of rebuilding the northern third of his country, which will cost billions of dollars Pakistan does not have, at a time when extremist religious parties have already begun sniping at him for the army's slow response to the quake.
Because Musharraf's support of the Bush Administration's war on terror is unpopular with many Pakistanis, the U.S. jumped at the chance to join in the earthquake relief operations. Washington has promised $50 million in emergency aid, and already an airlift of blankets, plastic sheets, medical supplies and disaster-survival kits is being parachuted by C-130 army cargo planes to victims in the quake zone. But the Bush Administration has to balance its aid to Pakistan with its priorities in Afghanistan, where fighting against the Taliban has worsened in recent months. The Pakistani relief effort, said one Kabul-based U.S. official last Tuesday, has "sliced away some of our capacity in Afghanistan. So far, it hasn't impeded the war on terror—but it will if it goes past another 10 days." Most likely, the eight choppers on loan will return to their combat duties in Afghanistan, and other air support will be flown to Pakistan from American navy facilities in the Gulf, where they are serving as back-up for the Iraq war. This will put yet another burden on the U.S.'s resources in its two battle theaters. "Fixing Pakistan is going to take a while," says U.S. army spokesman Colonel Jim Yonts in Islamabad.
By Saturday, weary rescue teams had given up hope of finding another miracle case like Zarabe and were packing up their sniffer dogs to fly home. But even as waves of smaller quakes kept battering the region, the Indian and Pakistani armies overcame their initial sluggishness and were ferrying out relief packages and doctors to remote villages. Often, the choppers had to dodge rockslides from the peaks above as the pilots navigated the walled-in river valleys.
No amount of relief will alleviate the grief of those who have lost family and friends. On the Indian side of Kashmir, Manhas wanders through the graveyard under a yew tree pointing at fresh graves, overlaid with rocks and thorns to keep away hungry dogs. In all, Manhas helped to bury 70 people, many of them his relatives. "We had no coffins, so we made shrouds out of the cloth for winter quilts. I told people we didn't have time to wash the dead, and to bury them wherever they could, in their gardens, in their fields, because we didn't have space for everybody in the graveyard." After decades of conflict, Kashmiris must have thought they had suffered enough. But fate had more in store for them; and winter is coming.
- Tim McGirk | Islamabad
- In the cold Himalayan mountains, aid workers are rushing to help the survivors of a massive earthquake. Will there be political consequences?