UNTIL LAST week Khaista Rehman owned a fabric shop and lived in a brick-built home with his family. But the floods that devastated northwest Pakistan, claiming about 1,500 lives so far, have destroyed his home and washed away his business.
Mr Rehman, a 26-year-old father of four, now shares a single room with 33 members of his extended family in a school building converted into a makeshift camp. “My house was two kilometres from the river,” he said. “The water crossed my house, submerged it completely and went one kilometre further. There was no warning. By the time I gathered up the children, the water was waist high. We carried the children on our shoulders.”
Mr Rehman is among about 800 people crammed into primary school number two, in Pir Pia village, in Nowshera district. The room he lives in is bare except for a few thin mats on the floor, where the entire family sleeps. Outside, uprooted children wander, grubby and lost.
Mr Rehman said he had taken about €5,000 worth of fabric on credit for his shop, which is now ruined. “I don’t know what I will do. All I can say is that it is up to God.” His family are among tens of thousands trapped in submerged areas, cut off because access roads and bridges have been washed away by the torrents. More than a million people overall have been affected by the floods, caused by torrential rain in recent days that brought many times the usual monsoon deluge.
The floods are the worst since at least 1929, and the water levels in the river Indus are said to be the highest in 110 years. The waters, having ravaged the northwest, are now gushing deeper into Pakistan.
Afghans from a nearby refugee camp fill the other side of Rehman’s school building. The Azakhail Payon Afghan refugee camp had been there for 30 years. But its 5,000 mud homes were washed away.
“It’s all gone. We went back there and found nothing,” said Rahmatullah, a 29-year-old religious cleric who had lived and worked at Azakhail Payon.
Nowshera, probably the worst hit district, is not a remote area, yet there was no sign of government aid. The school camp was set up by a local charity, the Khair-un-Naas foundation, which is also providing food to refugees in three other schools in the village.
In Pakistan, the gap left by the state’s inabilities and ineptitudes is dangerous. Protests are breaking out among people frustrated by the lack of government help, which many complain was limited to a military airlift of people stranded on roof tops.
The government and military insist that a full-scale relief effort is under way.
Hard-line religious groups have jumped into the vacuum. Among the Islamic groups distributing aid to the flood victims is Jama’at-ud-Da’wah (JuD), a supposedly banned organisation that is reckoned to be a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is blamed for the devastating terrorist attack on Mumbai in 2008.
JuD often tries to disguise its presence with other names, but this time its own banner was visible in several places.
Salman Shahid, a spokesman for the Falah-i-Insaniat foundation (Foundation for the Welfare of Humanity), which has links to JuD, said the Islamist group had set up 13 relief camps and six medical camps, and that a dozen ambulances were providing emergency treatment.
“We’re very much there. We’re the only group that is providing cooked food to trapped people and those laying on the roadside,” Mr Shahid said. “Our volunteers are evacuating people.” The north-west is the centre of Pakistan’s battle against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Alongside military and police operations, the government is trying – with the support of the west – to improve its services and living standards there, to blunt the appeal of militancy.
Now, across Nowshera, people are wading through the water, with bundles of salvaged possessions on their backs.
The river should be far away, but water or sticky mud saturates everything, creating a landscape of collapsed homes, fallen electricity pylons and upturned cars.
In the scenic Swat valley, further north, which was also hit hard, the population was only just recovering from the Taliban takeover and subsequent military operation last year to drive them out.
Tourists had returned for the first time this summer, only to be stranded by the flood waters.
Hundreds have had to be rescued by army helicopters. The provincial government warned yesterday that there were signs of a cholera outbreak in Swat.
“People are making do with just rice and I couldn’t even find that in the market today,” said Zubair Torwali, a social worker in Bahrain, a town in the upper reaches of Swat. “No aid has come here,” he said, speaking by telephone.
He believes one factor that may have contributed to the extreme flooding in Swat is the deforestation that accompanied the Taliban takeover.
With the landowners fleeing after being targeted by the Taliban, the timber smugglers had joined up with the Taliban to chop down as many trees as possible. The floods have ripped away bridges, washed away crops and swallowed roads.
More rain is forecast for the coming days. – (Guardian service)