Skies over Shangla still silent

For five days, Faraz Hussain, his wife and their three children have looked to the sky for the helicopters to bring them aid. They had heard on their crackly pocket radio that large-scale relief efforts were on their way to their district of Shangla in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). So far the helicopters have failed to appear. “All we know is that supplies were reaching Muzzafarabad and other Kashmiri areas,” Faraz said. “But does no one care about us? Why are there no planes, no helicopters to bring us some help?” By the sixth day after the quake, some aid, provided by a handful of NGOs assisted by military personnel, had begun to trickle in. But for many it has come too late. As taxi driver Ajmal Khan, who traveled to his native Shangla from Rawalpindi, said: “Over these six days, children have died of their wounds, no attempts were made to rescue people trapped under rubble and the voices heard even into the third day have fallen silent." “The cuts, deep gashes and fractured limbs suffered by people have become infected and will need to be amputated, and even today, there are no doctors working here, apart from a few local students who have no equipment, no drugs and no facilities,” Khan maintained. Shangla, in the historic Swat Valley, is an ancient seat of Buddhist culture that lies west of the Kaghan Valley and 265 km northwest of the capital, Islamabad. Initial reports on the quake focused on deaths and damage in the area but attention was diverted as the scale of losses in the Mansehra and Pakistan-administered Kashmir areas was revealed. While the Shangla district has not been hit quite so badly as the Allai district of Kaghan, or Bagh and Muzzafarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the devastation is still immense. About 70 percent of buildings have been badly damaged or flattened and homeless people sit along roadsides, atop ruined homes or in small areas cleared of debris. Many wear poorly wrapped bandages or splints. Across Shangla, with a population of almost 500,000, small villages lie in ruins, their people deeply angered by delays in providing help and traumatised by the death and destruction surrounding them. Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan, a spokesman for Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), told IRIN: “We are moving into this area. The problem is that the news about where the damage is greatest is not always reaching us and some of these areas are extremely inaccessible, even in normal times.” Local relief teams said international organisations were on Friday alerted to the situation in Shangla and asked to send in workers. UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland, who met President Pervez Musharraf and other top officials in Islamabad on Friday, has already said access to affected areas was particularly difficult “because trails and narrow mountain roads have been destroyed and this disaster has hit in one of the most remote, rugged areas in the world”. Meanwhile, in Shangla, neighbouring Madyan, Mingora and other areas, aftershocks felt on Thursday have created further panic, with almost everyone sleeping in the open. “Our house is still standing and, in fact, seems to have survived well but my elderly parents and my wife and children are too scared to sleep inside,” said taxi driver Khan. “They spent all night in the open, even though temperatures are dropping to two or three degrees centigrade.” In some of the worst-hit villages, lack of power and water is adding to the misery.