Quake mutes Muslim festival

QUAKE survivors marked a normally joyous Muslim festival with sombre prayers in debris-strewn fields and visits to the graves of victims yesterday, as Pakistan’s president deferred a key purchase of US fighter jets to focus on reconstruction.

Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf, visiting the city of Muzaffarabad in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir shattered by the October 8 quake, said the government wanted “to bring maximum relief and reconstruction efforts.”

He was criticised earlier this week after saying the quake would not affect his country’s enormous defence spending.

The planes have become a symbol of Pakistan’s improving relations with the United States after years in the political wilderness. Washington blocked the sale in the 1990s as punishment for Pakistan’s then-illicit nuclear program.

During his tour of the area, Musharraf visited a US Mobile Army Surgical Hospital set up to treat quake victims and praised the work of the American doctors and nurses there.

“This will go a long way to create the right kind of impression about American concerns for the people, for us,” he said.

Earlier, the faithful gathered in a field surrounded by smashed concrete as the helicopters of aid workers buzzed overhead in efforts to deliver much-needed aid ahead of the Himalayan region’s fierce winter.

Qazi Hussain Ahmed, head of Pakistan’s largest religious political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, told a crowd of 1,000 men: “God is testing us, testing our patience, testing our faith. One of the main reasons for the earthquake was our wrongdoing.”

The quake killed 80,000 people and left more than three million homeless.

For most of Pakistan, yesterday was the start of the Eid al-Fitr celebration marking the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, but Mr Musharraf asked Pakistanis to tone down festivities out of respect for quake victims.

Zubair Abbasi, 24, an economics student before his university in Muzaffarabad was destroyed, said he would spend the day visiting orphans, instead of the normal Eid routine of feasting and distributing gifts among family and friends.

“Usually we celebrate very happily but this time we are very sad. Houses have collapsed and people are dead,” he said.

He did not believe the quake was punishment, saying: “These were good people, very virtuous. We don’t know why this was sent from God.”

Some Muzaraffabad residents visited the graves of loved ones. On a bluff above the Neelem River, members of the Kiani family laid pink flower petals and tinsel on the graves of 56 relatives killed in the quake, from three-year-olds to grandparents.

In New York, former US President Bill Clinton urged Pakistan and India to set aside their rivalry, saying this would help prompt a world weary of major natural disasters to donate money for the millions left homeless by the quake.

The disaster has helped bring the nuclear-armed rivals closer, sparking an accord last weekend to partially open their heavily militarised border in Kashmir to allow Pakistani quake victims to seek help at Indian aid camps.