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Pakistan orders nearly half a million to evacuate
Agence France Presse - August 26, 2010
Emmanuel Duparcq and Hasan Mansoor, Hyderabad, Pakistan – Pakistan ordered nearly half a million people to evacuate towns on Thursday as rising floods threaten further havoc in a country straining to cope after its worst humanitarian disaster.
Torrential monsoon rains triggered massive floods affecting a fifth of the volatile country – an area roughly the size of England – where a US official warned that foreign aid workers are at risk from Taliban attacks.
Villagers in the south fled from where the Indus delta merges towards the Arabian Sea, trailing north in vans laden with furniture or crowded into buses, or in carts pulled by oxen. Some people were on foot, leading their livestock.
Water lined the road from Hyderabad to Thatta town, as workers frantically used bulldozers to dig embankments only just higher than the flooding, and where people camped out under open skies or in makeshift tents.
The catastrophe has affected more than 17 million people and left eight million dependent on aid to survive.
The Pakistani government has confirmed 1,600 people dead and 2,366 wounded, but officials warn that millions are at risk from diseases and food shortages.
In the southern province of Sindh, where the floods have washed away huge swathes of the rich farmland on which Pakistan's struggling economy depends, a senior administration official warned that fresh floods threaten three towns.
"We have warned people of Sujawal, Mirpur Bathoro and Daro towns to leave for safer places in view of possible flooding there," Hadi Bakhsh Kalhoro, the senior official in Thatta district, told AFP.
"Sujawal, Mirpur Bathoro and Daro towns have an approximate population of 400,000," he said.
The Sindh irrigation minister said waters were also mounting pressure on a protective embankment in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh village, where former leaders Benazir Bhutto and her father, as well as her two younger brothers, are buried.
"We have strengthened the embankment because we don't want mausoleums of our martyrs to be flooded," the provincial minister, Saifullah Dharejo, told AFP.
On the Arabian Sea, authorities fear that coastal districts may flood in coming days, trapped by Indus river floods pushing south and rough seas.
"Most people have left Sujawal. I'm also leaving town with a heavy heart with my family," Mohammed Bakhshal, a 40-year-old farmer, told AFP. "Local transporters are demanding a lot of money to carry our luggage and families to Thatta and Karachi. I had 15,000 rupees (175 dollars) in savings, which I'm now spending on transport."
The United Nations warned that 800,000 people in desperate need of aid had been cut off by the deluge across the country and appealed for more helicopters to deliver supplies to those people reachable only by air.
In Washington, which has put Pakistan on the front line of efforts to beat back the Taliban in Afghanistan, a US official said Pakistani Taliban were planning to attack foreign aid workers engaged in the relief effort.
"Tehreek-e-Taliban also may be making plans to attack federal and provincial ministers in Islamabad," the official told AFP.
Commenting on the warnings, a UN spokesman in Islamabad said: "We would find it inhumane for someone to target us and our work, effectively harming the millions of people whose life we strive to save".
"Our agenda is a global one, which should unite all humanity: to save lives," said Maurizio Giuliano.
The Pakistani Taliban have previously denounced all foreign aid for victims of the country's catastrophic flooding.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban faction is a key architect of extremist violence that has killed more than 3,580 people across Pakistan in three years.
On the ground, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) says 4.5 million people remain in urgent need of shelter.
Officials warned yet more Pakistanis could be affected in the fertile southern plains of Sindh province, which face the risk of further flooding in the next few days as the major Indus river threatens to burst its banks.
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