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10/21/2005:

"Alarm grows over scale of disaster"

Nato agreed to send up to 1,000 soldiers to boost Pakistan's overwhelmed relief effort last night as alarm grew over how to cope with a disaster now considered among the most difficult faced by the modern world.

Two weeks after an earthquake ripped across northern Pakistan an epic tragedy is unfolding. About 15,000 mountain settlements have yet to receive aid; international relief is chaotic and underfunded; and hundreds of thousands of survivors are at risk as the bitter Himalayan winter approaches.

President Pervez Musharraf yesterday described as "totally inadequate" the $600m (about £340m) in aid pledged by the international community. He estimated reconstruction costs at $5bn. But immediate worries centre on the 3.3 million people made homeless by the quake.

With three weeks before temperatures plummet and snow starts to fall, everything they need for survival - tents, medical care and helicopter transport - is in short supply. But much of the outside world, it seems, is unaware of the scale of the emergency. By last night UN members had funded just over a quarter of the UN's $312m aid appeal. Frustration at the slow response turned to anger.

In Muzaffarabad, the Turkish prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, announced a $150m donation - the single largest yet - and asked why other countries were not doing more.

"By the end of 2004 the world had put one trillion US dollars into weapons. We have to ask how much the world has put aside for this disaster in Pakistan," he said, after a helicopter tour of the devastation.

Mr Erdogan was the first foreign leader to visit the earthquake zone.

Several UN officials said privately they were unhappy with the response of their headquarters in New York. "They don't understand what we're dealing with here," said one. "This is our biggest relief operation ever. It's unprecedented in scale."
guardian.co.uk