“It’s clear this crisis is far from over,” she said. “People have lost everything: their homes, their belongings, their crops and cattle, and their livelihoods. Long after the cameras have gone, people will be struggling to rebuild their lives.”

Jolie’s visit is her fourth to Pakistan since becoming a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador in 2001. She last visited in November 2005 following the devastating earthquake in northern Pakistan.

On Tuesday, she met people who had been directly affected by the floods, including in Mohib Banda, where some 70 per cent of the homes were destroyed or badly damaged by the swirling waters.

“We will never be able to afford the things we once had, never again,” an elderly man, Rehman Gul, told Jolie, as he pointed towards an old plastic fan amid the ruins of his former home. “Since the flooding, flies and mosquitoes are everywhere… all over the children, all over us, everything.”

When asked by Jolie to speak of her situation, Gul’s wife Zainul said: “How can I burden you with all the things we need. I feel embarrassed.” Jolie walked through the village, meeting with families and witnessing at first hand the loss and bewilderment.

“There was a small stream outside the broken homes. It was full of a mix of faeces, flies, old shoes and old clothes that had been recently washed into the water,” Jolie said.

The floods that first hit Pakistan in July have affected millions. “We must not forget flooding is not the only trauma plaguing this country,” she said.

“They are still rebuilding infrastructure from the earthquake of 2005. They continue to have large numbers of IDPs as a result of the conflict in the north, and host 1.7 million Afghan refugees who still need care and refuge as conflict continues in their homeland. And now, of course, the recent flooding and its aftermath already affecting millions and the looming threat of disease,” Jolie continued.

“One problem does not negate the other, one headline should not pull focus from the many complexities of the situation in Pakistan,” said the Goodwill Ambassador, stressing the need for continuing efforts to support those in need.

“Over the last three decades, Pakistan has been very generous in hosting what continues to be the largest refugee population in the world. It is now the Pakistani people themselves who are in need of large-scale assistance,” Jolie concluded.

UNHCR has delivered help to almost 750,000 people, but continued flooding in many areas of southern Pakistan is creating new challenges for relief efforts in what has already become one of the most complex humanitarian crises of recent times.

Malik said that four army field hospitals are also working in different areas of Khyber-Pakthunkhwa to help mitigate the sufferings of flood victims. In addition, more than 18,000 victims are being provided cooked food in Risalpur during the month of Ramzan.

He said that the army’s relief efforts will continue till rehabilitation of the very last flood victim.

The spread of various epidemics has also been stopped by taking cogent measures by the army and people have been provided clean drinking water, Malik informed.

The Corps Commander added that suicide attacks cannot be dealt with in one day, adding that operations against militants continue despite devastated floods.

The operation in Orakzai Agency continues despite relief and rehabilitation activities by the army in the flooded areas, he added.

He said that there would be no let up in flushing out the militants as over 165 terrorists were killed during last one month.

He said that any decision about launching new operation would be taken in the interest of the country and denied that there was any pressure from the US government on Pakistan for launching new operation against militants in tribal areas.

Parda, which is also spelled “purdah” and means “curtain” in Urdu, is the practice of shielding women from men they are not directly related to, both through physical segregation and through the custom of modesty, that is, with the women wearing clothing to conceal their shape. It is observed by many women in rural areas of Pakistan, including in the majority-Pathan northern belt bordering Afghanistan. In these parts, a family’s honor is often tied to the chastity and obedience of its women — and protecting and defending the honor of women from verbal and physical harm is part of an ancient code of honor and revenge. But the code is all too often taken to extremes. Barely a week goes by without stories appearing in the Pakistani media about an enraged male — from across Pakistan’s multiethnic spectrum — who has killed his female relative or relatives for some perceived infringement of “honor.” For women adhering to Parda, it’s usually easier and safer for them to simply remain secluded in their homes.

The floods have made that option unavailable in many places. Desperation has driven women to vigorously jostle with men for limited relief goods at distribution points. Overcrowding and densely pitched tents have forced them into close quarters with men they don’t know, the flimsy canvas coverings providing little privacy from prying eyes. In the camp at Nowsherra, Adiba nods in gloomy agreement as her sister-in-law Nagina discusses the limits of parda amid the calamity . Her tribal tattoos — a green dot on her forehead and another on her chin — mark her as a member of a conservative tribe from the Taliban-infested town of Bajaur. Both women say their husbands are understanding of the conditions but they fear that their men’s patience will run out. “My husband is very upset,” says Adiba, a mother of six. “This is why we’re just sitting in our tents during the day and the night, like in a cage.”

