Focus on earthquake victims in the north

A group of men stood uncertainly around a truck, laden with relief goods, which had just arrived at the Mansehra police station in Balakot, about 180 km from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. The crowd swelled suddenly as a man emerged from the front of the truck and clambered up the back, pausing to look down at an assistant once he stood on top of the vehicle, before kneeling to unclasp the latch that would allow the hatch to open. "My house was completely destroyed by last Saturday's earthquakes," Haji Wali Rehman, a tall, bearded man with tears in his eyes, told IRIN as he watched the truck-driver and other men pull at the planks that appeared to have been nailed to the truck's hatch in order to fortify it. "I have nothing left. And we haven't been helped out in any way, by anybody," he complained, moving to one side to allow another old, stooping man to come closer. "A lot of people have suffered. They've seen their houses completely destroyed or damaged so badly that they can't live in them any more," Ghulam Jilani, the old man who said he came from Balakot, told IRIN. He stopped speaking abruptly and surged forward with the rest of a rapidly growing crowd of earthquake-affected locals as a triumphant shout from the man atop the truck signalled the successful opening of the vehicle's hatch. "I can't say how many houses have been destroyed, but it's a fairly large number," Jilani added, once he had given up the scramble to get to the truck to the younger men who elbowed and pushed their way past. A young man with a beard who had decided to wait rather than join the melee said he had heard the area most badly affected was higher up in the mountains. "It's called Hingrai, with a population of about 20,000 people and they suffered the most extensive damage that has been reported or heard of," Sabir, who uses a single name, told IRIN. TWIN EARTHQUAKES At least 24 people were killed when two earthquakes, measuring 5.7 and 5.5 on the Richter scale, hit Pakistan on February 14. The Peshawar Seismic Centre, the country's main earthquake monitoring organisation, estimated the epicentre to be roughly 200 km northeast of Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), but a centre official told IRIN on Monday that they would wait for data to be collected from all over Pakistan before the exact location could be pinpointed.

Another house damaged by the earthquake. A crack snaking its zig-zag route down the wall is clearly visible to the left

The two earthquakes occurred in the mountainous region of Pakistan's north, about an hour and a half apart in the afternoon on Saturday. Dozens were said to have been injured as mudslides and landslides, precipitated by the earthquake, showered down on roads and the little goat-tracks that wind up and down the hills. Tremors were felt all across the NWFP and stretched across Pakistani-controlled Kashmir to Srinagar in the section of the disputed valley controlled by India, a seismologist told IRIN earlier in the week. However, the impact was worse in towns and villages across the NWFP, particularly in the district of Mansehra and its sub-districts, Balakot and Battagram where terrified locals had spent five nights in the cold by Thursday, fearing that their already damaged houses could collapse if another earthquake were to occur. Local police officials, who had been engaged in relief and rescue operations, told IRIN that heavy snows earlier in the week as well as routes blocked by landslides were hampering efforts to trace and help victims in remote areas. "This is difficult terrain, it's mountainous, there's snow and no telephones, so the news is continuing to filter in," Attaullah Khan, the Nazim (district administrator) for Battagram, told IRIN on Monday. Battagram was one of the worst-affected districts where 13 people died after their passenger van was knocked off a road and into a river by a falling boulder. TOO MANY PEOPLE, NOT ENOUGH TENTS About fifteen kilometres further up the hills, on roads and dirt-tracks that wind their way up the mountains of the Hindukush, Abid Hussain, a diminutive man with the ubiquitous beard that every local sports in Pakistan's north, sprang from one rock to the next as he negotiated his way up an extremely narrow goat-path. "Wait till you see the damage to our houses," he told IRIN. Hussain lives in Sehwar, a small hamlet in Hingrai - a sub-district of sorts where, according to locals, about 20,000 people live in small pockets of mud and concrete huts scattered across the hills.

A relief tent, set up by a religious organisation, in Hingrai, a small hamlet where hundreds of people saw their homes destroyed or damaged

Hussain refused to slow down even as the narrow path became smaller still. "Look at this," he said, motioning towards a house that had tilted over and was apparently being supported by a couple of sturdy logs. "How do you expect people to live in something like this?" Hussain asked, pointing to a blue and white tent that stood at the edge, it seemed, of a precipice. Its ropes, snaking down past the rolling curve of the hill, were tied to a tree a level below. "They've given us 25 tents. But these are not enough: there are usually ten members to a family, and three or four families are forced to cram into these tents together at night," he explained. Residents are afraid of going into their houses at night because they are terrified by the thought of another earthquake occurring when they are inside, Hussain explained. He turned a corner - or, rather, the path did - past the edge of another house that stood dangerously close to the edge of a steep incline. "Hold on," he snapped, when the three men behind him had followed suit and found themselves on a small courtyard with a sheer drop on either side. A small dog snarled at the visitors as it tried to free itself from a stout-looking chain and Hussain shouted at two elderly women sitting in the rapidly fading sunlight to go inside. "The government isn't doing anything to help," Haji Ghazi, another white-bearded resident, told IRIN as Hussain pointed to a crack that zig-zagged its way down the mud-caked wall of a house. "What have they done? Nobody from the government has come to see what problems we're facing. We had high-level dignitaries come here, pose for pictures as they announced aid packages, and then leave. They have no idea what we're going through. No one seems to care," he grumbled.

Another house, with its walls threatening to collapse, shored up by wooden planks

He was interrupted by the sound of Hussain urging his visitors to come and take a closer look at something. The old man stood, one foot pointing downwards, anchored only by the heel, right at the edge of the little, man-made plateau, and pointed to another house that appeared to be on the verge of falling over. "See this? This house has been pushed forward by the foundations by at least three or four feet," Hussain said, leaning precariously on one leg. The earth displaced by the forward momentum of the house had been pushed into a little pile and that had acted as a natural brake, stopping the structure just before it would have toppled over. THE NEXT SLIGHTEST TREMOR "The district and deputy district administrators did come and disburse about 20 tents here. But they're not enough: All these houses have been destroyed," Master Sarwar, who appeared to be the local school-teacher, told IRIN, gesturing with his hand to show the visitors the scale of the destruction that had been visited on the area. The blue and white of a few aid tents bobbed pleasantly against the backdrop of lush green fields in the valley down below and the snow-capped peaks of the Hindukush Mountains, far away in the distance. In the foreground, however, two houses stood next to each other in various stages of disrepair - one, with a kaleidoscope of cracks running down its sides, had been propped up with tree-branches, wooden logs, even a solitary metallic-looking rod. The other looked worse: one of its walls appeared to be threatening to uproot itself from the seam where it joined with the others. "Where do these people go? We have women and children who've been forced to spend each night out in the freezing cold because they're afraid to go into these houses which they fear will fall down with the next slightest tremor," Sarwar asked, angrily. MONEY FOR REHABILITATION, NOT TENTS "I think on the Hingrai side, we've distributed about 200 tents. The problem is that anyone whose house has developed a crack wants a tent. Yesterday, we gave about 140 tents in the Hingrai area," Khan, the Mansehra district coordination officer, said.

One of the tents, donated by the government, where locals say four to five families have been forced to seek shelter together

"My own idea is that even if we give 20,000 tents, it won't solve the problem. What we're interested in is that the local people should be given some money so they can repair their houses themselves," he added. Meanwhile, in a separate move, the district government had announced the opening of a relief fund for people affected by the earthquakes, to which the government had already donated about US $1,800 which didn't seem enough, Khan explained. "We're already inviting donations for that. No one wants to live in a tent. Money spent on tents can be better spent on rehabilitation, I think," he maintained.