Tragedy on one of the world’s main fault lines

Oct 12th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

International aid in the form of everything from doctors to helicopters is pouring into South Asia following its devastating earthquake. But anger has grown among residents of Pakistani Kashmir at the slowness of their government’s response

TERRIBLE earthquakes, and speculation over their possible causes, are recurring themes in the Indian subcontinent’s ancient writings. One great scholar thought they were the sighs of elephants carrying the world on their backs, another that they were caused by the movements of sea creatures. Modern science explains that they are due to the fact that the entire subcontinent has, for tens of millions of years, been gradually crashing into Asia. This slow-motion collision between the earth’s Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates threw up the Himalayas and lifted the Tibetan plateau into the sky. The subcontinent continues to shove in a north-easterly direction, at a rate of about 5cm a year, every so often leading to a catastrophic release of the tension that builds up at the edges where the two plates meet.

Such a cataclysmic unleashing of destructive power took place on Saturday October 8th, when a magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Pakistan, India and the province of Kashmir, which is, in effect, divided between the two South Asian neighbours. The epicentre was near the city of Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. About two-thirds of its buildings were destroyed or damaged. Villages were also devastated in the Indian-run bit of Kashmir and in Pakistan and India themselves. In Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, a ten-storey apartment block collapsed with heavy loss of life.

By Wednesday, more than 24,000 people were known to have died in the earthquake, though some officials in the region said the final toll might be 40,000 or more. If so, that would make it even more deadly than the quake that hit Quetta in western Pakistan in 1935, killing 35,000 people—hitherto the most lethal quake on record in this part of South Asia. However, an earthquake last December along another edge of the Indian tectonic plate, underneath the Indian Ocean, set off a tsunami that is believed to have killed more than 230,000 people, from Indonesia to Kenya.

As terrible as the Kashmir quake’s toll already is, it seems certain to get worse still. The United Nations reckons that 2.5m people have been left without shelter. Landslides have destroyed many roads—where they existed in the first place, given the remoteness of some of the affected regions—making it extremely difficult to bring in medical and food supplies. Thus many more people seem destined to die from illness, injury, hunger—or hypothermia, as Kashmir's bitter winter sets in. Even those who still have a home to go to are afraid to sleep in it, for fear of violent aftershocks. These include Sikander Hayat Khan, the prime minister of Pakistani Kashmir, who has been working and sleeping in a tent in the grounds of his official residence since the weekend. “Kashmir has turned into a graveyard,” he said.

Pakistan’s government has pleaded with other countries to send helicopters; among the first to respond was America, which diverted eight military helicopters it had been using to track down Islamist militants across the border in Afghanistan. Some German troops from the NATO defence alliance’s peacekeeping force in Afghanistan were also being sent. By the middle of the week, food, medical supplies, doctors and other urgently needed staff and supplies were arriving in force in the region. Nevertheless, much of this aid has been slow to arrive on the ground and, in Muzaffarabad especially, residents have expressed their anger and frustration that the Pakistani authorities have been so slow in coming to their assistance.

As the rescue operation proceeds, some important questions will no doubt be asked: should the region’s governments have been better prepared for such a catastrophe, given how often such giant quakes have happened before? Why did so many modern buildings come crashing down—including several schools, crushing the pupils inside them? Were there not building regulations requiring them to be built to withstand tremors? Or were the regulations simply not followed? And, just as some people asked after the flooding of New Orleans, should all the devastated towns be rebuilt or should some be abandoned forever, with surviving residents re-settled elsewhere? On Wednesday, Pakistan's prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, said that instead of rebuilding cities lost in the quake, the government would build new settlements, constructed to higher standards, nearby.

The question of whether to build anew, and where, could be asked not just in respect of those areas affected by the latest quake but across the entire Himalayan region. Roger Bilham, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado, says the latest quake may have released only a tenth of the pent-up energy that has accumulated along the region's fault lines due to tectonic shifts. This means even bigger and more devastating quakes can be expected—though it is impossible to predict how soon.

Earthquake diplomacy

Complicating the rescue operations further is the fact that Kashmir lies on one of the world’s most dangerous political, as well as geological, fault lines. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since the subcontinent was partitioned, on gaining independence from Britain in 1947; two of these wars were over Kashmir, which is claimed by both sides (while some Kashmiris want independence). There have been several reported incidents in which Indian troops trying to rescue earthquake victims were drawn into gunbattles with militants opposed to India’s rule of its part of the province. Ironically, the “peace bridge” that was recently opened to link the Pakistani and Indian parts of Kashmir, as part of a tentative thaw in relations between the two countries, was damaged in the earthquake and is now said to be unfit for traffic.

In a gesture of friendship, India has offered to send troops to the Pakistani-run part of Kashmir to help with relief works. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the history of hostilities between them, this has been received somewhat coolly by the Pakistani side. Mr Khan, the prime minister of Pakistani Kashmir, welcomed the Indian offer, seeing it as positive for the tentative peace process, though he also said he hoped it had not been motivated by politics. The foreign ministry in Islamabad agreed to accept Indian help, though not troops, and indicated its willingness to reciprocate, given how India too had suffered great devastation.

Considering Kashmir’s proven capacity for causing strife between the two South Asian neighbours—both now nuclear-armed—and the tens of thousands of lives that have already been lost in Kashmir’s conflict, it would be wonderful if this tragedy brought the two sides closer and encouraged them to continue on the path to normal, friendly relations. There are a precedent for this: in 1999, a tentative thaw between Turkey and Greece, two other historic rivals, was given a considerable boost when both countries were struck in quick succession by earthquakes and each offered the other a helping hand. This “earthquake diplomacy”, as it became known, suddenly made it possible to reach agreements on all sorts of matters that had remained deadlocked for years. A similar effect was seen, after last December's undersea quake and tsunami, on the peace process in Indonesia's Aceh province—though the tsunami's devastation seems, if anything, to have undermined attempts at peacemaking in Sri Lanka.

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