A hundred days later, the litany of woes is piling up for victims of the devastating floods that ravaged Pakistan. Bad news is that the waters still remain. Worse still is the fact that aid is fast drying up.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), funding for the Floods Relief and Early Recovery Response Plan is only at 40 per cent of the requirements of USD$1.93 billion. An estimated 14 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. But the initial frenzy to help the victims is no longer there.
The UN Special Envoy of the Secretary General for the Assistance to Pakistan, Rauf Engin Soysal, was hapless in his plea, "At this time it is critical, more than ever, for countries to demonstrate commitment to the people of Pakistan. Millions remain in need of immediate help." So far, the plea has fallen on deaf ears.
According to OCHA, many face serious challenges on a daily basis, relying on the supply of safe drinking water, food, health care and shelter, especially as the harsh winter begins and temperatures drop in northern Pakistan. Displaced people are scattered across vast areas and floodwaters are still engulfing their homes, particularly in Sindh. Bad news has already started pouring in with reports of the first snowfall in the mountains. As agricultural communities all along the Indus brace up for a long and cold winter, their crops and livestock have disappeared.
The floodwaters started rising in late July and took weeks to move down the Indus river from the north to the south of the country. The flooding was estimated to have killed over 1,700 people and affected around 20.6 million people across the country. The floods caused an estimated $9.7 billion in damage to infrastructure, farms, homes, as well as other direct and indirect losses, according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB).
"The initial solidarity demonstrated in the early days of the crisis must be re-energized if Pakistan is not to be forgotten. There is still much work to be done to support people who are trying to recover from this shock and rebuild their lives," was the frantic call from Martin Mogwanja, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Pakistan.
In Quetta, capital of the southwestern Balochistan Province, thousands are still stranded and unable to get home. Most of these people arrived in mid-August looking for relief aid. Now they have no means to return. According to the National Disaster Management Authority, 90 percent of the 61,000 displaced who arrived here are still around. The rate of return of the displaced, however, has been better in other provinces.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people will have to remain in camps throughout the winter. The reason is that floodwaters still remain in parts of Sindh and Balochistan. Large tracts of the two provinces remain under 3-4 feet of water. Those hardest hit by the flooding – people affected by extreme poverty, loss of livelihoods and other vulnerabilities – may need camp accommodation even longer. UNHCR has been able to help 1.4 million flood affected people with tents and other shelter and household relief items. But the humanitarian needs remain acute and the agency's appeal for $120 million remains only 63 percent funded.
Last week, a top Red Cross official lamented that hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis whose lives have been devastated by recent floods will likely receive no aid at all, and the international community may never understand the full extent of the disaster.
Pascal Cuttat, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Pakistan, said, "The number of people affected in this slow-moving disaster is something we'll never know ... and the combined capacity of international actors with national actors, including the (Pakistani) armed forces, will not be good enough. There will be hundreds of thousands - or even millions - who have received absolutely nothing, and the impact on the social fabric in these areas will be hard to work out."
Militancy has compounded the problem in many areas. Pakistan has already restricted access for aid workers to parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as North West Frontier Province) and the semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas because of fears for their security.
