Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
UN to Meet on Pakistan Aid, 4.6 Million without Shelter
ISLAMABAD - The United Nations on Thursday estimated 4.6 million people are still without shelter after Pakistan's devastating floods, tripling its target number for assistance as it prepared to drum up more aid.
The United Nations has described Pakistan's worst humanitarian crisis as one of the world's biggest disasters, but while foreign aid is now reaching some of the 20 million flood victims, critics have slammed the response as too slow. (AFP) The United Nations has described Pakistan's worst humanitarian crisis as one of the world's biggest disasters, but while foreign aid is now reaching some of the 20 million flood victims, critics have slammed the response as too slow.
At least six million survivors are dependent on humanitarian assistance to survive, in desperate need of food, shelter and clean drinking water, with concerns growing over potential outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and hepatitis.
"Roughly 4.6 million people are still without shelter," Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Islamabad, told AFP.
The estimate includes hundreds of thousands of people who are still on the move, he said. Not all of them could be considered technically "homeless" because they may find homes to return to when the flood waters recede.
"In this context we have decided to increase the number of targeted beneficiaries for tents and plastic sheeting from the initial figure of two million to at least six million," he said.
At a camp for the displaced from across the country, survivors are battling with crippling heat, miserable sanitation and swarms of mosquitoes.
Many fled their homes with just the clothes on their backs and have been forced to drink contaminated water, causing watery diarrhoea.
The UN General Assembly meets in New York on Thursday in an effort to hasten the delivery of aid after receiving just over half of the 460 million dollars appealed for last week.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to use the UN meeting to announce extra American aid -- currently 90 million dollars -- after the floods wiped out entire villages, farmland and infrastructure.
"We still need more funds, tents, food, water and medical supplies," UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said.
A resolution urging the international community to help Pakistan recover in the medium and long-term will also be on the table, amid signs foreign donors are rallying in support of the embattled Muslim nation.
The Asian Development Bank said it would provide two billion dollars to repair roads, bridges, power lines, homes, schools, medical facilities and farm structures, and the World Bank has promised to lend 900 million dollars.
"The extent of human suffering caused by the floods cannot be easily quantified, nor can the damage wrought upon the country's physical and social infrastructure," said the ADB's chief for central and west Asia, Juan Miranda.
"But what is clear is that this disaster is like no other in living memory, and that our response must also be unprecedented, equal to the need and fast."
Although weather forecasters say the monsoon systems are easing off and water levels receding, the fallout from three weeks of devastating floods that have left nearly 1,500 people dead is likely to last for years.
Japan said it will send a military helicopter unit, expected to include more than 300 troops, to help with the relief effort and Pakistan's foreign ministry said Thursday that international assistance was gaining "momentum".
Senator John Kerry on Thursday became the first senior US policymaker to visit areas ravaged by the disaster, flying over affected areas in Punjab with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan is on the frontline of the US-led fight against Al-Qaeda and is locked in battle with homegrown Taliban who have been blamed over a three-year bombing campaign that has killed more than 3,570 people.
A US government report warns that ecological problems would likely worsen due to climate change, threatening the unity of Pakistan and exacerbating the threat of Islamist extremists.
Islamabad has confirmed 1,475 deaths, but WHO representative Guido Sabatinelli told AFP he suspected the toll was much higher.
"We're talking about 20 million people affected today and there is no infrastructure and no health centres that can register the deaths," he said.
- Posted in
3 Comments so far
Show AllSix million people at risk and Us offers 90 million.
This is chump change - the yearly bonus for a top dog on the Street. A few hopped up fighter jets. We pay more to Blackwater or whatever the hell Prince is calling it these days.
It's all there in the numbers, a stark and brutal balance sheet that demonstrates the diabolical priorities of the Us empire.
"dreamjoehill August 20th, 2010 2:35 am
Six million people at risk and Us offers 90 million.
This is chump change - the yearly bonus for a top dog on the Street. A few hopped up fighter jets. We pay more to Blackwater or whatever the hell Prince is calling it these days.
It's all there in the numbers, a stark and brutal balance sheet that demonstrates the diabolical priorities of the Us empire.'
Ah, just the human condition which of course includes 'Americans'.. they are not 'special'.
And Blackwater is now and has been for some time called Xe. Maybe its changed that name too now.. as the infamy around both names grows.. and around those who employ them.
I sometimes have to wonder if it might be better to be ruled by a One World Government which would make of the world one country : Earth.
Where people of that one country would be called upon to help those of that same country when it was in need.
~
Only one comment so far?
