Quake survivors massed in debris-strewn fields to pray and mark a normally joyous Muslim festival in a somber tone yesterday as preachers called South Asia's devastating earthquake a test of faith and punishment for wrongdoing.
Former US president Bill Clinton urged Pakistan and India to set aside their rivalry, saying in New York that this would help prompt a world weary of big natural disasters to open its purses once more for the more than 3 million people left homeless in the Oct. 8 quake centered in Pakistani Kashmir.
In the regional hub of Muzaffarabad, the faithful gathered on straw mats in a field surrounded by smashed concrete as helicopters of aid workers buzzed overhead in efforts to deliver much-needed aid ahead of the Himalayan region's fierce winter.
"God is testing us, testing our patience and our faith," Qazi Hussain Ahmed, head of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest religious political party, told a crowd of men. "One of the reasons for the earthquake was our wrongdoing."
For most of Pakistan, yesterday was the start of the Id-al-Fitr celebration marking the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, but President General Pervez Musharraf, who toured Muzaffarabad yesterday, has asked citizens throughout the country to tone down festivities out of respect for quake victims.
"This is a different Id. The children have no clothes," Ahmed said.
Zubair Abbasi, 24, an economics student before his university in Muzaffarabad was destroyed, said he would spend the day visiting orphans, perhaps playing soccer and cricket with them, instead of the normal Id routine of feasting and distributing gifts among family and friends.
"Usually we celebrate very happily but this time we are very sad. Houses have collapsed and people are dead," he said, though he did not see the quake as a punishment for misdeeds.
"These were good people, very virtuous. We don't know why this was sent from God," he said.
In Balakot in northwestern Pakistan, Abdul Aziz said his wife and children were among six family members lost in the quake.
"I wish I would also have died with them," a tearful Aziz said after prayers at a damaged mosque. "Maybe I lived to bury them and see their graves."
About 80,000 people died in the quake, 1,350 of them in India's portion of disputed Kashmir, and the rest across the border in Pakistani territory.
The disaster has helped bring the nuclear-armed rivals closer, sparking an accord last weekend to partially open their militarized Kashmir border, or Line of Control, on Monday to allow Pakistani survivors to seek help at Indian aid camps.
Clinton said in New York that if rapprochement between India and Pakistan continues, and people see "the Indians and the Pakistanis working together, crossing the Line of Control, treating each other as human beings ... the donor fatigue will wear down."
Pakistani Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri said in Lahore that his country is ready to make the partial opening of the border permanent, saying this could help "pave the way for a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem."
RSS