Quake survivors now mired in squalor

MUZAFFARABAD: Shortly after a cold rain had finally quit, German relief volunteer Waqas Sajid walked the muddy paths of this city’s most disease-ridden tent camp for earthquake survivors. Picking his way through mounds of rotting garbage and excrement, he felt like a character in Dante’s “Inferno.”

“This place is like hell,” said the 26-year-old paramedic from Frankfurt. “People are living together in squalor. Everyone is coughing and the babies get sicker every day. I cannot imagine how they will survive. Hell cannot be any worse than this.”

Situated on the site of a destroyed government college, it’s known as the Old Government Camp. The name is misleading, since neither the government nor any other relief group had anything to do with the impromptu compound until a team of German doctors stumbled upon it last month.

What they found was an unsightly collection of 350 tents and more than 2,000 people that sprang up on a dirt-caked cricket field days after October’s magnitude 7.6 earthquake.

Although scores of camps housing tens of thousands of refugees in the city are run by the government and domestic or foreign relief groups, Old Government Camp had no sponsor. People just began showing up there and erecting their hovels.

Unchecked by soldiers or international aid officials, conditions at the unsanctioned site quickly deteriorated — worsened by cold nights and days of rain.

Doctors blame the outbreak of infectious disease, including hundreds of cases of diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections, on a shortage of toilets, foul drinking water and the refugees’ close quarters. The German medical team, from the group Humanity First, discovered the camp after arriving in Muzaffarabad. They reported the situation to foreign health officials, who said they did not even know that it existed. Since then, several groups have rushed to the camp and have been shocked by the squalor.

“These are deplorable, appalling sanitation conditions — absolutely and completely inadequate,” said Dr. John Watson, a communicable disease monitor for the World Health Organization in Muzaffarabad. “There has been no access to latrines. People are relieving themselves indiscriminately. This is a recipe for an epidemic.” For weeks, health officials have warned of the possibility of widespread death from cold and exposure if residents of isolated mountain villages did not move into tent camps in the lower valleys for shelter, food and health care.

Experts including Salahud Din, a Humanity First physician from the Netherlands who helped set up a new medical clinic at Old Government Camp, question that wisdom. “People might be better off back up in the mountains, taking their chances against the elements in their own villages, than to endure conditions like this,” Din said.

At this teeming camp, even some of the smaller tents house 18 people. Infants crawl on dirt floors and through puddles, ignoring the carpets their mothers have spread on the ground. Dozens of goats scavenge from garbage mounds as chickens and feral cats wander between open campfires where women cook their daily meals, shooing away the ever-present flies.

Many of the tents are made of a single layer of burlap, and rain drips inside as steadily as a hospital IV machine. Some residents have dug trenches to divert the rainwater, but others have no tools to do so. Worst off are families with slapdash shacks made from sheets of corrugated tin that lean against a centre pole, with no way to stop the wind and rain.

At first, there was only one tank for drinking water, which soon became contaminated. Without latrines, residents relieved themselves just outside the doors of their tents, Din and other doctors said. Volunteers from the aid group Oxfam have constructed a second water tower and installed sets of latrines around the camp’s perimeter. They’re stressing better sanitation. But doctors still worry that the worst is yet to come. On his first visit last month, Watson diagnosed 170 cases of acute diarrhoea — “sick men, women and children — lots of them,” he said.

Officials say the diarrhoea, which could lead to worse illnesses such as cholera, has lessened in the camp with treatment.

Doctors also found cases of gastrointestinal infections, vomiting, meningitis, pneumonia, measles, scabies, chicken pox and infectious hepatitis — bacterial illnesses that can spread easily in the absence of proper sanitation, hygiene and water.

Among adults in the quake-struck area, respiratory illnesses are the second most-pressing medical problem after quake-related injuries, according to the World Health Organization. But for children under 5, respiratory infections are the No. 1 concern, a trend that worries Humanity First’s Din. “Once children come down with respiratory illnesses,” he warned, “it can spread through the camps like wildfire.”

Although they say Old Government Camp is perhaps the worst of disease incubators, widespread sickness is also being found elsewhere.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service

More aid-for-trade carrots offered to poor nations

HONG KONG: Rich nations are talking about a fresh trade package for the world’s poorest countries as a way out of the shaky World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks, now underway here. The details and scope of the package are sketchy but officials from industrialised nations, seeking to deflect attention from their failure in bridging a gap with developing nations, have been trickling out nuggets of information about their new plan.

Japan, for instance, has said it will pledge 10 billion dollars to help train and build export capacity for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), the world’s poorest 50 countries as defined by international organisations. The European Union said that it will increase its spending on trade- related aid to LDCs to 1.2 billion dollars a year. EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson proposed, on Tuesday, to allow duty free exports from 32 countries, including small economy nations.

“We need this down payment for developing countries here in Hong Kong because this is a development round and because it would pave the way for serious development gains ... which will come from the core market access negotiations,” said Mandelson. The US has signalled its backing for the proposal but said that competitive products in the global market, such as textiles from Bangladesh, should remain out of any new offers. The Europeans, upset at the critical tone of US trade diplomats who point fingers at the EU for blocking a trade deal, are now challenging the US side to come up with similar offers.

“Our ‘Everything But Arms’ agreement gives the LDCs completely duty and quota free access to our markets. I call on all other developed economies and advanced developing economies to match this initiative,” said Mariann Fischer Boel, member of the European Commission responsible for agriculture and rural development. US trade representative Rob Portman said, his country was prepared to make similar increases in trade aid and in widening its duty-free imports from the LDCs. Portman clarified that the US offer would expand on current trade promotion programmes like the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), and General Systems and Preferences (GSP).

AGOA is a plan that allows duty free imports from sub-Saharan Africa when African nations meet certain criteria while GSP gives exemptions from the more general rules of the WTO. “This is the way that we are going to implement development packages through our legislative process. It’s how we would have to do it under our laws,” Portman insisted.

The new parts in the US proposal would revolve around extending exemptions to include more products and “some flexibility over time”.

The aid package talk from rich nations follows a WTO announcement, last week, that eased rules on drugs for poor nations to give them better access to essential drugs. Two weeks ago, the WTO also gave poor nations until 2013 to start implementing intellectual property rules. Civil society groups attending the meetings here were quick to question the motives behind the new “aid for trade” package.

The international advocacy group ActionAid warned in a statement here, on Tuesday , that all too often such offers come with conditions attached. The group noted that the money from Japan’s 10 billion dollar offer to the world’s poorest countries will come in the form of loans — not exactly a development tool.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are concerned that the final offer, when and if it materialises, could sedate poor nations to drop some of their demands that have counter-balanced rich nations’ claims. Industrialised countries want developing countries to open their markets more dramatically for farm products, goods and services while developing nations would like to see an end to the dumping of agricultural products through export subsidies and other export support. They say farm support in rich nations has had a disastrous impact on millions of farm workers in developing countries.

“Trade-related development assistance is certainly desirable, but it must not become a pretext for arm-twisting by industrialised countries that obliges developing countries to mortgage their future industrial development and public services in exchange,” said Guy Ryder, general secretary of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), a coalition of labor unions.

An analysis of the new aid package to the LDCs, on Tuesday, said the offers will do little to improve the current situation of the poorest nations. Those countries have been accorded similar exceptions and extended time periods to implement some trade agreements in the past.—Dawn/IPS News Service