PAKISTAN: The grim task of recovering children's bodies is far from over for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) engineers helping the relief effort in northern Pakistan, more than six weeks after the earthquake.
Air Commodore Andrew Walton, British commander of the Nato relief team, recounted yesterday how young Spanish and Polish engineers were being confronted with death and misery on a scale they have never encountered.
"If you could see the anguish that is on the faces of young soldiers, engineers, Spanish, Polish, 19 to 20 years old, who are engaged in the gruesome business of recovering bodies from the wreckage," said Mr Walton who is based in Lisbon, one of the three joint headquarters of Nato.
This week, the Nato team is clearing the ground at a school in Bagh, a town in Pakistani Kashmir at the southern edge of the quake zone, where Nato also runs a field hospital.
About 90 schoolgirls were killed when their classrooms caved in and the thick, concrete roof came crashing down.
"We're clearing that . . . a school tent can be put up. But more than that, it's important for the families to be able to recover the bodies of their daughters." The scene is being replayed in many other stricken towns and villages in Pakistani Kashmir and North West Frontier Province.
The quake killed more than 73,000 people in Pakistan, about 35,000 of which were children.
During last week's international donor conference, President Pervez Musharraf thanked UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and the aid community for sharing his nation's grief.
At ground level, Mr Walton says Pakistanis can see Nato soldiers' empathy with their despair. When a body is found, work stops - soldiers step back, heads bowed, and a bereaved family claims their daughter's corpse.
"I think the emotion they show and the respect they show is very much appreciated by the local people," he says.
After Nato was requested to help Pakistan, Islamist parties objected, even though the western alliance sent teams of medics, engineers and helicopters vital for the relief effort.
Some Islamist leaders spread stories that Nato had only come to look for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda militants, or that the action was part of some subterfuge to get a presence in Kashmir.
"We are certainly aware of Islamist groups on the ground, but we have had absolutely no difficulty with them," said the Nato commander, adding that they work in the same vicinity.
He says his men do not feel under any threat, but the Pakistani army guards the engineers and medics as they get on with their work clearing roads, installing water-purifying systems, treating patients and, of course, delivering relief. There is a big drive to provide shelter to destitute villagers in the uplands.
He estimates that his men there have three weeks to complete the task before the snowline drops towards Bagh, where night-time temperatures are already touching freezing point. Helicopters ferrying relief up the mountains still come back laden with injured, about 20 per cent of whom are suffering from fractures incurred in the quake.
Mr Walton does not anticipate Nato being asked to stay much beyond the winter relief phase.
"We're not here for the long haul, we're not here to reconstruct the area. We are here to prepare people to get them through the winter, because that's the next disaster waiting to happen." - (Reuters)