yolland
Forum Moderator
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2004
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I know we've been all digging into our pockets a lot lately, but please consider donating to this effort whatever you can afford at the moment. The potential for loss of life if dramatic action is not taken SOON is horrific, and a little show of Western concern in this area could go a long way.
Unicef
www.unicef.org
UN Refugee Agency
www.unhcr.ch
Disasters Emergency Committee (UK)
www.dec.org.uk
Kashmir International Relief Fund
www.kirf.org
Red Cross/ Red Crescent
www.icrc.org
Unicef
www.unicef.org
UN Refugee Agency
www.unhcr.ch
Disasters Emergency Committee (UK)
www.dec.org.uk
Kashmir International Relief Fund
www.kirf.org
Red Cross/ Red Crescent
www.icrc.org
MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan, Oct 21 (Reuters) - Alarm mounted across the world on Friday for survivors of the Pakistan earthquake still awaiting help two weeks after their world collapsed, with a freezing Himalayan winter looming. The United Nations yesterday warned of a second, massive wave of deaths unless more is done to help the estimated 3 million people left homeless, with no blankets nor tents to protect them from the Himalayan winter. Unicef has warned that up to 10,000 children could die from hunger, hypothermia or illness in the next few weeks alone.
Yet the outside response has been hesitant. The UN has received just $86m of the $312m pledged to its emergency appeal, in contrast with 80% of pledges at the same stage after the south Asian tsunami.
The top United Nations aid official, Jan Egeland, was so incensed by what he saw as a woefully inadequate international response to the most difficult relief operation the world has ever seen that he called on NATO to stage a massive airlift to get survivors to safety.
That would mean helicopters, the only means of getting quickly deep into the rugged Himalayan foothills of Pakistani Kashmir and North West Frontier Province where 50,000 people are known to have died, a number expected to rise substantially.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has told India he would accept helicopters, but only if they came without crews given the enormous political sensitivity of the issue. India said no and Egeland called on the two governments to figure out a compromise fast.
The few roads into the high hills were crumpled, buried by landslides, even swept away by the Oct. 8 quake and aid officials on the ground are frightened that countless more people, without adequate shelter, cold and miserable, could die. Pakistani soldiers are using mules, horses and donkeys, even carrying supplies up on their backs. So are villagers.
"We went to one village at 1,300 metres and temperatures were dropping to minus five at night and there were old people whose only shelter was plastic sheeting," said Mia Turner of the World Food Programme. "Shelter is crucial and people don't get that soon there will be a crisis of a different kind -- people will start dying of exposure."
But tents of a kind which can stand up to the harsh Himalayan winter are in short supply and Pakistan pleads daily for the world to send more. "We need the world's help to provide tents and kerosene heaters to protect people from the cold," said Major-General Farooq Ahmed Khan, chief coordinator of the relief effort, in his latest appeal.
Egeland and other aid officials with experience of both said the earthquake relief operation was more difficult than that in the wake of last year's Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more people but hit coastlines ships could reach easily. "We have never had this kind of logistical nightmare ever," said Egeland. "We thought the tsunami was bad, this is worse. And the world is not responding as we should be."
Pakistan said the number of injured, now 79,000, could also rise substantially with large areas still not reached. How many bodies are still buried in the rubble, nobody knows.
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