John Home Robertson: Ignored victims of flooding disaster

Mohammed Marjan's house was swept away by the catastrophic floods in Pakistan three months ago. He and his wife and four children survived, but they now live in a tent in the Himalayan foothill village of Bagnowan, and winter nights are extremely cold for people in tents at 9,000ft.

Media coverage of the devastation of towns in low-lying areas further south inspired great generosity and a massive relief effort, but far less is known about the sheer violence of the flooding in the glens of Pakistan's mountain areas. People perished in the raging torrents, and there have been further casualties as people are forced to use dangerous improvised bridges to cross the changed courses of rivers.

I have just spent a fortnight with Edinburgh Direct Aid (EDA) in the remote Upper Neelum Valley of Pakistani Kashmir, and I was shocked first by the damage wrought by the freak monsoon rain of August 2010, and secondly by the fact that the massive international relief programme has delivered very little help to this badly affected remote mountain area.

The Upper Neelum and its tributaries like the Shuntur and Surgun nullahs could be compared with Scottish Highland crofting glens: steep valleys with common grazing up to the treeline and precious arable land around villages. This summer's 100-year record rainfall (300mm in 24 hours) sent an unprecedented surge of water down the burns and rivers with terrifying destructive power. The torrents carved away large swathes of terrain, including parts of villages, roads and farmland in some areas. Some houses disappeared altogether. Some have been partially demolished, while others are left teetering on the brink of crumbling cliffs carved out by the flood waters. The whole landscape of these village communities has been viciously transformed.

Mohammed Marjan's substantial stone and timber house, and hundreds like it, disappeared without trace. And it gets worse, because the criteria for providing shelter for victims require that they must have a site on which to rebuild. In his case the site has gone as well as the house - it is now in the re-aligned course of the Shuntur river. This cruel Catch 22 means that a homeless family does not qualify for emergency shelter because there is technically nowhere to erect it.

I spent two nights in a tent nearby last week, and the temperature is already close to freezing, so shelter and food must be the top priorities, but there is a lot more to do.Bridges and long sections of the valley tracks have been washed away, leaving precipitous cliffs and banks of scree; rural Pakistan's excellent mini-hydro power installations have been wrecked; and vital basic services like water-driven flour mills have been destroyed too.

EDA knows the area, having helped earthquake victims in 2005. So we used local contacts to plan a response to the flood emergency. EDA went to work immediately with 37,000 awarded by the Scottish Government's International Development Fund as well as generous voluntary donations.

Last week we climbed 20 steep landslide-strewn miles up the Shuntur valley, with essential help from sure-footed ponies - a new experience for this volunteer. Helped by an engineer from the Pakistani army garrison, we determined the materials and work needed to replace footbridges and tracks over gorges between villages, to repair water channels for mini-hydro schemes and mills, and where possible to reduce further erosion of land and houses.

EDA has procured hundreds of gabion cages and the cement required to start those tasks before the snow falls. Local people are already working flat-out to carry those vital supplies up the valleys on horseback or on their own shoulders before winter snows block access to their villages.

People are very grateful for the generosity of British donors, and they readily agree to contribute what they can in cash as well as labour towards the recovery of their communities.

We have commissioned a Punjabi engineer to manufacture hundreds of woodburning stoves for cooking and water heating in an improvised workshop in the town of Kel. That will create jobs as well as providing vital heat for flood victims. EDA has bought materials to replace a village first aid post destroyed by the flood, we are helping millers to rebuild and equip water-driven flour mills, and where possible we are helping to repair channels for mills, hydro generators and water supplies.

We are appealing for more funds to buy solar-powered lanterns for houses in areas where hydro generators have been destroyed, to bring light and hope into the lives of victims of this terrible natural disaster. These lights will help families to survive a freezing Himalayan winter, and already people are offering to contribute what they can towards the cost of lanterns - they are not asking for charity but they certainly deserve it.

But there is another question: three months after these well-publicised floods, the only activity in the Upper Neelum funded by a Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) charity appears to be the shelter initiative provided by Islamic Relief. So it is just as well that EDA has stepped in to provide stoves for those shelters as well as our other activities.

The DEC is a wonderfully effective means of focusing attention on disasters and channelling public generosity to help victims.But, as I discovered while working in the earthquake area in Kashmir in 1995, the big charities which form the DEC insist on administering all of that money themselves. Since they need to concentrate on areas of greatest need, such as the inundated areas of Sindh and Punjab, there is a real risk that victims in remoter areas can be neglected. Small charities such as EDA are good at reaching such remote areas, and there must be a strong case for the DEC to help smaller charities do such vital work. It should not operate as an exclusive cartel of big charities.

Fate has been cruel to the people of Pakistani Kashmir. Life is hard enough for poor subsistence farmers in the Himalayan foothills, but they get earthquakes too, and now this flood, not to mention extremely messy national and regional politics. There is an uneasy peace on the "Line of Control" boundary with Indian-occupied Kashmir, and there is plenty of evidence of the effects of Indian artillery bombardments.

Contrary to the impression given by our own media, I found that people in that area of Pakistan are as friendly as ever towards British visitors. An army officer expressed pride that the Pakistani army is the only force that has taken on the Taleban and defeated them militarily in recent years. We have good friends in Pakistan, and it must be in our interests to help them in their time of need.

The big DEC charities are doing excellent work to support countless flood victims. But people like Mohammed Marjan in the remote mountain valleys deserve our help too, so I hope that Scots will continue to support the work of Edinburgh Direct Aid.

• John Home Robertson is a former Labour MP for East Lothian; to contact EDA visit www.edinburghdirectaid.org or phone [phone]