SHAHEED GHALI, Pakistan, 23 October 2005 — With roads still blocked by landslides two weeks after the catastrophic earthquake in northern Pakistan and winter coming on, mules are one of the only ways to get emergency supplies to cut off mountain villages.
But like everything else after the disaster, they are in short supply.
Yesterday, a train of more than 40 mules set off from the village of Shaheed Ghali high above Muzaffarabad, the destroyed capital of Pakistani Kashmir, up steep, rocky tracks to settlements on mountain ridges where helicopters cannot land.
They were carrying enough food from the UN World Food Program to feed 2,000 people for a week, but with hundreds of villages cut off, this remains a drop in the ocean.
WFP spokeswoman Mia Turner said the Pakistani Army had said it was bringing 50 more mules into the disaster zone and 48 more were at work in the Balakot area of adjoining North West Frontier Province.
“The problem is getting mules here, there’s a shortage,” she said as porters loaded the animals with sacks of flour and pulses and tinned supplies from Japan and USAID.
Each mule can carry 100 kg up mountain paths too narrow for trucks or cars.
“If we had more mules we could take more,” said Turner.
The aim was to deliver food to remote settlements so villagers would not have to make long journeys by foot up and down hazardous tracks, she said.
WFP has been transporting as much as it can by road, but many routes have been blocked or swept away by landslides caused by the Oct. 8 earthquake, which killed over 50,000 people over a wide area of Pakistani Kashmir and NWFP and 1,300 in Indian Kashmir.
Helicopters have been vital to the relief effort, but they remain in short supply. Turner said two would be available soon to the WFP that could carry food in slings to mountain settlements where it was impossible to land helicopters.
But she said it remained unclear how successful this plan would be.
“Even with the slings, the helicopters need a flat area to drop the food and they are not going to go near some of the villages built on ridges,” she said.
With the Pakistani Army saying it will take weeks to reopen blocked roads and winter fast approaching, aid groups are looking for more, Turner said.
“This is not an ideal situation, but unless roads are opened, then this is going to be a very important part of the effort.”
The mule train loaded at Shaheed Ghali was brought together by Jamaat-ud-Daawa, an Islamist aid group linked to the banned militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, which rented the animals from farmers.
Jamaat, which opposes Indian rule on the other side of Kashmir as well as the US military presence in neighboring Afghanistan, has been one of the most active local aid groups taking part in the quake relief effort.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the main pro-Pakistan militant groups fighting Indian rule in divided Kashmir, was banned in Pakistan after it was linked to a 2002 attack on the Indian Parliament that brought the nuclear-armed rivals close to a fourth war.
It was also labeled a terrorist group by the United States, but Jamaat workers have been carrying out relief efforts around Muzaffarabad, where US military helicopters based in Afghanistan have been flying in emergency supplies.
Jamaat spokesman Yahya Mujahid found it ironic that the group’s workers were loading sacks of US flour onto mules they had supplied.
A colleague, who asked not to be identified, said: “The Americans call us terrorists but they are working with us.”
