Flood survivors hit out at Pakistan’s president

 FT

 Anger erupted among survivors of Pakistan’s worst floods in 80 years on Monday as destitute farmers asked why their president was visiting the UK even as his country braced for more rains

Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s president, is due to begin a trip to Britain on Tuesday as outrage boils over at his response to floods that have killed more than 1,100 people and remarks by David Cameron, the UK prime minister, linking Pakistan to terrorism.

Forecasts of more rain have raised fears that fresh downpours could unleash more torrents in flood-hit areas of north-west Pakistan, where raging waters have forced at least 1m people to abandon their homes. Some may be able to return relatively quickly if the waters recede, but others come from villages that have virtually ceased to exist.

Several hundred people are feared to have been killed by rising waters in other parts of Pakistan, and many thousands more forced to move to higher ground. One government official in Islamabad estimated the nationwide death toll at 1,400 and said the figure could be much higher.

Residents fleeing washed-out villages in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the north-western province worst hit by the disaster, slammed the government’s response, saying they had received no help since torrential rains caused flash floods last week.

“The president has proven he doesn’t care about ordinary people. When Pakistanis are dying, it is the time for him to have stayed at home,” said Naeem Khan, seeking shelter in Nowshera, which lies 60 miles north-west of Islamabad and is partly underwater. “Last week, I was looking forward to harvesting my three acres of sugar cane but now I have nothing left, absolutely nothing.”

Opponents of Mr Zardari’s weak coalition government have seized upon his absence to accuse him of being out of touch with his people. The prominent role played by the army in the rescue efforts has underscored the authority still wielded by the military, which has ruled Pakistan for decades.

Anger at the government over the floods will pile further pressure on civilian leaders already struggling to prove they can steer Pakistan through a Taliban insurgency, an economic crisis and a chronic shortage of electricity.

Pakistani officials say they are doing all they can to help survivors and have appealed for the US, the United Arab Emirates and other allies to provide helicopters to help the rescue effort. The military says it has already evacuated thousands of people and is using boats and helicopters to reach more than 20,000 people trapped on patches of high ground in the north-west.

Relief workers fear more rain in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, and Sindh, home to Karachi, the commercial capital, could broaden the scope of a disaster they are still struggling to assess. “The scale is larger than we expected,” said Nicki Bennett, a senior humanitarian official with the United Nations. “It could still go from bad to worse.”

The Obama administration has provided rescue boats, water filters, prefabricated steel bridges and thousands of packaged meals to help flood victims, a gesture of support that comes as Washington seeks to win greater Pakistani co-operation to support its struggling military campaign across the border in Afghanistan.

Rescue efforts have been slowed by severe damage to roads in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, which has been the scene of fierce fighting between Pakistan’s army and Taliban insurgents in recent years. Officials estimate that about 100 bridges have been destroyed in the region, formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province.

One official in Islamabad drew parallels between the scale of the damage inflicted on infrastructure by the floods and the impact of an earthquake in 2005 in parts of northern Pakistan and Kashmir that killed some 70,000 people. “The loss in economic terms could be as much as the earthquake where the preliminary estimates were about $3bn and by some measures even $5bn,” the official said.

Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority said that more than 29,500 houses had been damaged and a key trade highway to China was blocked in several places by the flooding.