Feature Article

Fragmented lives in a divided land

The fault line that runs through the border area of India and Pakistan is political as well as geological. Victims of Saturday?s earthquake are now struggling to get aid in the face of government intransigence, and church groups have stepped in to help bridge the gap.

In what passes for normal times, Uri is a place of unusual tension. It is a frontier town, on one of the world?s most disputed and unstable political fault lines.

On the Indian side of the Line of Control between Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, Uri has seen three wars over the territory since partition between Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India in 1947.

But this week, I witnessed suffering and death on a scale that even war has not managed. The town of Uri itself was largely spared the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck Kashmir last Saturday, but surrounding villages were devastated. And across the Line of Control, the scale of destruction was so massive that an earlier estimated figure of 20,000 dead was expected to double, at least, and the main town of Muzaffarabad has been laid waste. Most poignantly, the UN said that deaths among children could reach 15,000, since so many school buildings collapsed on pupils attending lessons at the time. In Indian-administered Kashmir, with its more sparse population, the death toll is currently estimated at 1,300, with 4,500 injured. The earthquake zone as a whole is inhabited by 4 million people.

Given that so many of the areas affected, difficult to reach at the best of times, are now simply cut off, and only accessible by helicopter if at all, it is still possible only to give a snapshot of the aftermath of the earthquake, and Uri and its surroundings provide one.

In a makeshift tent, I find Haneefa Begum from the village of Jabala, 2,500 metres above Uri. The 70-year-old Muslim woman was pulled from the rubble of her house on Saturday morning, two hours after the quake struck. Along with other injured neighbours, she is being looked after by Carmelite Sister Jophy, part of a relief team from St Joseph?s Hospital in Baramulla, 50 kilometres away.

The team brought the first help to reach Jabala since the quake. Begum?s family members climbed down the steep mountain slope and pleaded with several relief teams to come to attend to their elderly relative, but none was prepared to make the steep rocky climb from the nearest pathway. In fact, the Catholic team only reached there by chance after irate villagers blocked the Uri-Muzaffarabad road on Monday, protesting over the Government?s failure to reach affected villages.

Tears started to pour down Begum?s wrinkled face and I asked her why she was crying. ?I am so happy someone has come to care for me at last,? she said. Sher Jaman, however, was certainly not happy. ?Our children are dying of hunger,? he shouted. ?Everyone is shivering in the cold and we cannot even take blankets from our flattened houses. You come and see our village!?

Jaman, 50, was wearing a garment soaked with the blood of his younger brother, who died after being pulled from the wreckage of their house. Almost all the houses in the village of 400 Muslim families had been flattened, Jaman said, and the surviving villagers were sleeping in the open, in the biting cold. Government workers had taken away 30 bodies a day after the quake, but they had not returned.

Mohamed Maqbal Parray, a college student from Jabala, guided members of the church relief team along the foot-wide pathway, with a deep gorge to one side, on the 40-minute trek to his village. When we reached Jabala we saw that Jaman?s statement had, if anything, been an understatement.

The village was levelled. ?I cannot find my books, and my finals for my BA start next month,? said Parray, pointing to the wreckage of what had once been his two-storey house. This might have seemed like an odd perspective on what happened, given the scale of what happened, but it showed, I thought, how, even for those who survived without injury, the course of their lives will probably be changed in ways that could not have been predicted and cannot yet be measured.

I watched a woman in her 20s ? she did not know her date of birth or precise age ? emerge with some difficulty from her makeshift shelter. This was Zarefa Begum, who was breast-feeding her month-old daughter when the quake struck. The roof of the house collapsed on mother and daughter, and the baby died in her mother?s arms. Zarefa Begum had deep lacerations in her head, that were dried over with mud.

She appeared to have sustained spinal injuries as she could only stand with great difficulty, and was clearly in acute pain. Some of the relief team left to bring stretchers that would allow them to carry Zarefa Begum and others with similar or worse injuries to the main road, to be transported from there if possible to St Joseph?s Hospital in Baramulla.

It was not difficult to understand the villagers who had taken the law into their own hands and blocked the road. For hour after hour their desperate pleas for help had been unheeded by passing government and army relief teams, as their awareness of the agony of their loved ones grew ever more desperate.

The gap between the needs of the victims and the resources available to assist them is terrifyingly large, but the Catholic relief effort, coordinated from its temporary headquarters at St Joseph?s School in Baramulla ? home to a single Catholic parish of 24 families ? is doing what it can to help bridge that gap.

?Our target is to reach the most needy,? said Susai Nathan, the Jesuit father who is directing the effort. Each day before dawn, nuns and nursing students from neighbouring St Joseph?s Hospital, along with other volunteers, set out for the remote villages around Uri that have been worst hit, but that are still waiting for government help.

The community feels fortunate that it is in a position where it can offer help, rather than being in dire need of assistance like so many of its neighbours. When the quake struck, the school and the nearby tiny church were hosting a visit of the state governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Lt Gen (retired) S.K. Sinha, to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the first Catholic mission in Kashmir in 1905. Two thousand five hundred students and guests were gathered for the celebration. ?We were really shocked and the children started crying and running away,? said Bishop Peter Celestine Elampassery. ?The school building was swaying when we were about to start the function.?

Baramulla itself did not sustain any serious damage, but Bishop Elampassery described the earthquake as a wake-up call. ?We need to be more faithful and dedicated to our mission,? he said. ?This is a providential sign to make the Church reflect on its mission here. This is a region that has witnessed much bloodshed where healing has to take place.? The number of Catholics in Kashmir has remained static since the Mill Hill missionaries set up the first mission a century ago. More than 30,000 people have been killed in fighting in Kashmir since the 1990s.

The Catholic Bishops? Conference of India, the Caritas aid agency and the Catholic Relief Service of the United States, now all have a presence in Baramulla and are liaising with government and army officials over access to the devastated but still politically sensitive areas where the Indian army is battling incursions by Islamic militants.

There are an estimated 12,000 people stranded in the remote villages on the Indian side of the Line of Control. ?We hope [the authorities] will give us all the required permission as we have good rapport with them, Father Sebastian Kalappurayi, principal of St Joseph?s School, told The Tablet.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, visited the region with Lt Gen Sinha. He told a news conference in Srinagar afterwards that he would take steps to reinstate damaged communication links between the two sides of Kashmir to assist people whose relatives were on the Pakistani side.

He would be taking up the issue with the Pakistani communications minister, he said. And, as the main route from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad had been completely blocked, people would be allowed to use alternative routes to get in touch with their relatives on the Indian side. So far just five families from Pakistan and one from Indian Kashmir have been allowed to return home without restriction but indications are that these figures may rise rapidly. ?It?s a humanitarian issue and no political consideration would be allowed to override a humanitarian issue,? Mr Singh insisted.

Meanwhile, India has offered helicopters to Pakistan, which Pakistan said, somewhat implausibly, were not needed, although it did accept a planeload of relief supplies. Whether the region?s political leaders have the imagination to rescue from this appalling crisis the opportunity it could present for the beginnings of a settlement of the half-century-old Kashmir conflict is still an open question.

Anto Akkara is The Tablet?s correspondent in Delhi.