ISLAMABAD, 18 October 2005 — Ten-year-old Saima Mehtab, her face badly bruised, sits forlorn in silence at a makeshift care center. She doesn’t know yet she is one of the thousands of children Pakistan will have to care for after its massive earthquake.
The traumatized girl, who still has blood in her right eye, has not been told that her father, mother and other family members lie buried under the debris in Muzaffarabad, the city razed by the Oct. 8 earthquake.
“I was in the school when the building collapsed. Someone pulled me out of the rubble and I was brought here,” Saima, surrounded by toys, said in the few words she could manage at a clinic meant for disabled children in the capital Islamabad.
With the death toll still rising from Pakistan’s worst ever catastrophe, the government is racing to put orphaned children such as Saima in state-run facilities and care for them.
The government is still pondering how exactly to raise an entire orphaned generation but it is adamant on one point — it will not let them be adopted.
Islamic law encourages the care of orphans but forbids full-out adoption. Humanitarian groups, hospitals and government officials have been flooded with inquiries from people moved by the plight of the earthquake orphans.
A spokesman for the private Edhi Welfare Center in Islamabad said it had received numerous calls from people, mostly Pakistanis, who wanted to adopt orphans.
Pakistani officials have said more than 53,000 people died in the earthquake across the country. Chief military spokesman Maj.-Gen. Shaukat Sultan said the number of orphans could run into the thousands.
“We are setting up special care centers for these children and also women who have been left alone without a male family member,” Sultan told AFP.
Other government officials said that the number of orphans and widows was likely to rise after a fuller picture of the catastrophe emerges in the weeks ahead.
But Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said hospitals have already been ordered not to allow anyone to adopt the children.
“Adoption of these children is completely banned,” Aziz told reporters when he visited injured youngsters at Islamabad’s Poly Clinic hospital on Sunday.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said yesterday that the government could not allow adoption as it was too risky for children to enter the households of other families.
“The laws relating to adoption are very strict in Pakistan and the cabinet has decided that no private person or group will be allowed to adopt them,” he told AFP.
“The government will fully take care of the orphans, but our priority is to locate parents and relatives of such children,” Rashid said.
Sardar Abdul Khaliq Wasi, the spokesman for the Pakistani Kashmir government, said a committee will register children who have been orphaned or left with disabilities.
“We have received requests from private groups and NGOs but we are extremely careful in handling this issue,” Wasi said.
The earthquake has taken a particularly brutal toll on children.
The tremor hit in the morning when children were in class, destroying thousands of schools and killing untold thousands of youngsters.