Pakistan’s northwest, the first region to be hit by the floods and the most devastated, “is an extremely conservative society,” says Imtiaz Gul, author of The Most Dangerous Place, a book about the Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt bordering Afghanistan. “You hardly see women outside and they hardly have any role except for cooking and cleaning the house and that’s about it.”

Nagina, like many of the women in Nowsherra’s camps and other places the Pathan have sought refuge from the waters, has sent her unmarried daughters away to live with relatives whose homes were not washed away by the deluge. She hasn’t seen them for a month. “We have no choice,” she says sullenly. “This situation is forced on us.”

Gul says that the longer it takes to get people back to their homes, the greater the possibility of social unrest between men from different conservative towns who have been thrown together. The situation “is pregnant with the possibility of social friction,” he says. “Frustrations will start boiling over. People are saying the worst is over, but I would say that the worst has just started.”

Akbar Ali, a 27-year-old driver who has been in the Khandar camp for 18 days now with his wife and two-year-old daughter, is simmering. He is desperately trying to rent a house at any price he says, to get his family indoors, but there’s little left on the market. He has been offered work, but turned it down because he did not want to leave his wife, who used to be inparda, alone in the camp. “We are all Pathan but we are still very different from each other. The men move around the camp. I’m just afraid that one day if they say something to my wife, it will cause a problem, a fight because I will have to respond, it’s my duty.”

As relative newcomers to the camp, Ali and his small family had missed out on securing a tent on the grounds of the Government College of Technology, or a space inside the school’s two-storey brick structure. The classrooms were already brimming with evacuees, packed four or five families per room, by the time he arrived. And so, he has had to make do with a slab of concrete outside the college cafeteria open to the elements. “We have become like dogs,” he says bitterly from behind dark sunglasses. “Wherever we hear that relief supplies have arrived, we just run after them.”

To avoid violence, he and the several other men whose families are also squatting along the cafeteria wall, have banded together to try and prevent strangers from approaching them. “Some people have tried to come around here, but they only try once,” Ali says. “They know not to come around again.”

“Eighty per cent of the hospital staff were affected themselves. The water had destroyed their homes, cars and everything. No one was able to come to the hospital,” said the hospital’s medical superintendent, Muhammad Arshad.

But since the devestation, caused by monsoon-triggered floods which swept across the country, a massive volunteer undertaking has allowed the hospital to reopen, and Arshad now sits smiling on donated furniture in his freshly whitewashed office.

The walls that were blackened and buried in mud for a week are now a hygienic white, there are working heart-monitor, X-ray, ultrasound and anesthaesia machines, and the damaged water pipe has been replaced.

“When we arrived to rehabilitate the hospital we had no idea where to start, because every corner of the hospital needed immediate attention,” said Arif Mehmood Siddiqui, the administrative head of the National University of Science and Technology, who coordinated the volunteer effort.

“What we had was mud and a stinking smell. There was not even a bench to sit on to run a clinic,” he says.

Young doctors from Rawalpindi arrived with doctors from international aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres, army engineers and university staff, to roll up their shirt sleeves and save the hospital.

Now, after hard work and donations, the hospital has new mattresses and pillows for all 114 beds, there are new delivery tables for the labour ward and the operating theatres are fully functioning.

“We have rediscovered this hospital from the rubble,” Siddiqui said.

Once the hospital itself had been saved, however, there were hundreds of flood victims waiting for help – meaning extra doctors were quickly needed.

“We ran this hospital for two weeks because the doctors normally on duty were affected themselves. There was a dire need for doctors and medicine and we successfully managed it,” said Dr Nasir Habib of Rawalpindi.

The World Health Organisation estimates that 4.4 million flood victims have received medical treatment since the floods began in late July, but that number only accounts for those who visited health centres that reported their figures.

Before the floods, this district hospital handled up to 400 patients each day, but Arshad says nearly 700 now come daily.

Many of them are suffering from water-borne gastric diseases caused by the month-long floods, which threaten to cause a second wave of death among the 18 million affected nationwide.

