Posted on 10/27/2005 11:57:41 AM PDT by Lovingthis
Quake aid shortfall baffles By Robert Birsel 2 hours, 21 minutes ago
MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - The United Nations reacted with bafflement and dismay on Thursday at the world's failure to come up with quick cash to help save hundreds of thousands of Pakistani quake survivors before winter sets in.
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Relief workers were only a few days away from grounding the vital helicopter fleet which is the only way to get help quickly to the remote mountain villages flattened by the October 8 quake, which killed more than 54,000 people, one U.N. official said.
"When the money runs out, the choppers stay on the ground and that's what's going to start happening in the next couple of days," Robert Smith told a Geneva news conference a day after a major conference failed to produce significant cash.
The United Nations aimed to raise $550 million at Wednesday's conference. It got a meager $16 million.
Some aid agencies were already out of money and others desperately juggling budgets to try to cope, aid officials said.
"We are still of the view that the international community lacks full comprehension of the catastrophe that is looming large," U.N. chief aid coordinator Rashid Khalikov said in the destroyed town of Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir.
"We are talking life," he said with the harsh Himalayan winter just weeks away and countless people still living in rubble.
"It may sound strange that we are still talking life-saving two weeks after the disaster," Khalikov said.
"But communities that live in the affected areas have become so vulnerable that it is absolutely important for us to reach them with help," he said.
U.N. officials had hoped for a day-after surge of donations following the conference, but recorded only $2 million in net new pledges on Thursday, taking the total to $113 million.
Because much of the money was earmarked for specific uses, even that left critical aid areas short of funds, a U.N. spokeswoman said.
TOLL COULD DOUBLE
Relief workers fear that as many people will die of hunger and exposure during the bitter winter as in the quake, which also injured more than 75,000 people seriously in Pakistan and killed 1,300 in Indian Kashmir.
Winter will descend in four weeks. By then, around 3 million people will have to have been found shelter and food stockpiled to see them through to spring.
It is an operation experts say is more difficult than that which followed last year's Indian Ocean tsunami, a disaster which prompted a torrent of aid.
Yet all but a small amount of the money pledged at the Geneva conference was for reconstructing the flattened villages of Pakistani Kashmir and neighbouring North West Frontier Province.
"It's a little bit frustrating, to tell you the truth," said World Food Programme spokesman Khaled Mansour. "The response of donors has definitely been disappointing."
Starting on reconstruction work is months away. But U.N. officials were asking whether the people the money was supposed to help would still be alive to benefit.
Khalikov said U.N. officials would have to go directly to governments, especially in the Middle East, to plead for cash.
"I am sure we have enough capacity to respond, we just need funding," he said.
Underlining the magnitude of the task, bad weather in the mountains grounded the helicopter fleet at the main airbase near Islamabad on Wednesday and for part of Thursday, leaving only mules and people to carry supplies up into the hills.
The few roads into the mountains have been blocked by landslides or swept away. Some will take weeks to repair, leaving helicopters as the main means of delivering food and shelter.
But the fleet, although growing, cannot reach them all, or deliver enough.
About 450,000 winter tents are needed, nearly 100,000 have been distributed and another 200,000 are in the pipeline, aid officials say.
That leaves them 150,000 short and not knowing where to find them before what U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan told the Geneva conference would be a "winter without pity."
(Additional reporting by Thomas Atkins in GENEVA, David Brunnstrom in ISLAMABAD and Lindsay Beck in BEIJING)
Islamic charity means jihad, not disaster relief.
"How many natural disasters can we support until there's no more relief money to be had for even our own citizens?"
I think we hit the limit with Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
Potential donors are probably thinking, "Why should I give more money to Annan's criminal family?"
If our helicopters can't land to search for the murderer of 3000 Americans......then F*ck'em, we can't land with relief supplies either.
I will gladly donate.......provided the money is used for building a new Christian Church for the Pakis.
I agree. I'm sorry for their little children, but their parents brought this on themselves. F*#k them is right on.
I suspect Bush is carefully husbanding our tax money on this one, so he can give it all away when he visits India next year.
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