Deadly Earthquake

Friday, October 14, 2005

Quake unites Sikhs, Hindus, Christians as Pakistanis

MANSEHRA: Radesh Singh, a Pakistani Sikh and his group of Hindu, Christian and Muslim friends have joined forces to help survivors of the devastating earthquake in northern Pakistan.

They hope efforts to provide relief and care would send a clear message of tolerance in the predominantly Muslim Pakistan. “We are here without any religious bias for people who are in dire need of help and care,” Radesh told Reuters in Mansehra, a district in Northwest Frontier Province now in ruins after Saturday’s disaster.

“We are also hoping that our efforts will give out a message that people from different religious backgrounds and communities can live peacefully together and help each other,” he said. An estimated 96 percent of Pakistan’s population are Muslim, about 1.7 percent are Christian and some 2.0 percent are Hindu, while others account0 for less than 0.5 percent.

Minorities in Pakistan have been targeted by Islamic militants recently. Just last week there was a bomb attack on a religious centre of the Ahmadiyya sect in the central province of Punjab that killed eight and wounded more than a dozen.

Radesh, who runs his own business in the province’s capital, Peshawar, came with a truckload of medicines, blankets, clothing and dry food mustered by his Sikh friends Rajinder and Ranjit Singh, Hindus Prakash and Diyaram and Emmanuel, a Christian. “It is simply an effort on our parts for the earthquake victims, who are in dire need of help. We have come here as human beings not as Sikhs, Christians, Hindus or Muslims,” Ranjit said. Rajinder and his Sikh friends were born in Peshawar and say they are Pakistanis first, second and last. “I even ran for the local bodies elections this time but lost,” Rajinder said. On Wednesday night they were faced with a different kind of problem. Having heard of incidents of looting of private relief vehicles and violence in badly hit areas, Rajinder and his friends stopped over in Mansehra, saying he and his friends wanted to distribute the goods under the supervision of the army.

“We just want these goods to reach the deserving people. We have come here as human beings and don’t want to get involved in any violent incidents,” Emanuel said. reuters


http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2005 10 14 story_14-10-2005_pg7_39

I am posting an email that was sent out by Samina Rizwan addressed to a friend on a mailing list. She can be reached on Samina. Rizwan@oracle.com

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We went up as far as Balakot yesterday with some goods that
Sheraz and Zeb had organized. They collected over RS. 300,000 and also
purchased the stuff which included blankets. kafans, long lasting food items and
clothing we had collected together from family and friends. Some facts so that
everyone can make sound decisions:

1. The road upto Balakot is completely clear. There is no damage
up until Shinkiari. Abbottabad has some fallen buildings but nothing
substantial. Shinkiari and beyond things get bad, but access is very easy and
possible.

2. There is a huge traffic jam now, perpetual and unending, most
of it caused by cars accompanying trucks who just want to see. Better
to ride in the trucks in case someone wants to go personally.

3. There is tremendous chaos and ill-discipline. No PROJECT
OFFICE where all relief organizations can come together and establish a pattern
of operation. I think 60% of their time is being spent running about doing
nothing.

4. The only two organizations working in a disciplined manner
with regard to delivery of goods and establishing services are the Army and
Edhi. Their camps are organized, their delivery is substantial and the
process seems to be running smoothly. We delivered some clothes at the Mansehra
relief centre. Subsequently, the truck was taken directly to a village
called ``Ouggi`` which had received very few supplies.

5. There is no need anymore for food. In fact, it is not wise to
send uncooked items since there is no means for cooking. What is
required now are tents and kafans as first priority, and blankets and
epidemic controlling drugs as second priority.

6. Ofcourse, the shortfall is happening seriously in terms of
machinery to pull ppl out of the debris. International teams have been very
effective, Pakistani teams utterly non-existent except for whatever the
Army could pull together in terms of machinery.