“Everything is under control, we are ready to fight diarrhoea and can deal with the patient load,” said Dr Fayaz Ahmed, who runs a clinic to counter the diarrhoea epidemic.

For Nabila, whose two-month-old daughter was struck with the illness, the work of the volunteers has saved her family.

“These doctors have given new life to my daughter. I am so thankful to this hospital which has saved my baby from death,” Nabila said.

For Shumaila Khatoon, a 29-year-old woman who is due to give birth next month, the reopening of the hospital has brought much-needed relief. “I am really relieved. Now I can give birth to my baby without worry,” she said.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 4^th, 2010.

A month after torrential rains caused rivers to overflow and flood Pakistan’s fertile valleys scattering millions of people and creating one of the largest humanitarian crises in decades, the water is beginning to recede, revealing a disaster that will take years to resolve, says the head of one of Canada’s largest relief organizations.

Dave Toycen, president of World Vision Canada, said in an interview from Pakistan that worldwide response has been inadequate, leaving the 17 million people affected by the flooding vulnerable to dehydration, malnutrition and disease and the country’s economy in shambles.

“Every major disaster has its own personality,” said Toycen, speaking from Sindh province, one of the worst hit regions in Pakistan’s south.

“But the sheer scale of this is incredible. It’s hard to explain how badly the country has been devastated and how much help is going to be needed for rebuilding.”

Severe monsoon rains in late July caused raging waters to sweep down from the mountains of northwest Pakistan into the southern valleys, inundating an area the size of Florida and leaving behind a path of destruction that Toycen described as “heartbreaking.”

The United Nations says 1,600 people died and more than 17 million people are suffering from the catastrophic floods, a number that could exceed the combined total of people affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.

Oxfam’s humanitarian director, Jane Cocking, described the flood in an interview with British media last week as “a single, long event which has the scale of the tsunami, the devastation of Haiti and the complexity of the Middle East.”

Toycen is in Pakistan until next week to review World Vision’s relief efforts in the flood-stricken areas.

A veteran of several disasters, including the Haiti earthquake, Toycen said makeshift tent cities are filled with people who tell the same story: “People didn’t have time to react, they just grabbed their children and ran. They were caught by complete surprise.”

As in most disasters, he said, children and mothers are the ones most severely affected.

“Many of these people were severely malnourished before the flood, and now there is less food,” Toycen said.

Victims of the disaster are also more vulnerable to such water-borne illnesses as cholera, chest and skin infections and severe dehydration, because in one of the cruelest ironies of a flood, clean water is scarce.

“I’ve seen mothers so dehydrated and malnourished that they just don’t have breast milk,” said Toycen.

He said the biggest tragedy is that the water flooded Pakistan’s “bread-basket,” destroying farmland and crops just weeks before they were to be harvested.

Some farms will be unable to yield crops for several seasons, which will lead to food shortages in the rest of the country, he added.

The UN called for $460 million U.S. in immediate relief in the weeks after the disaster, but reconstruction costs are expected to run into the billions, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The Canadian government has pledged $33 million, and it will match any donations to registered charitable organizations until Sept. 12.

While the slow-moving disaster did not have people rushing to open their wallets, much of the initial reluctance to donate to relief efforts in “image-challenged” Pakistan appears to have been allayed, according to Toycen.

Sallah Hamdani, executive director of Islamic Relief Canada, said the relatively low number of confirmed dead — 1,600 versus 200,000 in Haiti — likely contributed to the slow reaction from the international aid community. But he said that number will likely skyrocket as the waters recede in the coming weeks and months.

Hamdani said planning the reconstruction efforts, now that the rain has stopped and the flood waters have started to disappear, is incredibly challenging.

“It’s a prolonged disaster, and we have no idea what the full extent of the devastation is yet,” he said.

Hamdani said there are still people stranded on tiny islands created by the rushing water who are cut off from the international aid that is now starting to help the victims.

“Unless they’re Olympic swimmers, they aren’t going anywhere,” he said, emphasizing the need to keep the disaster in the public eye.

Toycen described flooding as a natural disaster that doesn’t have the suddenness of an earthquake or the drama of a tsunami, but with effects that are just as far-reaching.

“There is still a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done,” he said. “We’ve barely started.”

