30,000 marooned in Shangri-La

Thousands of people displaced by the threats of flash floods protest against 'beggar-like treatment' as Gilani visits the Hunza Valley.

A girl carries her brother at a camp at Azharabad near Gilgit. People living on the banks of the Hunza River have been evacuated to nearby relief camps, bottom, to protect them from the threat of flasShow more

GILGIT, PAKISTAN // A sense of the surreal surrounds government relief efforts in the northern Pakistani valley of Hunza-Nagar, inspiration for the fictional paradise of Shangri-La, where thousands are at the mercy of an increasingly unstable landslide dam that could be within hours of unleashing a 30-metre high flood.

The dam was formed on January 4 when the surface soil of a Karakorum mountain slope detached and slammed into the idyllic village of Ata-abad, about 720km north of the federal capital, Islamabad. Nineteen people were killed in the landslide. A 20km lake has since formed behind the dam and, fed by accelerating summer flows from six glaciers, on Saturday claimed its fourth communal victim by submerging farmland and homes in the village of Husseini. Some 30,000 people living upstream of the dam are now cut off from the rest of Pakistan. Authorities are nervously awaiting the entry into an excavated spillway of waters from the dam, expected by tomorrow - the point at which it would become obvious whether the structure would hold and allow for a comparatively gentle overflow, or collapse, causing a flood that could top 30 metres in height. Political debris from the leaky dam on Friday inflicted a painful, if not lethal, blow to the government. Yousaf Raza Gilani, the prime minister, had flown into the Karimabad area to, as the official statement put it, "assess the threat posed by a possible flooding from the dam and give assurances to displaced residents".

Having taken his first look at the brewing crisis and faced with an audience of more than 1,000 people rendered homeless and penniless by the landslide, Mr Gilani frankly admitted that his government had failed to pay them due attention. "We were unable to respond in a timely manner because we were distracted by events elsewhere in the country," he said. He might even have got away with a promise to start paying an undisclosed amount of compensation within a week had his staff not refused to allow a delegation of displaced community leaders to hand him a written petition. But they did, in the process sapping the survivors' last reserves of patience and, as Mr Gilani started to leave, a group of people stormed the dais and started shouting "down with" and "death to" slogans against the government and regional politicians. Alarmed security staff whisked Mr Gilani to his helicopter and formed a protective cordon around federal ministers and other dignitaries, turning the routine photo opportunity of inaugurating a free field kitchen into a farce. During two days of subsequent demonstrations by men and women of all ages, the normally soft-spoken, well-educated displaced residents staged protests, voicing outrage at being "treated like beggars". Events downstream of Karimabad yesterday did not augur well for either the displaced and stranded villagers, or for the estimated 13,000 to 18,000 residents of up to 36 villages at risk in the event of massive flooding. A tour of the lower half of the Hunza-Nagar valley yesterday found official disaster preparations in disarray. A May 20 deadline for the evacuation to higher ground of flood-endangered communities had not been met in the village of Faizabad, largely because local authorities had belatedly decided only that day it was at risk. Male residents gathered at the village mosque, where a dour magistrate, backed up by soldiers and a representative of the Pakistan Red Crescent Society, gave villagers an ultimatum: get to the relief camp at nearby Azharabad, or be forced out. However, half an hour before announcements blared from the mosque's loudspeakers, displaced people at the Azharabad camp were in a state of near-panic because half of its tents were pitched perilously close to the riverbed, and obviously lower than the 30-metre maximum height of a possible flash flood predicted by government engineers. Local administrators said the camp's site had been declared free of risk from the floods, but the nearby confluence of the dammed Hunza River with the Gilgit River narrows to just 200 metres and would be a bottleneck for untold tonnes of debris that would accompany a flash flood. Government promises to have 60 days of provisions at relief camps also remained unfulfilled at Rahimabad, where many residents, having adhered to orders to evacuate to camps by May 20, returned to their homes because of the lack of facilitation, intending to scramble back up the mountain when sirens sound the flood alarm. At both venues, displaced villagers complained they had only received a week's worth of relief goods, and that in many instances, many items were missing, suggesting pilferage. Their complaints prompted local journalists yesterday to raid a high school in Gilgit housing a mass kitchen for the two-free-hot-meals-per-day programme inaugurated by the prime minister. They were horrified to discover sacks of dried sauce mix contained large quantities of sawdust. Unperturbed by the prospect of disaster, regional educational authorities announced they would press ahead with annual high school graduation examinations for 14,000 students, many of them in Hunza-Nagar, from tomorrow, the critical day for the landslide dam. "Those unable to sit the examinations will be given another opportunity," they promised. [e-mail]