IT WAS 8.52am, and Rubi Noreen was walking home after delivering her six-year-old son to school when a powerful earthquake struck northern Pakistan and Kashmir. A building collapsed on her. Her right leg was crushed. She was buried for six hours before rescuers dragged her out. But as tomorrow's anniversary of that catastrophe approaches, the 28-year-old from the town of Balakot in North West Frontier Province has cause to wonder whether she would be better off dead.
Her son was killed, and it was five days before his body was found in the wreckage of his school. Her comfortable middle-class home was destroyed, killing two sisters and a brother. A hotel owned by her family slid into the Kaghan river, and barely a building in the entire town, built up the sides of a steep mountain valley, was left standing.
One year on, we would never have found Rubi by ourselves. We were led to her by an aid worker who picked his way through the twisted door jambs, shattered walls and fallen masonry of what was once a pleasant residential neighbourhood. Beneath a flimsy shelter constructed from tarpaulins and plastic sheeting on the foundations of her former home she lay, with another sister, on a filthy old double bed retrieved from the rubble. Her leg, swollen and yellow, was encased in a calliper. She is still unable to walk.
She was beyond tears, beyond emotion. “I want to go back to the old days, but I know that's impossible,” she said softly. “God gave me my son. God took him away. It’s as if someone has ripped my heart out.”
Rubi is not alone in her desolation. Before the earthquake Balakot was a prosperous town of around 40,000 people, a gateway to the hill stations further north. Today it looks apocalyptic. Locals claim that a single building of two or more storeys was left standing, and they are not exaggerating.
A colourful bazaar has sprung up along what used to be the main street, the bridge across the river has been repaired, and huge amounts of rubble have been removed. The authorities, working with an army of international aid agencies whose bases ring the town, have erected huts and tents to serve as schools and clinics. Most of Balakot, though, still lies in ruins.
About 8,000 of its inhabitants perished, many of them schoolchildren. As many again were injured. Some of the survivors have left, but most live in tents or jerry-built shelters beside the remnants of their properties. Even those whose homes stand cannot live in them because they are unsound.
There has been no reconstruction work in Balakot. It has been “red-zoned” because it sits right on a geological fault line. The Government in distant Islamabad plans to rebuild it near the village of Bakrial, about 14 miles away. The problem is that the new town will take years to build, the inhabitants of Bakrial are resisting, and the people of Balakot do not want to go.
“We have been living here for generations,” said Rubi. “The graves of our elders are here. We can’t think of leaving. We’ll die here.” With a winter approaching, and so little protection from the elements, they just might.
Balakot is an extreme example, but 12 months after Pakistan’s worst natural disaster the plight of the earthquake’s survivors remains parlous across mountainous region.
Of more than three million left homeless aid organisations believe nearly two million are still living in temporary shelters. There are 40,000 living in tents in official camps, and tens of thousands more in unofficial ones. Landslips have bitten out great chunks from the roads and everywhere are patched tents, crude tarpaulin shelters and huts fashioned from corrugated iron on the roofs of wrecked buildings and on scraps of empty land.
There will be no quick relief. Work has started on only a small fraction of the 600,000 homes that need rebuilding. On Thursday President Musharraf pledged to complete the programme by late 2008, but earlier in the week the Asia Development Bank predicted that the reconstruction programme would take eight years.
The problem is not money, though General Musharraf also appealed for an additional $800 million (£426 million). In the months after the quake 76 countries pledged $6.4 billion in loans and grants — $1.2 billion more than Pakistan said it needed. The Government can also claim mitigating circumstances. The earthquake zone was the size of Switzerland, with terrain even more rugged. Its administrative and physical infrastructure, including 3,700 miles of road, was destroyed. Winter snows were followed by a baking summer and unusually heavy monsoon rains that triggered further landslides and destruction.
As an Oxfam official remarked, even wealthy America could not rebuild hurricane-ravaged New Orleans within a year, and by common consent the Pakistani Government did well to avert a widely predicted second wave of deaths from exposure and disease last winter. Helped by NGOs, it has set up temporary schools and hospitals that are better, in many cases, than those destroyed.
But aid officials also say the Government lacked any contingency plan to cope with the disaster, squandered the spring building season, and then compounded matters by adopting a reconstruction plan that offered each household 175,000 rupees (£1,540) provided their new homes were built of cement and steel — not timber and mud — to make them earthquake-resistant.
It was a good idea. But in practice the price of cement and steel rocketed, as did the cost of transporting them to remote areas, and the grants scarcely begin to cover the cost of building for traditional extended households. The Government refused to let NGOs build houses. There was a severe shortage of trained labour. People had nothing with which to prove their ownership of property, and in some cases their land had vanished in landslides.
It is the landless who fill most of the 40 official camps around the town of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. One of them, al-Hadith, is home to 250 families who have lived cheek by jowl for a year in leaky khaki tents pitched on baked mud. Most are there because their property literally vanished: across the valley is a vast grey rockface exposed when half a mountain simply collapsed in the earthquake, carrying their homes with it.
The “widows’ corner” of the camp illustrated another problem with the rebuilding programme. There we found Nasima Bibi. She is 25, illiterate, and as a woman has little independent status in this deeply conservative society. Indeed before the quake many lived in purdah; their husbands were their only link to the outside world.
Clutching one young child, and with two others tugging at her clothes, she told in a whisper how her sleeping husband was crushed to death when their house collapsed. She is entitled to 100,000 rupees (£880) compensation for his death, and 175,000 rupees to rebuild her home but to apply to officials for those grants is to her inconceivable. “I am a woman,” she said simply. Asked how she saw her future, she fell silent. She had no answer.
The occupants of camps such as alHadith now live six or eight to a tent. They have few possessions beyond rugs, blankets and cooking pots. They have a rudimentary electricity and water supply but no heating, no work and no hope. “It’s terrible,” said Muhammad Shefiq Kiyani, a 52-year-old farmer who lost his wife and two sons and had his leg amputated below the knee. “I no longer see any aim in life.”
They have to get through another winter, one unlikely to be as mild as the last. The international relief effort has wound down and Western officials are sceptical about government promises to produce winterised tents. The delay in rebuilding means hundreds of thousands of people remain vulnerable, Oxfam cautioned this week.
The survivors are tough and resilient, but they are worried. “We’ll do something to save our children, but I don’t know what,” said Muhammad Rafiq, 54, who shares a tent with his wife and eight surviving offspring. “It’s a frightening time coming up.”
From Martin Fletcher in Balakot
Source: TimeOnline UK (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2392249,00.html)
http://www.pakquake2005.com/article.php?story=20061008122659331