DEVELOPMENT: Homelessness Lingers After Pakistan Quake

Srabani Roy

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 10 2006 (IPS) – The snows have already started falling in the high mountains of Pakistan, two weeks earlier than normal. Another winter, with sub-zero temperatures, will soon engulf the valleys and peaks of the Himalayas and thrust itself upon the thousands of people still homeless following the devastating earthquake that shook northwest Pakistan a year ago Sunday.
With the onset of winter, which Pakistan s Meteorological Department predicts will be more severe than last year s, officials say the need for shelter is of utmost importance for those still living in tents in the earthquake-affected areas.

Housing reconstruction is our biggest challenge, said Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan s state minister for economic affairs and statistics, who spoke at a United Nations news conference commemorating the one-year anniversary of the earthquake last week. While this is one of the most important sectors, it still remains one of the most under-funded.

Khar said that as the government transitions from relief to reconstruction, an estimated two billion dollars is needed to rebuild the almost 600,000 homes that were destroyed by the earthquake. But the government faces an 800-million-dollar shortage to meet this task, and so far only 300,000 people have returned to permanent housing, according to Khar. The health, water and sanitation sectors also remain under-funded, she said.

We are trying to get existing [donor] pledges translated into something that can be used immediately, said former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, speaking at the news conference. But we still have a long way to go before I can express total satisfaction.

The former president is the U.N. s special envoy for the South Asia earthquake, which measured 7.6 on the Richter scale and hit the Northwest Frontier Province and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (in Pakistan Administered Kashmir) on Oct. 8, 2005. The earthquake left 73,000 people dead and 3.5 million people homeless, and affected over 30,000 sq kms in Pakistan. It also hit parts of Indian Administered Kashmir, though on a much smaller scale.
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Echoing Khar s concerns, Bush said that 94 million dollars, of an estimated 255 million dollars needed, is still missing for Pakistan s Early Recovery Plan, launched this May to help the transition from relief to reconstruction.

Soon after the earthquake, Pakistan created the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority to oversee and coordinate the longer-term reconstruction work. The ERRA estimated that 4.3 billion dollars would be needed for post-earthquake reconstruction efforts in 12 sectors, including health, education, housing, livelihood, water and sanitation, governance, telecommunications, power, transport, social protection, tourism and the environment.

Immediately following the earthquake, the international donor community came through with pledges well over the estimate, promising Pakistan 6.7 billion dollars in grants and loans. So far, 5.4 billion dollars has been committed or spent on projects, according to Khar.

Bush, who is responsible for mobilising donor pledges and commitments, admitted that he was worried about donor fatigue . Despite concerted efforts, he noted that he had some response but not as much as we d like from many countries.

By way of comparison, the U.N. s appeal for the Dec. 26, 2004 Asian tsunami, which claimed more than 200,000 lives, was fully funded, and close to 80 percent of donor pledges for that disaster were committed within the first few months of the event.

Of the U.N. s 552-million-dollar appeal for the Pakistan earthquake, only 70 percent has been funded to date, according to Stephanie Bunker, advocacy and public information officer at the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which overseas the U.N. s funding efforts for humanitarian crises.

Rebecca Scheurer, regional manager for Asia, Middle East and Europe at the American Red Cross, agreed that in the aftermath of the tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast of the United States on Aug. 29, 2005, an element of donor fatigue had set in. But she noted that, unlike with the tsunami or Katrina, many simply were not aware of the full magnitude of the disaster until days or even weeks after the event.

The rugged terrain and remoteness of the affected villages significantly hampered the Pakistani authorities and relief community s ability to conduct rapid needs assessments, she told IPS. This was in large part why the full scale of the disaster was not evident in the initial aftermath of the disaster.

At the time of the earthquake, Scheurer was regional advisor for South Asia with the U.S. Agency for International Development s Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance. She has worked on all three disasters. In addition to the difficult topography and related access challenges, humanitarian and donor groups also had to be aware of security and cultural sensitivities.

Many in the relief community considered this to be the most challenging natural disaster of our time, Scheurer told IPS.

Pakistan s coordinated response and management of the immediate relief and rescue operations has been generally hailed as a success, particularly in averting a predicted second wave of deaths last winter, which turned out to be relatively mild. But aid groups warn that if the upcoming winter is harsh, as predicted, thousands of people in temporary and insufficient shelters will once again be vulnerable.

The number of people in official tent camps, located in two of the worst affected cities, Muzzafrabad and Balakot, is approximately 30,000, according to government figures. This constitutes only five percent of those who were in camps last year, and Khar was optimistic that finding more permanent housing for the people in these camps would be very, very manageable .

Humanitarian groups such as Oxfam International, however, put the total number of homeless people at 1.8 million.

According to Oxfam, which recently released a briefing paper on the challenges facing the earthquake response, the Pakistani government has yet to prepare plans for the vast majority of the homeless, who are primarily in rural areas and landless, and living in unofficial camps, makeshift shelters or with friends and relatives. The report points out that they have not begun rebuilding their homes; most of them are in makeshift shelters that offer limited protection against the coming cold.

Humanitarian groups such as Oxfam and the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) and Red Crescent Societies have urged that the camps, which the government had planned to close, be kept open this winter. Oxfam recommends building temporary winterised shelter for people living in rural and mountain areas who are unable to rebuild, and upgrading winterised shelter for people in camps (especially in Northwest Frontier Province).

Scheurer said the American Red Cross has set aside 2.5 million dollars to support the IFRC and the Pakistan Red Crescent Society s needs this upcoming winter.

The humanitarian community has been busy with contingency plans, such as increasing stockpiles of pre-positioned relief, in anticipation of continued needs over the winter, she told IPS. We can t think of Pakistan in a reconstruction phase yet.