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Pak quake relief situation worse than tsunami: UN

Annan seeks more aid for survivors

Afp, Geneva/ Muzaffarabad
The UN's top relief official warned yesterday that the shortfall in aid for victims of the earthquake in Pakistan made the situation worse than after the Indian Ocean tsunami last year.
"This is not enough. We have never had this kind of logistical nightmare ever. We thought the tsunami was the worst we could get. This is worse," Jan Egeland, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator told journalists.
Egeland said at least half a million people in Pakistani Kashmir were still out of reach in the mountainous region following the 7.6 magnitude earthquake some two weeks ago.
The international community needed to set up a "second Berlin airlift", he added, referring to a western air shuttle that overcame the blockade of the German city in the late 1940s.
An estimated three million people were without useable homes and in need of shelter, while about 67,000 people were seriously injured, according to the UN official. The UN says there have been 48,000 confirmed deaths.
"The earthquake in Kashmir afflicting three countries is becoming worse by the day as the extent of the emergency dawns upon us," Egeland said.
"The world is not responding as it
should," he added, warning of a "cutoff" facing aid deliveries in December as winter and "massive" snowfalls takes hold in the region.
"Tens of thousands of people's lives are at stake and they could die if we don't get to them in time," Egeland said.
The UN has received 86 million dollars in aid pledges in response to its appeal for 272 million dollars in aid from the international community.
Other bilateral offers of aid to Pakistan have been made by countries.
Currently 60 helicopters were operating in the region, with 20 more due to arrive, the UN said.
The tsunami on December 26, 2004 killed 217,000 people in India, Indonesia, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.
It triggered an outpouring of short-and long-term international aid worth billions of dollars, although the unprecedented relief operation was initially blighted by logistical bottlenecks.
Earlier UN chief Kofi Annan begged the world to do more to prevent a second wave of deaths from Pakistan's earthquake as troops yesterday set up new helipads to reach survivors cut off for nearly two weeks.
Annan made a strongly worded appeal for "immediate and exceptional escalation of the global relief
effort" as the merciless Himalayan winter sets in for three million people made homeless by the October 8 catastrophe.
"That means a second, massive wave of death will happen if we do not step up our efforts now," Annan said at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
He said he would go in person next week to a UN-sponsored donors' conference in Geneva on the disaster, which killed more than 47,700 people in Pakistan alone, and urged governments to attend at the highest level.
"I expect results," he said. "There are no excuses. If we are to show ourselves worthy of calling ourselves members of humankind, we must rise to this challenge."
The military said it was further stepping up its drive to get to the most remote areas using helicopters, mules and footsoldiers and would open 24 new helipads Thursday for quake aid flights in the Kashmiri mountains.
The helipads will be set up outside Muzaffarabad in the devastated Jhelum and Neelum valleys, which are only now seeing road links restored.
"This means we will be able to help people who we have not been able to reach so far," another army spokesman Colonel Rana Sajjad said late Wednesday.