NEELUM VALLEY ROAD: Children burned incense on Wednesday at the graves of family and friends killed when the Kashmiri earthquake flattened their refugee camp, while their parents hoped the disaster might have a silver lining of sorts.
More than 300 people were killed when the Oct. 8 quake hit the three Kamsar camps on the Neelum Valley road outside Muzaffarabad.
Survivors said the dead included more than 100 children who were killed when three schools were destroyed, two of them collapsing down a steep gorge into the fast-flowing Neelum River.
The refugees, natives of the Indian side of the divided territory of Kashmir, were forced over to the Pakistani side by fighting 15 years ago.
They welcomed a call by President Pervez Musharraf for the opening of the border to occupied Kashmir for earthquake victims, although some questioned whether they would be allowed to make the journey.
Imtiaz Butt said his family was forced from their home in occupied Kashmir by militants fighting Indian rule.
“We were told that we would stay at the camps for only a few months. But over 15 years have passed now, and we are still here,” he said.
“Half our families are still on the other side of Kashmir. It is a good idea to allow Kashmiris to move freely across the Line of Control, but I don’t think they will allow the refugees to go as well.”
Butt said he wanted to resettle in occupied Kashmir, but refugees had been barred from using a bus service launched between both sides of Kashmir this year on the grounds that would hurt the Pakistan-led “freedom struggle”.
Butt said he wanted to see Kashmir as an independent state, ruled by neither India nor Pakistan.
“We have no future here. We have no jobs. We cannot spend our whole lives sitting here in a refugee camp.”
“Everybody here supports that,” he said of independence.
However, others at the camp appeared reluctant to speak openly, and quickly drifted away when soldiers arrived with a truck to distribute water.
Khuwaja Abdul Rehman, a refugee at a camp in another part of Muzaffarabad, said he wanted to find out about his family in Indian Kashmir, which was also hit by the earthquake.
“If the road opened today and the announcement is made, I am ready to go right now,” he said.
At Kamsar, Khuwaja Nisar Ahmad expressed irritation about the debate in Pakistan as to what relief assistance should be accepted from India, after Musharraf said Pakistan would accept Indian helicopters, but not pilots.
“We need a lot of help at this point. And I don’t care whether it comes from Pakistan, India or America, or the Mujahideen,” he said, referring to the guerillas battling in Indian Kashmir.
“We have nothing to eat, and nowhere to live. We still have bodies under the rubble and we have to take them out.
“We have lost a large number of our family ... What we need is shelter.”
The Kamsar camps resemble a bombsite and refugees have pitched tents to replace tin-roofed concrete houses flattened by the quake, which killed thousands of people across the region.
A resident pointed over the cracked and crumbling edge of the gorge down to the river at debris far below by the riverside.
“There’s a school, and there’s another,” he said, pointing at the remains of another building halfway down.
Survivors had recovered strips of twisted tin roofing and used them to cover graves of young and old in a makeshift cemetery by the roadside, where a group of children laid flowers and burned incense.
“It’s grandpa,” said one little boy with a group of other children by a grave.—Reuters
