Kashmir: afflicted by a "winter without pity" and globalisation
A "winter without pity" awaits the population of Pakistani and Indian Kashmir after the 8 October quake wiped out perhaps for good thousands of villages and cities on the Himalayan slopes. The death toll, still provisional, stood at 54,000 on 26 October, with more than 77,000 wounded. Entire families sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins were killed by destruction provoked by the quake. A Pakistan immigrant in London lost 27 relatives in Muzaffarabad in one night. The torment caused by the untold pain continues in the daily suffering of being homeless, in the lack of clinics and hospitals, which also collapsed, and in the dearth of doctors and nurses, themselves quake victims. The snow about to fall on Kashmir will find the lucky survivors crammed into settlements of tents which can barely protect them from the mountain cold and bitter weather. Nearly a month after the quake, some villages situated in high altitudes are still impossible to reach because of landslides, storms, and the shortage of means available to the Pakistani government to travel by air (helicopters).
The "winter without pity" is not an outcome of climate alone: it is also the fruit of a cold response from the international community. After the 8 October quake, the UN launched an appeal to member states for emergency aid amounting to 312 million dollars. By the end of October, only 67.8 million had been given, other than "pledges" for another 35 million in the coming six months. Masood Khan, Pakistani ambassador in Geneva, said on 26 October that the UN will up its request for aid from 312 to 549 million dollars. But it is far from certain whether this sum minimal for our amply provided-for world can be collected. The "winter without pity", the intense cold threatens to kill even more people if aid does not reach them soon.
Right from the beginning, Benedict XVI as if perceiving the compassion fatigue of our well-off world called on the international community to respond "swiftly and generously" to help victims of the South Asia quake. And yet help has been neither swift nor generous.
Mgr Pascal Topno, archbishop of Bhopal (India), was quick to draw a comparison with the generosity shown by the international community in the face of the seaquake in the Indian Ocean. He said the global population "responded in a spontaneous manner" when the tragedy of the tsunami devastated South-east Asia, but "the same zeal was not apparent for this disaster".
What, then, is lacking in this mountain tragedy that it has failed to arouse the emotions and generosity of the world? Certainly our globalised world needs images, and there were no well-off tourists on Kashmir's poor mountains to film the disaster live, as happened in Phuket and other beaches in the south-east. The international community has no weighty economic interests to consider among these rocks, whose beauty has been marred by decades of war between Pakistan and India. And let's not forget that there were no westerners among the victims, save the occasional unfortunate diplomat. Hence, an entirely different scenario from the Maldives and Thailand, the Mecca of tourist pilgrimages which turned last December's tsunami into a true disaster of the global era, drawing rich and poor, people from west and east, into the same destiny.
The Kashmir tragedy is merely a "local" tragedy. But it is made so by choice of governments, media and people who pay lip service to globalization and world unity and then distance themselves from the pain and sorrow of tens of thousands of people who are just like us. There are a few who have dared to strive fraternity beyond borders which are "strictly localized": among them we find the Caritas offices from around the world and even the poor of the tsunami. The Andaman and Nicobar islands sent tents, winter clothing and biscuits for the stricken populations in Kashmir. And Pakistani Catholics an oft-persecuted minority have done themselves proud, giving money and goods for survivors. Mgr Joseph Coutts of Faisalbad said: "The poor know how to be generous even with the little that they have". Globlisation has urgent need not only of means, but of a heart moved by faith.
.png)
