Winter is the enemy

MORE people could perish in harsh weather than they did in the catastrophic earthquake of Oct 8. Winter has already set in, and with each passing day temperatures will be dropping to make a mockery of tented habitats.

Talk of ‘winterized’ tents is little more than a consolation exercise. Though admittedly better than the ordinary canvas tops, they will be of little help against the biting cold and heavy snow in the quake-affected areas.

It is now or never. And it is not a question of weeks but of days as winter’s harsh onslaught has already begun.

The response of the international community to the 21st century’s biggest natural disaster remains callously half-hearted and inadequate. Some 80 per cent of the one billion dollars pledged had materialized in the first week of the Asian tsunami of December 2004. In the case of the earthquake disaster, a pitiful two per cent ($1.5 million) of the $95 million pledged for shelter and food at the Geneva Donors Conference (October 26-27) had come through by the end of October.

More cash may have trickled through in driblets. Figures, even those officially quoted, remain fluid, tentative and hardly reliable. The survivors in the remote mountains are facing “much harder conditions” than the tsunami survivors, as President Pervez Musharraf himself has said.

The tsunami with all the havoc it played with land and people was nothing compared to the logistical nightmare that the Oct 8 quake has been.

The prospect of rehabilitation of the seriously injured, particularly amputees, is grim. Surgical intervention, without post-op care, will be of little value. Provision of artificial limbs will be more of a morale-boosting PR exercise than anything else with the means available to the authorities. The magnitude and the fallout of the disaster surpass imagination.

Aid agencies warn that if a minimum of $2.5 million is not provided for food and shelter and healthcare soon, the fate of an estimated three million people may well be sealed.

Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief coordinator, said in Geneva recently that the world “never had this kind of logistical nightmare ever . This is (any time) worse than tsunami,” which ravaged beaches and plains that could be accessed by land and air.

Kofi Annan’s ‘flash appeal’ for immediate international help in cash flows and materials did not elicit the kind of response it should have. He said that to avoid another “massive wave of deaths, urgent help was needed by Pakistan”.

The point for us to ponder is why the world is reacting so half-heartedly to our unprecedented disaster. Furthermore, why should the international media continue to describe the quake as ‘South Asian’ instead of as a Pakistan/Azad Kashmir quake?