More aid sought for quake victims

EFFORTS to reach stranded villagers in Pakistan’s northern mountains gathered pace yesterday after the country’s friends and foes both urged help for up to three million survivors rattled by fresh aftershocks.

One on Sunday evening, at magnitude 6.0, was among the strongest of nearly 900 recorded since the October 8 quake, but there were no reports of new deaths.

Equally important, there were no reports of major landslides in the rugged hills where army engineers are working around the clock to reopen roads destroyed in the quake which killed at least 53,000 people and left more than 75,000 seriously injured. Only when the roads are rebuilt can aid be delivered in sufficient quantities to an estimated 2,000 still unreached villages to allow hundreds of thousands of people to survive the rapidly approaching winter.

The fleet of aid helicopters, although growing, cannot reach them all, or deliver sufficient supplies to the worst-hit areas of Pakistani Kashmir and adjacent North West Frontier Province. In Rajkot, a two-day trek from the destroyed Pakistani Kashmir capital of Muzaffarabad but just a 10-minute helicopter ride, Farid Ayub complained it took 13 days for aid to reach his village.

“There’s still a lot of people that are out there, flashing mirrors and waving red flags,” said 27-year-old Capt Brandon McRay, a US Army helicopter pilot from Texas.

Aid officials say the world is slow in coming up with the cash to help up to three million people who must be sheltered and fed through the winter, although the European Commission proposed giving at least 80m.

But, with the first heavy snows just five or six weeks away, aid is flowing in faster, said chief United Nations aid co-ordinator Rashid Khalikov, two days before rich countries were to meet in Geneva to discuss help for Pakistan.

Pakistan asked for five points to be opened along the heavily militarised line dividing Kashmir, over which it has fought two wars with India. New Delhi offered to open three relief camps there. Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said talks with India on the acutely sensitive issue of opening the de facto frontier would begin in Islamabad on Saturday.

US General John Abizaid promised the US would send more helicopters, while al Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, urged Muslims to help though Pakistan’s government was a US “agent.”