The world's failure to come up with quick cash to help save hundreds of thousands of Pakistani quake survivors before winter sets in left relief officials on the ground baffled and upset on Thursday.
"We are still of the view that the international community lacks full comprehension of the catastrophe that is looming large," UN Chief Aid Co-ordinator Rashid Khalikov said.
"We are talking life," he said one day after a UN Geneva conference drew $580 million in aid promises - but only $15.8 million in emergency relief 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 in the destroyed city of Muzaffarabad.
"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.
The United Nations officials had hoped for a day-after surge of donations following the conference, but recorded only $2 million in net new pledges on Thursday.
That took the total to $113 million - far short of the $550 million the UN says it needs to avert a catastrophe - and because much of the money was earmarked for specific uses, even that left critical aid areas short of funds, a spokeswoman said.
Relief workers fear that as many people will die of hunger and exposure during the bitter winter as in the October 8 quake, which killed at least 54,000 people in Pakistan and 1,300 in Indian occupied Kashmir.
Winter will descend in four weeks. By then, around three million people will have to have been found shelter with 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.
"FRUSTRATING, DISAPPOINTING" Yet all but a small amount of the money pledged at the Geneva conference was for reconstructing the flattened villages of AJK and NWFP.
"It's a little bit frustrating, to tell you the truth," World Food Programme Spokesman Khaled Mansour said. "The response of donors has definitely been disappointing." Starting on reconstruction work is months away.
"It is, in my view, not right to sit with reconstruction money for one-year from now if we're not sure whether those people will be alive one-year from now," UN Aid Chief Jan Egeland said in Geneva.
Some UN agencies had run out of cash, Egeland said after a conference preceded by a clamour of complaints that the world was not helping enough.
Khalikov said the UN officials would now have to go directly to the 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.
CHINA OFFERS CASH China promised an additional $13.8 million in unconditional aid, including cash, and Iraq said it would send an engineering battalion if Pakistan wanted it.
Underlining the magnitude of the task, bad weather in the mountains grounded the vital 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, the aid officials said.
That leaves them 150,000 short and not knowing where to find them before what UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told the Geneva conference would be a "winter without pity".
Helicopters ferrying food and supplies to Pakistanis stranded in the Himalayas may have to be grounded in just a few days if donors fail to increase emergency relief contributions, a UN official said.
Aid workers are scrambling to supply the millions of Pakistanis who have no food, water, shelter or medicine in the freezing temperatures of the Himalayas. Workers have resorted to rafts and pack mules to reach them, but helicopters, though costly, have proven the most useful.
"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," said Robert Smith, financial expert at the United Nations' leading disaster-relief body, the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Smith said helicopters were virtually the only way to supply those stranded as the quake, snows and landslides triggered by some 900 recorded aftershocks have made most roads impassable.
One large helicopter can cost up to $6,000 per hour, he said. "Nobody is using helicopters for fun. They do it because they have to," he said. "They carry less payload than fixed-wing aircraft and they're dangerous as hell."
HOPES FADING Aid agency Oxfam said some donors may have misplaced priorities, giving money for home building for next year as survivors now face starvation and disease in the snow.
"Donors needed to provide hundreds of millions of dollars for emergency relief yesterday, instead they could only scrape together $16 million. This is loose change for donor governments," Oxfam's head of advocacy Jo Leadbeater said.
"Reconstruction is important, but there's no point budgeting to rebuild someone's house if they have died in the cold during the winter," Oxfam said in a statement.
Comments
Comments are closed.