More than US $5.8 billion pledged for quake victims

In a rare display of solidarity, the international community on Saturday pledged more than US $5.8 billion in assistance to quake-devastated Pakistan. “We are really touched by your generosity, by your feeling of sharing our grief," Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said at the closing session of this weekend's international donor conference in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Of the $5.8 billion, about $3.9 billion would be in the form of soft loans, with the remaining $1.9 billion comprising of grants, Aziz explained. More than 80,000 people were killed and more than 100,000 were injured when a 7.6 magnitude quake ripped through Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Pakistani-administered Kashmir on 8 October, rendering more than 3 million people homeless. Response at an initial donor conference in Geneva on 26 October had been limited, with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warning of a second wave of deaths unless the international community was not more forthcoming. "The pitiless Himalayan winter is almost upon us and growing more and more severe every week," Annan told Saturday's conference which opened with harrowing images of quake damage and wretched survivors. "We must sustain our efforts to keep people as healthy and as strong as possible until we can rebuild," he told donors. For that reason, he said, a reconstruction phase must be planned that improves on what was there before. “This, in short, is where we can and must turn a challenge of inhuman dimensions into an opportunity for human development,” he told representatives of more than 50 donors. “I hope I can count on all of you as we pursue that mission in the weeks, months and years ahead." After touring the quake-hit areas on Friday, Annan told reporters that the devastation was “unimaginable; one had to see it to understand what has happened.” Following his call, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) pledged $1 billion each mostly in soft loans, while another $573 million was committed by Saudi Arabia. The United States tripled its aid package from $156 million to $510 million, comprising of $300 million in cash, $100 million in private donations and $110 million in military-supplied relief, including 24 US helicopters, two emergency field hospitals, an engineering unit and 1,200 US soldiers engaged in relief operations in the quake-hit areas. Among others were the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) with $500 million, China $326 million, Iran $200 million, Turkey $150 million, France $124 million, the UK $120 million, Japan $120 million, the European Union (EU) $110 million, Germany $100 million, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) $100 million and another $100 million given by Kuwait. “No doubt, it’s a rare display of solidarity by the international community with Pakistan,” Ihtasham-ul-Haq, a leading economic expert, commented after the day’s meeting. In another move in recent days, Pakistan has approved of international monitoring and auditing to ensure transparent spending of foreign contributions to earthquake aid and reconstruction. “This assurance, coupled with a sense of seriousness from government circles to curtail the misuse of funds, certainly has its own value in helping such an overwhelming response,” Haq noted. Pakistan lies near the bottom of Transparency International's 2005 Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking 144th beside Kenya, Paraguay, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan and Tajikistan.