BALAKOT: VISIONS OF HELL ON EARTH

EYEWITNESS By Foreign Editor David Pratt in Balakot, Pakistan

So far 38,000 people are believed to have died in the earthquake in Pakistan and India. Fears are increasing that the numbers of dead could rise as winter sets in

At least 62,000 have been injured in Pakistan alone. The UN says over 1000 hospitals were destroyed, with many doctors and nurses killed or injured

Across the region two million people are homeless and have no shelter

At least 200,000 homes in Pakistan have been destroyed, along with thousands of others in India and Kashmir

IT creeps up slowly carried by the drifting breeze. Cloying, sweet and sickening.

A stench that slips into the throat and nostrils, before clinging to your skin and clothes for what seems like ages. Sometimes, it's so over-powering you instinctively gag, and simply have to get away from it.

But it is a smell from which there is no escape, and one which you will never forget.

Like the carnage that created it, and the stories told by those who survived the events, it will linger in the memory indelibly.

This is the story of how in less than a minute, one of the world's most beautiful places was turned into a living hell. A place with mountain air clean and sharp enough to pleasantly take your breath away, that became one giant charnel house stinking of death from the decomposing bodies of the ordinary people who once lived there.

It's the story of a man who saw the ground rise up eight feet in front of him, buckling like a flag in the wind, before swallowing hundreds of children in a maelstrom of noise, dirt and tumbling concrete.

It's about a husband and wife's last walk to the market together, and the dusty bloodcaked face and twisted body of a little girl exhumed from the rubble of her school seven days too late.

It's also a parable of our times, about the way a world of plenty, fed on a diet of 24-hour rolling TV news, quickly gets bored of suffering in remote places and turns the other way.

Almost from the moment that I arrived at Islamabad Airport in Pakistan last week to cover the earthquake that ravaged the north of the country, it was evident how so many lives had been touched by the 7.6 magnitude of the disaster.

"I was lying in bed, and it was moving from side to side so much, I thought it was my son pulling the bed frame as a joke, " recalled Mohammed Shaheen, my taxi driver, moments after he picked me up and only an hour after another aftershock had swept the capital.

On rushing outside, he had seen his young daughter swaying as she stood on a low wall in the garden, before sweeping her up into his arms and stumbling towards some open ground near their home.

One of Shaheen's friends, a Spaniard who lived in part of central Islamabad's Margalla Towers high-rise complex which collapsed, was not so lucky.

"His body still hasn't been recovered, and his family arrived at the airport the same time as you, " he told me, as we pulled into the grounds of my hotel. "They're just like so many families here in Pakistan now, how can they mourn without knowing their loved ones have been found and put to rest peacefully?" said Shaheen.

"You will see for yourself when you go there, " he added, after I told him of my intention to journey to the quake's epicentre region the following day.

Even once inside the sanctuary of my hotel, there was no escaping the toll of the quake's victims. Barely minutes after checking in, a waiter confided that he too had lost family members - both his sisters - in the city of Muzaffarabad in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, which along with the town of Balakot in North West Frontier Province (NWFP), sat within 15 miles of the epicentre and was among the worst devastated.

It was still dark when I set off the next morning with an American colleague on the 60-mile drive north from Islamabad to Balakot. Eight miles outside the town of Abbottabad the traffic thickened. Looking every bit like Spanish galleons on wheels, convoys of the huge, highly decorated trucks so common on the roads of Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan, made their way bumper to bumper towards the earthquake areas, laden with sacks of rice, flour and bedding.

Coming the other way, Red Crescent ambulances shot past, their lights and sirens warning of the urgency of their mission.

Inside, sprawled on stretchers, were the latest victims hauled from the debris of the surrounding mountain communities, their limbs mangled, broken and bleeding.

It wasn't until the hill town of Mansehra that the first pancaked houses and twisted electricity masts began to appear. All along the roadside vast numbers of Pakistani soldiers and paramilitary police had been deployed, a high-visibility presence that was simply that and nothing else.

