Quake area needs 'Berlin airbridge'
October 22, 2005
MUZAFFARABAD: The UN's top aid official has called on NATO to stage a massive airlift to get survivors of the Kashmir earthquake to safety.
Jan Egeland said a "second Berlin airbridge" was needed - referring to the air shuttle that overcame the Soviet blockade of the German city in 1948-49 - to avert the deaths of thousands of quake survivors, particularly children, left stranded in remote villages and exposed to freezing temperatures.
"We have never had this kind of logistical nightmare, ever," Mr Egeland said. "We thought the tsunami was the worst we could get. This is worse.
"We need a second Berlin airbridge, and if they could do that in the end of the 1940s - set up in no time a lifeline to millions of people - we should be able to do that in 2005."
Mr Egeland's words followed another strongly worded statement by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who had earlier called for an "immediate and exceptional escalation of the global relief effort".
The UN estimates that about 120,000 survivors have still not been reached. Survivors are continuing to flood down the mountains to devastated cities to report harrowing stories of death, destruction and ailing survivors trapped without help.
UNICEF, the UN children's agency, said hundreds of cut-off villages needed urgent help and that 10,000 children could die of hunger, hypothermia and disease over the next few weeks.
"There are still too few helicopters to reach more than 1000 remote villages with life-saving supplies children urgently need," the agency said. Aid workers say they have three, perhaps four, weeks to distribute tents to shelter people from the winter.
An airlift would involve helicopters, the only quick means of getting deep into the rugged Himalayan foothills of Pakistani Kashmir and North West Frontier Province, where almost 80,000 people are thought to have died.
"You must rest assured that NATO fully realises the gravity of the situation," NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said yesterday. "NATO will act accordingly."
But NATO, which was to consider Mr Egeland's airlift demand in Brussels last night, does not have many of the right kind of helicopters. The closest source would be India, but it has fought two of its three wars with Pakistan over Kashmir.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has told India he would accept helicopters but, given the enormous political sensitivity of the issue, only if they came without crews.
India said no and Mr Egeland called on the two governments to work out a compromise quickly.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16996286%255E2703,00.html
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