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Pakistan+rebuilding+could+take+years+says+World+Vision+Canada/3479646/story.html#ixzz0yXdNachF

Two doctors evacuating the sick had to be airlifted to safety after getting trapped on the top floor of the district hospital, the main source of health care for 1.6 million people in Pakistan’s impoverished north-west.

‘Eighty per cent of the hospital staff were affected themselves. The water had destroyed their homes, cars and everything. No one was able to come to hospital,’ said the hospital’s chief doctor, Muhammad Arshad.

But since the ruin, caused by monsoon-triggered floods which swept across the country, a massive volunteer undertaking has allowed the hospital to reopen, and Mr Arshad now sits smiling on donated furniture in his freshly whitewashed office. The walls that were blackened and buried in mud for a week are now a hygienic white, there are working heart-monitor, X-ray, ultrasound and anesthesia machines, and the damaged water pipe has been replaced.

‘When we arrived to rehabilitate the hospital we had no idea where to start, because every corner of the hospital needed immediate attention,’ said Arif Mehmood Siddiqui, the administrative head of Pakistan’s National University of Science and Technology, who coordinated the volunteer effort. — AFP

August 29, 2010 Islamabad, Pakistan (Veterans Today exclusive) Informed sources in the Government of Pakistan have told Veterans Today that they are developing “hard evidence” indicating the Jet Blue Airbus 320 that crashed July 28th outside Islamabad was a terrorist hijacking tied to rogue American security forces operating inside that country.

Sources indicate that the plane crash was an unsuccessful hijacking attempt intended to crash into the nuclear weapons facility at Kahuta, outside Islamabad. Such an attack may have been blamed on India and would likely have led to retaliation which could easily have escalated to a nuclear exchange between these two nations that have spent decades at each other’s throats.

Suspicions were raised inside Pakistan’s military and intelligence organizations when American military contractors employed by Blackwater/Xe showed up on the scene immediately after the crash, seizing the black box and “other materials.” There is no confirmation that parachutes or electronic equipment had been removed when Blackwater/Xe security relinquished control of the crash scene to Pakistani investigators.

Royal Television in Islamabad, owned by the brother of the head of Pakistan’s powerful JI (Jamate Islami), the Islamic political party, has reported that investigations are underway tying American based contractors to the planning of the attack.

Pakistan’s ISRP (Inter-Services Public Relations) has failed to confirm this but private sources indicate that an active investigation of these allegations is, not only underway but has established ties between an American group and the hijackers.

Military and intelligence officials inside Pakistan, in concert with the American embassy, are withholding all official details of the investigation and are likely to continue doing so.

This same facility had been the subject of an armed penetration by American contractors, believed to be employed by the State Department, in 2009. Four Blackwater employees, armed and possessing explosives were arrested outside the Kahuta nuclear facility in 2009. The four, driving a Jeep 4×4 and possessing advanced surveillance and jamming equipment of Israeli manufacture, were intercepted 1.5 miles from the Kahuta nuclear facility.

The four spoke fluent Pushtu and were dressed in a manner as to resemble Taliban fighters. The order for their release, given by Minister of the Interior Rehman Malik, is an issue of considerable controversy between the civilian government in Pakistan and the powerful military.

The passenger jet with 152 on board slammed into a hillside in what was believed to be Pakistan’s most serious air crash. At least 2 Americans were believed to be on board but, a month later, the US Embassy in Islamabad has left this unconfirmed. Reports received today, however, confirm that at least 5 Americans, military contractors said to be employed by Xe, may also have been on the craft but could not be identified as they had been traveling in local garb and had boarded with false identification.

Xe is an American based military and intelligence contracting firm formerly known as Blackwater and has been the subject of considerable controversy for activities inside Pakistan.

Sources indicate that the attackers stormed the cockpit in a hijacking attempt. The pilot is said to have jammed the flight controls, careening the Airbus 320 and all aboard into a hillside rather than allowing the plane to be used in a “9/11? type attack inside Pakistan or flown into Indian air space for a repeat of the 2008 Mumbai attack.

Pakistan has, at times in error, referred to American contractors employed by the Departments of Defense, State or the Central Intelligence Agency as Blackwater. However, it is believed the majority of such employees are, in fact, members of that organization or is derivitive, Xe.
The same group, often criticized for irregularities in Iraq, has been contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency to operate Predator drones inside Pakistan, operations that have resulted in a significant number of civilian deaths and said by political leaders of several factions to do little but recruit terrorists.