Some wore green surgical masks, part protection against the fumes spewing from the convoy of passing trucks, but also to staunch a far more potent odour that began to filter into our vehicle as we swept down a spectacular steep mountainside towards Balakot town.

Suddenly, when viewed not from above, but from ground level, the reality of what we were witnessing kicked in. It was a scene that will be hard to erase from the mind's eye. A town no more. A mini Hiroshima surrounded by towering mountains from which whole slices had sheared off into the valley below.

And all this in little over a minute.

One villager recounted how, while the earthquake was at its strongest, the ground in front of him reared up like a wave to a height of eight feet or more. Another spoke of a wooden suspension bridge spanning the valley's river bed swinging back and forth like a pendulum, but surviving intact because it moved with the force of the tremor.

Everywhere, on heaps of masonry and wood that had once been their homes, sat what was left of families, bewildered, traumatised and afraid. A few salvaged belongings were all that most had left in the world.

The only signs of medical aid for the army of injured were a few hastily rigged open-air triage and emergency clinics set up by a handful of independent foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

"We have three teams here in this area, " said Dr Rizwan Ullah of the International Medical Corps, his words almost drowned out by the overhead clatter of helicopters ferrying supplies to outlying surrounding villages and the Muslim call to prayer by the local muezzin.

Not far from where we spoke, on the other side of the river, another surgical team from Azerbaijan had quite literally set up its own stall. The Azeris had been here for four days and on Friday were still treating a fresh intake of 67 patients.

As the doctors described the problems they faced, four Pakistani soldiers, their faces enclosed in gas masks, went past shouldering a stretcher on which lay a body covered with a white sheet stained with dried blood. The smell from the corpse sent people scurrying in the opposite direction.

Almost everywhere, strewn along the roadside, were heaps of used clothes. Donations from the people of Pakistan, delivered in truckloads by well-meaning volunteer drivers, only served to block the few roads remaining open, that were vital for badly needed emergency relief aid.

Many other ordinary Pakistanis from cities like Lahore, Peshawar, and as far away as Karachi, had also come to join returning relatives in the search for those still interned beneath the layers of roofs, beams, bricks and mud that had engulfed Balakot.

A suspicion of authority and an understanding of the widespread corruption that underpins it, runs deep here. The prevailing view is that when ordinary people need something desperately, then they have to fend for themselves.

Hamid Mahmoud runs a plant-hire business in Rawalpindi, but for the last five days he and a few colleagues have become self- appointed search and rescue workers.

I came across him as he picked his way through a mountain of collapsed buildings on a slope overlooking the river that runs through Balakot valley. Mahmoud's men had uncovered five more bodies, and were taking stretchers back to enable them to carry the corpses down to the roadside So badly decomposed were the victims, that as one was lifted from the rubble, the man's right arm broke away entirely from the shoulder and torso.

"Those we find now are in a terrible condition, " said Mahmoud angrily. "In the five days I have been here, not once have I met or seen a local official who has come to talk to the people or explain to them what is happening."

According to the Pakistani government, the official search for those still missing is now being wound down, but for many people in Balakot the journey towards final closure is still a long and emotional way off.

Many have not yet begun to grieve properly, their minds so traumatised and unwilling to accept the scale of the disaster that has befallen them.

"I'm waiting for Rubeina, " said Mohammed Iqbal, a local man, as if his wife had simply gone to the market and would be back safe and sound any moment.

The husband and wife had been walking to the market for some shopping, and were passing a nearby school at the precise moment when the ground surrounding them yawed and opened up as the quake began shuddering.

"I was walking just a few yards in front of Rubeina and then it started, and she disappeared in the dust, " Iqbal explained.

As he spoke, his eyes glazed with tears, and he cast a glance sideways at the Jordanian search and rescue team who had just uncovered a hand sticking from the spot where his wife had vanished.

It was difficult to imagine what was going through Iqbal's mind, as one of the Jordanian rescuers called for wire cutters and a shovel.

A few minutes later, we watched as first the arm, and then the shoulder and head of a little girl, emerged from beneath a slab of concrete. Her face was caked in a grey-white dust and her eyes were open but lifeless. Just one of more than 130 children still missing after the school collapsed.

