Quake survivors start the journey home

Ghulam Rabbani and his family are climbing aboard a battered four-wheel-drive vehicle along with their possessions bound for their home village of Sarli Sacha in Neelum Valley, almost 10 hours away by road, northeast from Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. The group are amongst 29 families – over 220 Internally Displaced People (IDPs) - returning to their home villages and hamlets from the Bela Noor Shah camp in Muzaffarabad after having spent five months in the city following the 8 October earthquake. “The 29 families are going back to their homes voluntarily. This is the first group returning to their homes from camps in Muzaffarabad,” Sardar Nawaz, head of the government-run Camp Management Organisation (CMO), said. “CMO provides vehicles to move the returnees to their places of origin with all their belongings. That is tents, food and non-food items that have been provided to them,” Nawaz added. Tens of thousands of survivors flooded into Muzaffarabad from outlying villages after the devastating earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale ripped through Pakistani-administered Kashmir and Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). More than 80,000 died and another 100,000 were injured, while over 3 million people were rendered homeless by the disaster just weeks before the bitter Himalayan winter descended. “We are proud to go back to our home village. We need to start rebuilding our houses and cultivating our land as well,” Ghulam said on Friday, just prior to his departure. There are some 90,000 quake survivors living in camps in and around Muzaffarabad alone. The majority are to start returning to their home villages from 31 March, relief workers say. According to CMO, the overall government policy on the return of earthquake survivors to their villages is expected to be finalised in a week or so, with detailed mechanisms of the process. Many survivors have no housing or even land to return to, others were widowed, orphaned or injured by the quake. Such individuals will require longer-term assistance, aid workers have said.