India should help Pakistan with floods disaster
ONE-THIRD COUNTRY UNDER WATER WITH MORE THAN 1,000 KILLED IN DISASTER
IT IS easy to say India should help Pakistan over the floods, but will such assistance be accepted?
Now is not the time to consider Pakistan-India relations. The stories emerging from Pakistan are just too harrowing.
One man told the BBC his daughter had been swept away.
“She told me, ‘Daddy, I’m going to collect leaves for my goat,’” said Muhammad Fareed, who lives in the Kaghan Valley in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. “She went to the bank of the river and a gush of water followed and took her away.”
Flash floods triggered by destructive monsoon rains have killed more than 1,000 people and affected the lives of 30 million in Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, three of the country’s four provinces.
Sindh has received almost eight times the average amount of rainfall in August, wiping out crops such as rice and cotton.
Videos on social media from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa show hotels, roads, bridges, houses, hospitals, schools, mini power stations, and water mills being washed away.
Pakistan’s foreign minister, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, son of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, has appealed for international help. He admitted, “I haven’t seen destruction of this scale. I find it very difficult to put into words ... it is overwhelming.”
Pakistan is an Islamic republic but its climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, told CNN: “We have a monsoon season every year but this is nothing like that… it is a torrential downpour of biblical proportion.”
As Pakistan’s neighbour, India is best placed to offer urgent help. Nothing else matters.
TENS of millions of people across swathes of Pakistan were on Monday (29) battling the worst monsoon floods in a decade, with countless homes washed away, vital farmland destroyed, and the country’s main river threatening to burst its banks.
A third of the country was under water, creating a “crisis of unimaginable proportions”, climate change minister Sherry Rehman said.
Officials say 1,061 people have died since June when the rains began, but the final toll could be higher as hundreds of villages in the mountainous north have been cut off after flood-swollen rivers washed away roads and bridges.
This year’s flooding has affected more than 33 million people – one in seven Pakistanis – said the National Disaster Management Authority.
“It’s all one big ocean, there’s no dry land to pump the water out,” Rehman said, adding the economic cost would also be devastating.
Pakistan’s foreign minister said last Sunday (28) the country needs financial help to deal with “overwhelming” floods, adding that he hoped financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund would take the economic fallout into account.
Some initial analyses by economists have put the cost of the damage at $4 billion (£3.4bn), though the foreign minister said it was likely higher.
The Queen on Monday said in a message of support to Pakistan prime minister Shehbaz Sharif, “My thoughts are with all those who have been affected, as well as those working in difficult circumstances to support the recovery efforts.”
Pope Francis last Sunday called on the global community to help Pakistan, and said he was praying for the victims.
The chief minister of the southern province of Balochistan, Mir Abdul Qudoos Bizenjo, told reporters the province had suffered more than 200 billion Pakistani rupees (£767 million/$900m) worth of damage from the more than two months of flooding.
“We are facing a lack of financial resources, tents, and other relief goods and connectivity, as all major highways are badly damaged ... hampering our relief efforts,” he said, adding that his province needed more help from the federal government departments to cope.
This year’s floods are comparable to those of 2010 – the worst on record – when more than 2,000 people died.
Flood victims took refuge in makeshift camps that have sprung up across the country, where desperation is setting in.
The residents of Panjal Sheikh are among those affected by the flooding.
“When it started raining, there was destruction in every direction,” said Panjal Sheikh resident Mukhtiar Ahmed.
“As we rushed to try and save the children in a house that had just collapsed, another house fell, and then another,” he said last Sunday. “The whole village has been erased.” Near Sukkur, a city in southern Sindh province and home to an ageing colonialera barrage on the Indus River that is vital to preventing further catastrophe, one farmer lamented the devastation wrought on his rice fields.
Millions of acres of rich farmland have been flooded by weeks of non-stop rain, but now the Indus is threatening to burst its banks as torrents of water course downstream from tributaries in the north.
“Our crop spanned over 5,000 acres, on which the best quality rice was sown and is eaten by you and us,” Khalil Ahmed, 70, said. “All that is finished.”
Much of Sindh is now an endless landscape of water, hampering a massive military-led relief operation.
“There are no landing strips or approaches available... our pilots find it difficult to land,” one senior officer said.
The army’s helicopters were also struggling to pluck people to safety in the north, where mountains and deep valleys make for treacherous flying conditions.
The government has declared an emergency and appealed for international help, and last Sunday the first aid flights began arriving – from Turkey and the UAE. It could not have come at a worse time for the Pakistani economy.
In Washington later Monday, the International Monetary Fund executive board was scheduled to meet to decide whether to green-light the resumption of a $6bn (£5.1bn) loan programme essential for the country to service its foreign debt, but it is already clear it will take more to repair and rebuild after this monsoon.
Prices of basic goods – particularly onions, tomatoes and chickpeas – are soaring as vendors bemoan a lack of supplies from the flooded breadbasket provinces of Sindh and Punjab.
The Met office said the country as a whole had received twice the usual monsoon rainfall, but Balochistan and Sindh had more than four times the average of the last three decades. Padidan, a small town in Sindh, was drenched by more than 1.2 metres of rain since June, making it the wettest place in the country.
Across Sindh, thousands of displaced people are camped alongside elevated highways and railway tracks – often the only dry spots as far as the eye can see.
More are arriving daily at Sukkur’s city ring road, belongings piled on boats and tractor trollies, looking for shelter until the floodwaters recede.
Sukkur Barrage supervisor Aziz Soomro said the main headway of water was expected to arrive around September 5, but was confident the 90-year-old sluice gates would cope.
The barrage diverts water from the Indus into 10,000km of canals that make up one of the world’s biggest irrigation schemes, but the farms it supplies are now mostly under water.