IN the midst of the rapidly changing political scenario, with controversies raging on the issue of the Kalabagh dam, the Balochistan insurgency, the Wana bombings, the Danish cartoons and the Bush visit, the unprecedented misery of the victims of the October 8 earthquake is slipping away from the nation’s consciousness. The priority that the government initially attached to the relief and rehabilitation of the quake victims has been overtaken by its preoccupation with proving its legitimacy and indispensability.

Earthquake relief and reconstruction programmes have been put on the backburner and a crisis is brewing as the plight of the earthquake victims has not improved substantially and there is a growing sense of uncertainty about their future.

The international community and the NGOs also seem to be finally falling victim to aid fatigue and have started to wind up their activities. After three months of intensive and commendable relief work, many international relief teams started leaving the country and the helicopter fleet serving the earthquake zone has been scaled back to 17 from 20. Without more funds, the number of helicopters will fall to 13 towards the end of the month. The UN estimates that a minimum of five to six helicopters will be required at least until September. But the lack of funds has meant stopping the passenger flights mainly used for transporting quake victims to areas where medical treatment is available.

Until now, most of the affected were passive recipients of relief goods supplied in their tents by the administering NGOs or other agencies and often supplemented by munificent donors who had been moved by their plight. However, these supplies, which peaked in the first two or three months after the disaster, have started to dwindle. While there are rumours of some tent dwellers having amassed supplies well beyond their needs and pilferage of goods en route to the affected areas, the fact is that by themselves such goods are only temporary palliatives. The focus now has to shift — except in the case of those who live in remote and inaccessible areas — from ensuring an uninterrupted flow of relief supplies to providing secure livelihood and dependable shelter.

This new and more challenging phase would require a much more pro-active and less paternalistic approach than the earlier phase in which the survivors’ needs were limited to basic requirements of living and to overcoming the massive shock of death and destruction in their areas. Although even in that earlier phase less of a top-down approach than our hierarchical structures permit would have resulted in less misery of surviving families and less expenditure.

However, the government and even some of the international agencies and NGOs were more interested in taking the credit than in ensuring greater relief for the surviving families. If that had been done, the roadmap for the next phase would have been clearer and enriched with the perceptions of those affected and would have instilled some self-confidence in them. Instead, the relief programmes have engendered a feeling of dependence, self-pity and helplessness, which leaves the survivors ill-prepared to face the daunting future ahead.

Having weathered the cold without encountering the dreaded “second wave” of deaths, the government now plans to close by the end of March the relief camps that have housed more than 200,000 people. About two million other quake survivors have been staying in flimsy tents across an extended area of about 28,000 square kilometres, and about 400,000 have lived in tin shacks in the mountains. While relief agencies have focused on planned and spontaneous settlements with 50 or more tents, the fate of those living in smaller settlements or in private residences is largely unrecorded.

Yet there is no indication where these “tent people” will go and when will the new housing promised to them be put in place. About 10 per cent of these tent dwellers are located outside the earthquake-affected zones of Azad Kashmir, mainly in the northern plains of Punjab. A large majority of them have indicated their preference not to return to their earthquake-affected abodes, especially if they are provided with some place to build their own homes and some facilities for finding employment for their adult household members.

Although the chief relief commissioner Maj-Gen Farooq Ahmad Khan has ruled out forced relocation of quake survivors from relief camps and has discounted rumours that all relief camps would be closed by March 31, there is considerable unease among the affected people. The government is offering a package of incentives including one-month ration, transport, blankets and tents to encourage voluntary repatriation, but most tent residents find these insufficient to induce them to return to their devastated surroundings.

Among the many apprehensions they have about immediately returning to their original homes is the continuing fear of aftershocks and landslides which could seriously hinder their efforts to resettle. They are also unsure whether they would be able to resume the livelihoods they have lost. A factor that induces them to stay in the cities is that most families already have one or more male adults working in the urban areas of Pakistan or overseas and would like to live and find employment for other adult male family members in the areas where they have been temporarily relocated.

The attraction of the availability of better educational and other urban amenities is also contributing to their reluctance to return. Moreover, in a number of areas, such as Hatian Bala, the land has literally disappeared as a result of landslides and formation of lakes on land previously inhabited by the earthquake victims.

During the last five months, the emergency aid effort has been run by an odd mixture of organizational entities — most conspicuously the agencies of the United Nations and the Pakistan army, but equally importantly by international and national NGOs and individuals, with varying resources, capabilities and working philosophies. While they have collaborated to some extent to ensure that the relief reaches the neediest and in the speediest manner, there has been little coordination in their activities.

In the emergency phase the UN and the Pakistan Relief Commission had taken the lead role, with loosely-coordinated efforts of NGOs and individual donors. The role of the governmental agencies was mainly that of facilitator while the UN and the NGOs provided much of the material support, including shelter, blankets, food, medicines, hospitals, schools and other facilities.

According to the UN and government spokespeople, enormous amounts of relief aid were distributed among the survivors of the earthquake. Notable among the claims of the supplies delivered are: more than 500,000 tents, 870,600 quilts, 5,070,000 blankets and 73,400 tons of rations and 370,000 shelters, including 175,000 constructed by NGOs besides 39,600 under construction and more than three million CGI sheets (sufficient to build 300,000 shelters). Given the estimated 3.5 million affected people, some of these figures seem disproportionately high and would indicate large amounts of leakage to non-affected people or to the black market (especially in the case of imported supplies).

General Farooq is also reported to have said that 93 per cent of the work on providing artificial limbs to amputees had been completed. This does not appear accurate in view of the hundreds who are still waiting to receive artificial limbs in the various earthquake-affected areas. (A British-based NGO has desperately been trying to establish a limb-production factory with the Indian technology of Jodhpur limb, but has been refused visas for its Indian trainers by the government of Pakistan, despite the talk of the peace process and of “converting adversity into opportunity”).

This raises the question of transparency and accountability on which Gen Musharraf waxed eloquent in his inaugural address to the donors’ conference last November. Unfortunately, none of the elaborate promises he made in that address have been fulfilled and it is nearly impossible for any one to verify the flow of aid either from origin or destination. There is no website available where these flows are clearly shown. There is no mechanism, such as a relief helpline or hotline, through which a donor or recipient or an interested researcher can get such information.

As the UN and the government embark on the next phase of the relief and reconstruction work, it is extremely important that a “bottoms up” approach is adopted and that survivors and their representatives are fully involved in the process of reconstruction, both in the conceptual and implementation stages. Issues such as food and financial assistance beyond March, modalities of camp closures, provision of health care, utilities, education, restitution of land ownership, rubble removal, urban/rural planning, special support to vulnerable groups, employment generation and consistent provision of information about a coordinated return process need to be deliberated.

They need to be discussed not only by the UN and ERRA, which after the somewhat mysterious removal of an army general, is now headed by a civilian but also with NGOs and the representatives of the affected communities and tent dwellers. This alone will ensure the orderly closure of the first phase and mark the beginning of the final phase of a huge humanitarian programme which needs continued vigilance by all concerned sections of the population at home and well-wishers of the survivors abroad.

Email: sm_naseem@hotmail.com