Opinion - News Analysis   

Pakistan will not forget

Tariq Ali

THE SCALE of the disaster has traumatised the entire country — or perhaps not quite. In Lahore a group of people collecting funds for earthquake relief were apprehended and charged. They were amassing money for themselves. Even amidst devastation, life goes on. The global media have descended on the country, their reports repeating the same images and the same banal comments every few minutes. Soon they will move on, so that when they are really needed, to monitor relief efforts and reconstruction or keep watch on the funds, they will no longer be there. The citizens of the West will also forget. But Pakistan will never be able to.

The death toll has been underestimated. Balakot, a city that is the gateway to the beautiful Kaghan Valley and heavily dependent on tourism, has been destroyed. Corpses litter the streets. According to estimates, at least half of the city's population of 100,000 is dead. Survivors were, till Tuesday, without food or water because the roads were wrecked and helicopters were in short supply.

It is the same story in Muzaffarabad, in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Everything is wrecked. There have been anti-government protests and citizens have "looted" shops in search of food, just like in New Orleans. Further up on the India-Pakistan border, 400 Pakistani soldiers sitting in trenches were crushed to death as the mountain wall protecting them crashed and buried them alive.

What of the relief effort? The government is doing its best, but it is not enough. The absence of a proper infrastructure, a dearth of reserve funds to deal with the unexpected, and a total lack of preparedness despite annual disasters on a lesser scale, have cost many lives. To watch General Musharraf on television bemoaning the shortage of helicopters was instructive. A few miles to the north of the disaster zone there is a large fleet of helicopters belonging to the Western armies occupying parts of Afghanistan. Why could the U.S., German and British commanders not dispatch these to save lives? Is the war so fierce that they are needed every day? Three days after the earthquake, the U.S. released eight helicopters from "war duty" to help transport food and water to isolated villages. Too little, too late.

Even in normal times the poor have limited access to doctors and nurses. The shortage of medical staff has been a curse for 50 years. No regime has succeeded in creating a proper social infrastructure. At times like this the entire country feels the need but it will soon be forgotten, till the next disaster. In a privatised world, the state is not encouraged to buck the system. Things look bad this week, but they will look worse when rescue teams arrive in areas still out of reach. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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