"It's not Rubeina, " Iqbal said quietly, his face betraying a complex mix of emotions.

What can you say to any person faced with such a tragedy? What would Iqbal tell his four daughters and two sons about what had happened to their mother during that 60 or so seconds last week on the way to the market? What can it be like to lose someone you cherish in such a way, depriving your children of everything only a mother can bring to a family?

In many years of covering the worst cruelties the world throws up, rarely have I seen another human being so emptied as Mohammed Iqbal.

Yet, walking through the rubble of Balakot, there were many sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, the old and the very young, looking for one or more people they had lost, most likely forever. On the wall outside one small shop that lay submerged in rubble, a tiny red post box remained attached and padlocked to a wall. Inside, I could just make out letters still waiting to be uplifted by the local postman. More than likely this was the last communication many of Balakot's citizens had with people beyond the town's remote boundaries. Who were the writers of those letters, I couldn't help wondering, and where are they now, after conservative estimates put more than half the town's 20,000 inhabitants dead or missing?

Some of the survivors and their relatives remain determined that, more than ever, there is the need to get a message out to the world at large.

"What I would like you to write for us is that we don't need any more clothes, and that we do have things to eat for now, " one local man insisted, before making his real point.

"But we are sitting in the open air, and the winter snows will be here in three weeks' time, and then these people you see around you will die, " he warned.

By then will the world's attention continue to focus on this disaster? Will we really still care? Already, the "South Asia quake" story, has been overtaken by other headlines in the news. Yet, just as in the aftermath of the tsunami last December, the real battle for survival is only now beginning.

"The government has promised to help with reconstruction, but I don't believe any of it. Look around you, can you see such a thing happening, when they can't even get here almost a week after the quake?" insisted businessman-turned-volunteer-rescuer Hamid Mahmoud.

Undoubtedly, there are questions that need to be asked about the way the Pakistani authorities have handled the relief effort around Balakot.

During our entire time there, we saw no soldiers directly involved in the search and rescue operation. Their duties, it seemed, were apparently restricted to standing guard, removing a few dead bodies, spraying some anti-bacterial chemical into the crowds on the streets, or occasionally directing traffic when the bottlenecks caused by well-meaning but misguided civilian volunteers led to ambulances being unable to move on traffic-jammed mountain roads.

The real Pakistani military effort, motivated more perhaps by security concerns in the unsettled region of Kashmir, centred heavily in Muzaffarabad and surrounding areas on the so-called Line of Control (LOC) that borders India.

An obvious co-ordination strategy by the United Nations also seemed strangely absent around Balakot. The organisation's usual armada of white 4x4 Toyota Landcruisers was almost permanently stationed at the southern end of the valley, and its personnel were thin on the ground in the heart of the town where chaos ensued.

Back in Islamabad, the political talk is now of investigations into shoddy building practices, and criminal proceedings should any "cowboy constructors" be uncovered, especially over the collapse of the Margalla Towers.

Issac Malik, a driver in Islamabad, told me that his brother was a builder in the capital, and a rare one at that.

"He lost hundreds of thousand of rupees over his last contract because he would not cut corners on materials, which would result in weak buildings that could fall apart when there is a tremor, " Malik pointed out. "But at least his conscience is clear."

It's a lot more than can be said for many private construction companies in Pakistan.

Only time will tell whether others in private business or government care enough about such corruption for it to bother their conscience.

Either way, it will doubtless be of little consolation to the thousands of poor villagers who have lost everything to something so terrible in a place so beautiful.

HOW TO HELP

DONATIONS to the Asian Earthquake Appeal can be made on 0870 60 60 900 (open 24 hours) or at www. dec. org. uk Post office branches, banks and building societies are also accepting donations, as are Save the Children, Oxfam and Red Cross shops.

The DEC co-ordinates the responses of 13 of the biggest charities in the UK.

In Scotland these include Christian Aid, Concern, Islamic Relief, Oxfam, Red Cross, Save the Children and Tear Fund.

Copyright 2005 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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