Wow! Pakistani "Muslims" in America, of which there may be about 500,000 with another 100,000 in Canada, and close to 2 million in England, have so far contributed zilch to their fellow humans who are under a flood that rivals Noah's biblical one.
Among these 3 million or so Pakis in very good living conditions in the "infidel" West, there are tens of thousands who love to hate that West until time comes to beg food from it. These are the Paki Muslims who wear their fundamentalism on their sleeves and in-your-face by building mosques where they wisely should not, suffocating women under veils, and other "Islamic" ungodly acts. In this mass of people here, there aren't 10,000 who can make a $5000 donation each to get an international aid effort started with that $50 million?
Tu,tut Pakis, if you don't give a shit about Pakistan, then why should the rest of the world? Also, doesn't the Quran teach you basic decency? As a Muslim, my last reading of it says that those who have money but deny it to those in need but make a show of religion, are hypocrites - - MUNNAFIQUN. Hypocrites are considered the lowest vermin on Earth by ethics of Islam. I am not a Paki, and I am a Western Muslim, fully in sync with sicence, logic and the Enlightenment. Right now I don't have much money. When I did, I used to give $10,000 from a salary not much larger than 10 times that to a human disaster such as the Tsunami that struck Indonesia, and in other years to CARE and Save the Children to female children in abjectly poor countries. And the 10,000 doctors,professionals and others who hail from Pakiland cannot set aside $5000 each this year for their felow humans in their own motherland or fatherland?
So you Pakis, of which hardly anyone seems to be reading Common Dreams since there is only one comment below, you consider yourself "Islamic" civilized? Your entire North American community nearly a week back made a commitment to raise $1 million, but so far has raised only $30,000! A measly $30,000? Instead of $2 per head, your 600,000 NAmerica community can manage only $0.05... 5 goddamn cents per person after 7 days!!!
And what about your "fellow Muslims", the oil rich Arab states? The amount of money needed urgently for food and shelter by Pakistan for the next 3 months is about $150 million. That is less than ONE DAY's OIL PRODUCTION's market value, production from Saudi and Gulf States. They haven't contributed anything that can feed even the crows who may be feasting on the human carcasses and refuse in the flood waters. They spend more than 10 times that on their concubines in a month. Where is the so called "Islam" of these Arabs? They always want every Muslim to hate Israel and support the Palestinians? Have the Palestinians suffered such catastrophe in the midst of abject poverty as is the case in Pakistan? Why is it always that the Judeo Christian West, which large swathes of crazy, orthodox Muslims hate and consider "infidel", has to bail Muslims out from every natural disaster?
Why don't Muslims admit that the Islam they are in thrall to is a fundamentalist Islam, coming from the bowels of PRE-ISLAMIC Bedouin Arab barbarism in Arabia in the 5th century AD, and not the Nature loving and respecting Islam of the Quran,and become Enlightened to science,logic and mathematics, eradicate subjugation and enslavement of women, and come into the world of the 21st Century so that you can face natural disaters on your own without always begging for aid? I suggest you get rid of your military and plutocratic parasites, have a genuine democracy and rule of law and simply hang every "imam" and what Professor Yunus calls "pseudo-mullah" who has been trained in Saudi Arabai and wears a long beard from the nearest tree. You can then sing "Free at last!"
As I have said before, I am a Muslim. I am a Hellenistic Western Muslim. Everything I know in science and mathematics and economics has been taught to by western Scholars who follow the method of systematic, logical analysis of data and information as originally taught by Aristotle and then refined and expanded tremendously after the Enlightenment by people like Newton, Einstein, Fregge, Gauss, Lagrange, Bohr and others. Muslims added to this methodology when the reason and justice loving Muslim religious scholars called the MUTAZILLA were in power during the ABBASSID CALPHATE, and BAGHDAD had the largest concentration of intellectuals in every science,philosophy, grammar in one place - - larger than the Great Library of Alexandria. NOTHING has been taught to me by any Muslim because, and I am saying this being fully versed in Islamic history, Islam in practice has been brain dead for a 1000 years, in shackles by Shariah Law after fundamentalists such as Ibn Hambal and others killed off the Mutazilla. The fundamentalists said in 1000 AD, reason and logic and science and justice have no place in Islam... People simply have to OBEY WITHOUT QUESTION what the religious "scholars" deem to be consistent with Shariah.
So Pakis, what do you feel? Don't you feel any shame that you cannot raise even $1 million in 10 days? Do feel shame that the Islam that you display in paroxyms of violence when somebody tries to free women in your midst who are clearly enslaved by their misogynist husbands, fathers, brothers and the relgious establishment and give them dignity, but that gives you no passion for humanism for your poor drowning in floods, hunger and lack of basic medicines?