7. The first emergency medical camp we saw was in Abbottabad, at
Ayub Medical College. It was full of injured and dead. Also quite
chaotic but somewhat more organized than the one in Mansehra.

8. The camp in Mansehra needs a PMO! There is all sort of
political manouvreing going on to get goods and supplies to specific spots
thru specific groups. I saw many politicians there - wont name them!
- who were shaking hands and just generally checking up alongw/ their
individual camera crews. For the 2 hours that we were there trying to find out
who would take custody of our goods, we saw no progress other than doctors who
were exhausted with looking after an unending line of injured. I saw
more dishonest activity going on than I did serious work other than
by the doctors. There were rooms full of medical supplies but they
were all getting wet and dirty due to the rain and hailstorm. I didnt
see anyone make an effort to move them to safer, closed structures.

8. In terms of communication etc., cellular service is working
all the way to the top, i.e till Sinkiari, in patches ofcourse. Whatever
communication network you intend to set up, make sure you put ONE TEAM
INCHARGE, to organize it. I would advise do it in collaboration with either
Edhi or the Army. There isnt any other organization there that I felt was
equipped to handle any substantial cross-town, across-territory work.

Rgds.

S

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Chowk: The article below is for you...

AFTER THE QUAKE

A World Turned Upside Down
The aftershocks of Pakistan`s temblor will be felt for years.

BY RUSSELL SEITZ

When Kipling was a cub reporter in Lahore, the area struck by Saturday`s earthquake was a blank on the map separating British India from the ``Independent Khanates of Chinese Turkistan.`` Washington scarcely cared if the Victorian Empire needed a weapon of mass destruction called the Maxim gun to deter hotheads along the Northwest Frontier, for it was a long way from anywhere. Now America`s concerns are more ecumenical and acute: Pakistan`s 1998 bomb test conjoined the world`s three great monotheistic religions in a nuclear trinity (to say nothing of the polytheistic Hindus nearby, with their own nuclear saga).

There`s no predicting the outcome when a natural disaster strikes an inexperienced nuclear state bordering two others. The aftershocks may loosen Pakistan`s postcolonial grip on its wild and woolly Northern Areas, or shake its fragile truce with India in long-partitioned Kashmir. The quake rattled Pakistan`s armories, nuclear and conventional, shattered its military academy, and left some of its general staff sleeping in the streets alongside a million other traumatized citizens.

It also severed the Karakoram highway, the amazing but fragile artery linking Pakistan to its conflicted frontiers and providing western China`s only direct connection to world trade. The new North-South strategic highway runs through a landscape as unstable as the region`s politics, for the Indian subcontinent has been thrusting into the heart of Asia since the days of the dinosaurs, raising some of the highest mountains like the bow wave of a dreadnaught and garlanding them with metamorphic treasures like the sapphires of Kashmir and the rubies and lapis lazuli of Hunza and Badakhshan.

This tectonic beauty comes at a high human cost. Last December, the far edge of the Indian Plate popped open a 1,000-kilometer split in the Andaman seabed, raising the tsunami in which 300,000 perished. Now the same great plate`s 60-mile-deep keel has surged forward, nudging peaks like K-2 and Nanga Parbat a little higher, and knocking the ground out from under everyone from Kabul to Kashmir.

North of Srinagar, in India`s Vale of Kashmir, villagers blocked highways demanding aid for stricken mountain hamlets. Scientists and climbers are missing, too, for the stunning exposure of living rock on 25,000-foot peaks and the flanks of the Indus gorge make the region a geological and mountaineering Mecca.

