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Pakistani army soldiers rescued villagers from flooded areas in Khangarh near Multan, Pakistan on Monday. More Photos »
By SALMAN MASOOD and WAQAR GILLANI
Published: August 16, 2010
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — With flooding affecting a fifth of Pakistan and worsening by the day, United Nations officials said Monday that a shortage of aid funds was leaving some six million people, the majority of them children and infants, at risk of potentially lethal diseases borne by dirty water.
“Clean water is an urgent need,” said Maurizio Giuliano, a United Nations spokesman. The United Nations has appealed for international donations of $460 million, but only one-third of that has been provided, he said in a telephone interview. Clean water has been distributed to just one million people, he added.
“There was a first wave of deaths caused by the floods themselves,” Mr. Giuliano said. “But if we don’t act soon enough there will be a second wave of deaths caused by a combination of lack of clean water, food shortages and water-borne and vector-borne diseases.
“The picture,” he said, “is a gruesome one.”
Estimates of grievous long-term economic and political damage from the inundation are constantly revised in more dire directions as the rains continue. Roads, bridges and communications networks across the country have been severely damaged, Pakistani officials said.
The devastation has raised fears of further instability in Pakistan, a central pillar of American regional strategy to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda but also a place long troubled by a weak government and economic woes. Hard-line Islamic groups have stepped in to provide aid where the government has failed to reach; the United States is also sending aid with an eye to improving its reputation among ordinary Pakistanis.
Still, aid lags far behind immediate need, and costs will continue to grow even after the rains end, experts warn. The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who flew over the country on Sunday with President Asif Ali Zardari, said he had never seen such a disaster and urged foreign donors to speed up their assistance.
Arbab Alamgir Khan, the federal minister for communications, said that as of Monday, damage to roads alone was estimated around $76 million, much of it in the volatile northern province of Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa, formerly North-West Frontier Province. That is where the floods started amid pounding monsoon rains earlier this month.
In the latest surge, floodwater submerged vast areas of Baluchistan and Sindh Provinces after causing massive destruction in the country’s north and in the central Punjab Province.
Television footage from helicopters showed a seemingly endless vista of muddy water, freckled with palm trees. The distribution of aid seemed chaotic in some parts, with people jostling for handfuls of food thrown from trucks.
In Baluchistan Province in the southwest, rail service was suspended for three days starting Monday from the provincial capital, Quetta, to the provinces of Punjab and Sindh, and floods were threatening the town of Osta Muhammad. Officials said Monday they were trying to evacuate thousands of residents there, while thousands more were stranded in the town of Dera Murad Jamali.
In Punjab, a second round of flooding threatened some areas such as Rajanpur, said Muhammad Usman, a provincial coordination officer.
“The second wave has hit us worse,” he said. In another area, where people had gathered after escaping earlier floods, a canal had burst its banks, and relief workers were struggling to repair the damage.
“We are trying to fill that breach with heavy machinery, but we have also warned people to be alert,” Mr. Usman said. Some people were preparing to move again, abandoning an area where floodwaters have cut roads and electric power supplies, but others insisted they would stay put.
Abdul Mohsin, a government education officer, scrambled to salvage the school records and said that, despite the threat of further flooding, not everyone was prepared to abandon their land and homes.
“My father is not ready to leave,” Mr. Mohsin said. “He has told the family to move, and he will be on the roof of the house with his gun.”
Elsewhere, The Associated Press reported, angry flood survivors blocked a highway to protest delays in the delivery of aid as rain poured from leaden skies.
In the Sukkur area, The A.P. said, hundreds of survivors complained bitterly that food aid was rare and was distributed only when television cameras were in the district.
“They are throwing packets of food to us like we are dogs. They are making people fight for these packets,” a protester, Kalu Mangiani, told The A.P.
Salman Masood reported from Islamabad, and Wagar Gillani from Lahore, Pakistan. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris
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