KARACHI, Nov 10: People in Mansehar have urged volunteers of certain organizations working in various relief camps to hand out relief goods only after properly identifying the seekers as survivors.

Talking over the telephone from Mansehra, they claimed that anybody posing to be a survivor could get relief items, for instance, from the MQM relief camp set up near the Government Degree College, four kilometres from the town, which is the hub of relief activity but not that badly affected.

“Just put on a pair of old, torn clothes and these volunteers will give you things you say you need urgently, particularly rations,” said Babar, the principal of a private school.

“Other non-governmental organizations having local volunteers are rather wary of impostors and usually successfully ward off such elements,” he added.

“There are many families hailing from the affected hilly areas but actually living in the plains which are not much affected by the earthquake. They have national identity cards with their addresses showing them as natives of the Kaghan valley. Nobody can distinguish them from the non-affected ones,” said Abid, a government employee, adding: “Besides, the relief organizations know that all people seeking rations are poor and they do not deny them such items. Poor are everywhere in the country, but the things meant for the survivors should reach them alone.”

Naveed, a shopkeeper, said people who were not at all affected by the earthquake had filled their houses with relief items.

“There are about a dozen new blankets and heaps of boxes of relief items in the house of a neighbour hailing from Afghanistan,” the man added.

They lamented that some greedy people had turned this “tragedy into an opportunity to grab things” and alleged that even well-off people such as transporters used their vehicles to collect goods “for their own relief.”

There are daily wage-earners who prefer standing in a queue for relief items to working as labourers.

“That’s why construction workers are hard to find even at Rs250 a day,” said Fareed, a mason. “Previously they crowded the roundabout in Mansehra town for work and charged only Rs130 a day.”

People also urged the authorities and NGOs to stop giving relief goods to nazims and other politicos because they distributed these items only to their own supporters and ignored people who in their opinion might have voted against them.

“In the present situation, the army is the best organization to be trusted with relief goods,” said a social worker.

There were however people who opposed preferring the army to the elected representatives of local people.—Naseer Ahmad