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| December 19, 2005 | Monday | Ziqa’ad 16, 1426 |
The road to Bagh
Anybody who has not traversed the road from Kohala to Bagh in Azad Kashmir cannot truly understand the nature of the devastation wrought by the October 8 earthquake. The view from a chopper cannot do justice to the havoc and gloom prevailing in the region. More than two months after the earthquake, in parts there is no road, only an apology for one.
Boulders, which were remnants of the disaster and subsequent landslides, were lying on either side of the road which had been cleared by the army.
Forty-five seconds were all that was needed to convert Bagh into a heap of rubble. Now it has been turned into a vast relief camp.
The buildings or ‘plazas’, as the local people call them, in the main bazaar have collapsed into unusual twisted shapes. The havoc is visible through the side streets in the small habitations in the town and the surrounding mountain slopes.
Where the prison once stood, there is a huge pile of rubble which looks like a natural mound. All the prisoners died under its weight, while the police personnel perished. The schools and colleges collapsed on the innocent students.
The main highway and the roads in the town carry the banners of relief agencies working in the region; Muslim Aid, Islamic Relief, Kashmir International Relief Fund, among others, all based in the United Kingdom. While the names of Pakistani organizations and individual relief workers were too many to be mentioned.
The young women and men whom we met in a house partially demolished by the earthquake showed unusual resilience and courage. Tireless volunteers, they advised us to help the most destitute, the poorest of the poor, who have no voice and cannot reach the top of the queue, and those who might be overlooked.
Only now have they started to come to grips with the full scale of their loss but the cries of trapped children pleading for help will always haunt them.
The patriarch of the family said they would never be able to thank the “people of Pakistan” who had reached out to them in this crisis, especially the people of Karachi.
And had the army not intervened, he said, there would have been violence in an effort to reach for relief goods.
As darkness fell on the way back, that evening there was no electricity from Bagh to Kohala.
All the wayside shops were closed and the settlements looked deserted. People stood around aimlessly, waiting for the infrequent transport, and women and girls huddled around sources of water, for they are the eternal water carriers. As we drove away from Bagh, a sense of desolation descended upon us along with the darkness. Only when we reached the bridge at Kohala, did we see the glimmer of lights.
The writer is a former ambassador.
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