Jonathan Miller blogs from a refugee camp in flood-hit Pakistan where medical facilities, schools and homes have all been swept away by the country’s floods.
I’ve spent the afternoon in the village of Nowshera and it’s about 30 miles east of Peshawar on the main trunk road towards Islamabad.
The village lies on the Kabul river which flooded very severely. The river level rose many metres about five or six days ago. In the intervening period, people along the river bank have received virtually no aid at all. Some medical aid and food distribution is now going on courtesy of some foreign aid groups and Islamist charities, including one group we’ve just been with called the Al Khidmat welfare group.
We’ve spent a long time in a refugee camp, the Aza Khel refugee camp. Which is where Afghan refugees have been living for 30 years. The river rose I would estimate about seven or eight metres and completely covered all of their houses. There were several thouand people living there not a single house is left standing. Their medical facilities are completely gone, their schools are gone, the houses have gone, there is absolutely nothing left.
We spoke to the doctors who didn’t have any medicines to distribute. They said, they’re severely worried now about the risk of epidemics. They’re already seeing many cases of vomiting and diarrhoea and respiratory infections but they have no medicines at all with which to deal with these problems.
Local people are salvaging pathetic amounts of stuff from their former houses, it is heart-rending to see it. And there is just a sea of mud.
The water is still everywhere and it is contaminated. People are drinking from wells and stand pipes. The water in those is also contaminated, not only from raw sewage but also from the decomposing carcases of animals which are left bloated where the flood waters had washed them up.
It’s a pretty depressing scene and everywhere there is a sense of real anguish. Anger at the government as well.
Everybody knew that President Zardari is in the UK, they’re angry that the army has not even been here to help and that no Pakistani aid has got to them apart from a handful of local people generous enough to make donations and provide them with some basic water and food.
The situation now is that a week after the flooding, there is a really small trickle of aid and really there are a lot of outlying areas we’ve heard of not only Upper Swat but in Kashmir too.
In parts of these areas, villages have been wiped away by landslides which have not yet been reached. I think there is an undiscovered catastrophe here that has yet to be reported.