Kashmir - Thunder from Below
Jan Grarup
Politiken
Just before nine o’clock on the morning of Saturday, October 8, 2005 a massive earthquake shook the mountainous and heavily populated region of Kashmir on the disputed border between India and Pakistan. The tremors could be felt all the way from Kabul, Afghanistan to New Delhi, India. When the dust settled, what remained was a nightmarish landscape of devastation. The facts are chilling: an earthquake of magnitude 7.6 on the Richter scale, some 75,000 people killed immediately, many of them women and children, buildings and entire villages destroyed in an area covering 20,000 square kilometers, more than three million people left homeless, and years of work spent transforming steep mountainsides into cultivated terraces of farm land erased in a moment. Homes and lives were in ruins. The thousands of people sheltered in tents were in danger of freezing to death. Others were trapped in wrecked villages cut off from the surrounding world by roads that had been wiped out.
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Helicopters became the lifeline, but there were too few of them and too many days when they were grounded by bad weather. Many families sent women and children down to camps in lower lying valleys while the men remained to protect what was left of their homes and property. Only by remaining in their shattered homes could these people prevent their more fortunate neighbours with intact houses from confiscating their property. The world reacted slowly. Some people spoke of tsunami fatigue. In a frantic race against the impending winter and harsh conditions for earthquake survivors, emergency aid finally began to arrive. The closed border between India and Pakistan did not make the work any easier, though the sheer scale of the catastrophe brought the arch enemies closer, if only for a short time, and a new border crossing was opened to facilitate rescue operations.
