Quake survivors angry at government inaction

Across Pakistan-administered-Kashmir, the same rubble-strewn scene is repeated as irate locals allege that assistance from the government has been far from forthcoming. Instead, they say, most of the population has been forced to fend for itself, with some help from non-government organisations.

In the hamlet of Lashdahar, 50km from Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, rubble from destroyed houses has still not been removed from the mountainside. Goat tracks zigzag between countless tents that now serve as homes for most locals, 17 months after a 7.6 magnitude earthquake hit Pakistan’s north and northwest, leaving more than 80,000 dead, tens of thousands injured and millions homeless.

Mohammed Aslam, 50, surveys the interior of his two-room house with satisfaction. “When the earthquake struck, we lost everything: our house, our belongings, even some relatives,” he said.

“But God has been kind to us. My immediate family escaped unscathed and, with assistance from Help in Need [a local NGO working with the US-based charity, Helping Hands for Relief and Development], we have managed to reconstruct our house,” he said, pointing towards the walls and the roof made of lightweight material.

Most of Lashdahar’s 3,000 inhabitants, however, continue to live in tents and a large number interviewed by IRIN said they had not received any assistance from the government to rebuild their homes.

“We are not even expecting compensation from the government,” Akram Aziz, a local businessman, who saw his house destroyed and three siblings die in the disaster, told IRIN.

Aziz added that many Kashmiris, after being initially optimistic of government assistance, had resorted to picking up the pieces themselves, despite the “bureaucratic hassling”, as locals describe it, that impeded their efforts to rebuild their lives and homes.

Pakistan’s Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA), however, denied that help had not been forthcoming. “We have provided them full-on assistance, from the initial few days after the earthquake till now,” a senior official told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad.

He said every claim staked by locals had either been met or was being processed.

The quake survivors have been provided with about US$3,000 in three tranches, the official said. “This is a big achievement, any way you look at it.”

On 18 March, deputy chairman of ERRA, Lt Gen Nadeem Ahmed, said 98 percent of quake survivors had been given compensation for their damaged houses, according to local media.

But, for Mohammed Ali, a shop-owner in Muzaffarabad, who lost his entire family in the 8 October 2005 disaster, that has not enabled him to rebuild his life.

“I thank the Almighty for sparing my shop because it affords me a livelihood,” he said, explaining that he has had to move in with relatives because he had nowhere else to go. “But I have not received a penny from the government despite the fact that I filed a claim over a year ago.”

Not too far from Muzaffarabad’s main market centre, where most of the buildings are scarred by the devastating quake, a woman living in a tented shelter agreed.

“I became a widow because of the earthquake,” Asmat Bibi said, her three teenaged children huddling in the tent behind her. “We lost our house and my children’s lives have been damaged for ever. But we haven’t received any help from anywhere, except NGOs. We don’t have the means to rebuild our house ourselves but we can’t go on living here for ever,” she added.

Sardar Riaz, a retired senior Kashmiri official now working with the United Nations Development Programme in Muzaffarabad, said he understood how locals must feel but there were several “complicated issues” that needed to be understood.

“Problems have arisen because, sometimes, four or five members of the same family have applied for government assistance to rebuild the same house,” he explained. “When the government seeks to verify such claims, of course, these people are going to be found out.”

According to the Pakistani government, all reconstruction in the quake-ravaged areas should be complete in three years, while aid agencies proffer a more cautious assessment, saying that the entire process could take up to eight years, or longer.

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