The exaggerated verticality of northern Pakistan makes it scientifically transparent but politically opaque, with borders hard to define and harder to guard. The chaos in the quake`s aftermath has put the field in motion for fugitives of all stripes. Al Qaeda cadres and Islamist Kashmiri separatists can readily lose themselves among the flux of refugees in a region famed for discreet hospitality. It cannot have escaped Osama Bin Laden`s attention that in the 19th century the Aga Khan spent tranquil years in Hunza while internecine war made him a hunted man elsewhere in the Islamic world. Today, the Raj has evaporated in India, but in Pakistan`s Northern Areas some local notables` business cards still read ``Head of State.`` Political parties--some religious, some ethnic--have proliferated in the Punjab and the parts of southern Pakistan that share an Urdu culture with India; but in the North, men owe their first allegiance to where they were born, not to where politicians in Islamabad want borders to be.

The region`s isolation in the months to come could erode Pakistan`s often-resented efforts to integrate the linguistically and ethnically distinct populations of areas like Baltistan, a ``Little Tibet`` where mountains five miles high enforce local autonomy--and where the central government`s authority fades out of sight of the now-obliterated roads built to enforce it. The temblor`s timing is itself disastrous, for the north helps feed Pakistan, and harvests have been isolated from the urban markets by the wholesale destruction of infrastructure. Far away, in Karachi and Quetta, the political impact is being felt, as food prices soar despite the imposition of price controls. A month ago, polo was being played at 11,000 feet in the summer pastures of the north. Now the monsoon has combined with the quake to set slow-motion boulder-falls down the Indus Valley, with a hard freeze to follow. Only come spring will Pakistan know the true toll in areas too high for helicopters.

The Indo-European frontier was already an ethnic and religious crossroads when Alexander the Great passed through. It has seen the rise and fall of whatever gods were worshipped in the era of the proto-Hindu Mohenjo-Daro civilization, and then of Gandharan Greco-Buddhism; but only in the last few decades has the upper Indus begun to see much of the outside world. Even in four-mile-deep valleys isolated as Kipling`s not-quite-fictional ``Kaffiristan,`` Internet cafés are up and running; and this winter, un-wired teahouse firesides may be enlivened by well-armed Afghans driven across the borders of Kunar and Badakhshan by U.S. or U.S.-backed forces. Still, equating Islam on the Upper Indus with the Taliban is as inane and dangerous as representing the Ku Klux Klan as typical of American Christianity; for while hidebound Salafist mullahs may prevail in one mosque, a valley away female education may be compulsory and Ismaili merchants may come and go from around the world.

Mountains like the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush will go on rising whether borders or empires stand or fall, and the erosive force of the Indus River will sweep away whatever the angry earth throws down as the tectonic plates continue their collision. Saturday`s quake was as powerful as the one that leveled San Francisco, but one of these centuries the rafting together of the Asian and Indus plates will rock the subcontinent with quakes a hundred times stronger, as it has before. It may take a harder shock than Saturday`s to persuade the subcontinent`s capitals to recognize that, partition notwithstanding, they are in the same tectonic boat. The region`s conflicts may seem intractable, but the Earth is ever patient in its diplomacy. The civilizations of South Asia have a half-billion years` grace in which to resolve their age-old differences before the slow tectonic violence that has put fossil seashells atop Everest crumples Ceylon--unserendipitously--into the mountainous seashore of Tibet.

Mr. Seitz is a physicist in Cambridge, Mass.

re: joint Indo-Pak rescue operations
While Ali shows his true class in this forum (did i tell u guys his name in Tamil means Eunuch and he is indeed behaving like one), there is at least one person whose heart jives with mine. Kashmiri leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq calls for a joint Indo-Pak rescue operation.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2005 10 12 story_12-10-2005_pg7_2
Sridhar

A terrible tragedy indeed!

May humanity manifest itself in terms of relief efforts and give strength to the victims and those who have lost their loved ones.

For the hotheads, let`s be gracefully polite and put your neurons to a more constructive purpose and do the best that you can.

For, if you want the kick, you can always start another thread about political morality followed by the usual south asian mud-slinging.

Re: # 39

Dear Yasser,

Thanks for the inspirational post. Keep up the good work in bringing people together.

