Turkey's prime minister became the first foreign leader to visit South Asia's quake zone yesterday, a day after the UN urged the world to do more to help the disaster's 3.3 million homeless victims before the harsh Himalayan winter threatens their survival.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered US$150 million in cash and aid, making Turkey the biggest single donor yet to the relief effort. On Thursday, the UN warned that it had so far funded only about a quarter of its appeal for the quake.
Officials estimate that at least 79,000 people died in the Oct. 8 temblor and 3.3 million were left homeless -- many more than the number that were displaced by last December's tsunami that hit Indonesia and other Asian countries -- and in a mountainous region that poses much bigger logistical challenges for authorities.
"We will do whatever is possible to assist you in this crisis," Erdogan told reporters in the capital of Pakistan's part of Kashmir after surveying the ruins with Pakistan's Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.
The numbers of seriously injured seeking medical attention was beginning to fall yesterday, relief workers said, but villagers in the mountains were still crying out for tents to shelter from the frigid Himalayan weather.
"It's horrible," said Hanna Mattinen, of the aid group Action Against Hunger at the village of Paras, where 1,000 tents were required but only 150 had arrived, forcing men to sleep outside, while women and children shared the tents.
UN relief coordinator Jan Egeland in Geneva on Thursday called on NATO countries to launch "a second Berlin airlift" with helicopters flying supplies and evacuating victims by the thousands, referring to the nonstop flights into West Berlin in the late 1940s when Soviet forces sealed off the city.
Egeland said that so far the UN had received only 27 percent of the US$312 million of its flash appeal for quake relief -- compared with 80 percent pledged within 10 days of a similar appeal to international donors after the tsunami.
NATO was expected yesterday to approve a dispatch of medics and military engineers to clear roads in the quake zone spanning from northwestern Pakistan into Indian's part of divided Kashmir. But allied commanders are struggling to muster helicopters needed to carry aid into the mountains. The US, Germany, Japan and Afghanistan have already sent choppers.
In Kashmir, snow already has begun to fall in high mountains, and some villages face subzero temperatures at night, and aid workers fear casualties will rise because communities are without adequate food, shelter or health care.
Major Saqib Mahbub, who coordinates relief flights out of the hard-hit district of Mansehra, said the number of seriously injured quake victims arriving from outlying villages for treatment had dropped from about 500 a day at the peak of the crisis, to about 100 now.
But Medecins Sans Frontieres warned that even minor injuries that are left untreated could become infected and pose a danger.
"Every case now left behind is becoming a very serious case now," said Krist Tierlinck, the group's emergency coordinator for Bagh in Kashmir.
Meanwhile, back in Turkey a magnitude-5.9 earthquake, the fourth strong temblor to rock a western Turkish city, shook already terrified residents in their beds early yesterday.
Thirty-seven people were hospitalized after suffering panic attacks or injuring themselves in jumping from balconies. An elderly man died of a heart attack at the stairs of his apartment building.
Authorities reported minor earthquake damage in and around the Aegean port city of Izmir. Governor Oguz Kagan Koksal of Izmir province said the roofs of five buildings in the city had been damaged. Authorities evacuated at least one hospital after the quake cracked some of its walls.
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