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SALAMABAD, Oct 14: After pulling his three daughters out of the rubble of his house and burying them, Mohammad Sadiq sat down in his village in occupied Kashmir and waited for help to come.
Five days after last week’s earthquake he was still waiting, sleeping under open skies, praying his three-year-old son would not fall ill.
Finally, he and hundreds of other villagers decided to walk to the nearest road and sit there until someone gave them food and blankets.
Sadiq is resigned, perhaps too shocked to complain. “How can I criticize anyone, when God is angry with us?,” he said.
Other villagers from Gawalan, near the Line of Control (LoC), are not so reluctant to lay blame.
“The government of India is sending relief to Pakistan, and they are not helping us, who they claim are their people,” said farmer Syed Mukhtar Hussein.
The earthquake should have been the perfect opportunity for New Delhi to rebuild bridges with the Muslims of occupied Kashmir and to reinforce a shaky peace process.
Perhaps ironically, the only organization to recognize this has been the Indian army.
Often vilified as an occupying force in held Kashmir and accused of human rights abuses, the army is using its formidable presence here to ferry victims to hospital by helicopter, reach far-flung villages and help organize the relief effort.
Otherwise, it is beginning to look like a chance wasted.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has promised money would be no object to bring relief to desperate Kashmiris.
That is scant comfort for the tens of thousands of villagers still awaiting tents and sleeping rough under increasingly cold mountain skies.
PUBLIC RESPONSE POOR: “It was a golden opportunity for the government of India to show a human face,” said Yasin Malik, head of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. “But the government missed the opportunity.”
But if many are angry at New Delhi for not responding more quickly to the disaster, what has really surprised and hurt Kashmiris is the tepid response of ordinary Indians.
“When the tsunami happened, when the Gujarat earthquake happened, Kashmiris donated money and were involved in the aid effort,” said Noor Ahmed Baba, head of the political science department at Kashmir University, Srinagar.
“But this time we have not seen Indian civil society moving to help Kashmir.”
And almost a week after the quake, UNICEF — playing a major role in Azad Kashmir — is still waiting for Permission to come into occupied Kashmir, aid workers say.
After December’s tsunami, hundreds of Indian volunteers, doctors and relief workers descended on the country’s southeastern coast determined to provide whatever help they could.
When an earthquake devastated the western state of Gujarat in 2001, Indian businesses stepped forward to help. “But no one seems to be coming to our aid,” moderate Kashmiri leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said this week.
A handful of Indian volunteers arrived in held Kashmir this week, but the aid effort is overwhelmingly home-grown.
—Reuters