I know now is not the time. But today`s Washington Post has a column by George F. Will. Here is the clip that should be looked at, even in these darkest hours of our countries. Keep this in your back pocket for easy reference....

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After Earth`s heavings subside, they reverberate in people`s minds. Winchester says that after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake killed 60,000, ``priests roved around the ruins, selecting at random those they believed guilty of heresy and thus to blame for annoying the Divine, who in turn had ordered up the disaster. The priests had them hanged on the spot.``

The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in what is now Indonesia fueled the growth of an extremist strain of Islam, bent on purging society of impurities displeasing to God. That strain has twice recently been heard from in Bali.

San Francisco`s 1906 disaster prompted the explosive growth of a Pentecostal movement based in Los Angeles, a movement then embryonic but now mighty.

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Remembering this cataclysmic tragedy with utmost and deepest sorrow, I just remain

#94 by rsridhar
[I am sorry for my post # 89]

Rest of the chowk community is sorry that you were born...... I hope they start making sturdier condoms in India.

In the situation that we have, it takes a black, hateful heart to write the spiteful, hatefilled posts that we see coming from rsridhar. Although being a Hinju, he is immune from getting flushed on chowk.com.

re:#89 by rsridhar
I am sorry for my post # 89
I only bemoan the fact that the 2 nations could not come together even during this tragedy.
It would have been great if India and Pak had formed a common Task force to work together towards rescue efforts. The world would have applauded such effort. But that did not happen. Politics won over compassion and common sense.
I saw the videos of small children affected by the tragedy. It is really tragic to see small innocent children affected the most.
Sridhar

if pakistan is a sick place then why are certain interactors professing to have made contributions? is it to show how good and kind your heart is? and why is this same person asking if other interactors have made contributions.

the deeds of people speak for them. no one has to talk about how they have given or what they have given.

r.a.janjua: this is indeed a terrible tragedy.

as for those few still carrying on ``mud-slinging-business as usual`` on chowk, just ignore them. as catchy wrote about qazi hussain muhammed on unplugged, ``zameen jumbud, na jumbad gul muhammed``.

I don`t know if this is relevant here, but here is a letter from an American reader in today`s Dawn:

IN the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we Americans heard an earful from Muslims worldwide about how God was punishing the United States for its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder if the same reasoning is now being applied to the devastating earthquake in Pakistan? I am interested in hearing from all the self-appointed Muslim apologists whose knee-jerk reaction to all that happens in the world is to blame America.

STEVE ELISHA
Colorado Springs, CO, US

re:#74 by sri
Good point. Also, do not forget most deaths in earthquakes occur following collapse of buildings than by earthquake itself. If homes are made of wood, death toll would be much less (just my guess).
Sridhar

re:#85 by warpster
As i have said already, Pak is a sick place and their dictator is a weirdo.
Sridhar

re:#86 by r.a.janjua
F*ck off Ahole.
BTW, did u send some contributions or yippee-dee-do-dah is all u can say.
Sridhar

ONLINE DONATION FOR EDHI AND PRESIDENT`S RELIEF FUND

You can donate to

1) Edhi
2) President`s Relief Fund

at www.DevelopPakistan.org

Your donation is not only tax deductible in US but will also be matched dollar for dollar.

``In Tsunami, while thousands died, worst affected were from militant prone areas. Militancy in the island of Banda Aceh and Srilanka`s North was hard hit.
In this earthquake, POK is hard hit, with Muzaffarabad the capital of POK razed to the ground. The militant organization Lashkar-e-toiba and its affilitated fronts have been wiped out in the area. It is now known that the organization was gearing up for more attacks on Indian Kashmir after having received the green signal from Mushy the rat.
Is this all just a coincidence or is there a message here?``

thousands of children have died to vindicate this sh1thead`s sick existence - or so he thinks.

``BTW, I already sent in my contributions to Pakistan through Oxfam``

yippee-dee-do-dah.