Pakistan Earthquake Toll

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ALEX CHADWICK, host:

This is DAY TO DAY. I'm Alex Chadwick.

Coming up, White House counsel Harriet Miers and the Supreme Court.

First, the lead, the Kashmir region of Pakistan where a 7.6-magnitude earthquake hit Saturday morning. Probably 20 to 30,000 people were killed. Pakistan's president, General Pervaiz Musharraf, has asked for international help to get supplies to residents of this mountain region. The foreign ministry of Pakistan says today they're going to accept help from India, Pakistan's traditional enemy. But India, too, suffers damage from this quake. Muneeza Naqvi is a special correspondent with The Washington Post. She's in Srinagar, India, which is right on the border.

Muneeza, welcome to DAY TO DAY. And tell me what you're seeing there.

Ms. MUNEEZA NAQVI (The Washington Post): Well, Alex, every day as I drive up, about 80 miles north of Srinagar to Uri district, which very close to the border with Pakistan and is also the part of Indian Kashmir that is absolutely the worst hit, I see complete devastation. I mean, 90 percent of Uri has been flattened out. So there are absolutely no homes standing anymore. And the closer you get to the border and some of the villages that are completely on the slopes of the mountains, those homes have been destroyed. Poor families, those that have survived the earthquake and were not in their homes when the quake happened, almost all of them are now on the streets--I mean, are outside the debris of their homes, because very few tents have reached families here yet. And it's getting increasingly cold in the evenings in this hilly part of the country. Everywhere I go I see, you know, gradually despair is changing into anger and small pockets of very angry people are now stopping cars driving up to most of these villages demanding that, you know, they do something to help them. Very often journalists are being sort of--their cars are being blockaded and they're being asked to go to specific villages because so little help has reached these people. And for them, they don't know what else to do, how else to draw attention to what is happening to them.

CHADWICK: Muneeza, how many people are you talking about living right in this area that you are able to get to?

Ms. NAQVI: Most of the villages--every single village has about 300 to 400 homes, and I've been to about four or five villages, but there are almost 85 villages in this district itself. The death toll officially is about 800 to a thousand is what the government is saying. But the paramilitary soldiers and the local people working on relief efforts say that the number is likely to be much higher because several villages in the remoter parts of the mountains still haven't been accessed by the relief efforts. So, you know, there are landslides pretty much everywhere in the higher and the more remote villages.

CHADWICK: So roads are cut off and you can't...

Ms. NAQVI: The roads are cut off by landslides.

CHADWICK: And there's no way to get in water and food and supplies?

Ms. NAQVI: There's no way except for, you know, often one or two soldiers will pack on one or two canisters of water on his back and walk across, past the debris, walking on this very precariously balanced loose stones and boulders. And that's how I got to one of the villages I went to today, because there was no road and one of the villagers actually helped me walk across the debris and across a temporary bridge that they've made into their villages to see what was happening there. And (technical difficulties) of soldiers are walking across the debris, but there's no way for ambulances to actually drive up to the villages because there is no road. To begin with, most of these roads were narrow--you know, a little bit wider than mule paths, but now with severe landslides, most of these roads have been blocked off.

CHADWICK: Well, I understand the anger and despair of people in these villages, but what can the government do to try to respond to this? What steps are under way?

Ms. NAQVI: Well, you know what a lot of these people--their biggest problem seems to be is that nobody has come to even assess the damage in the area, except for the army, which already sort of has a very heavy presence in the area because of the conflict with Pakistan. Their biggest complaint is that not one single politician has come to these villages. Now the tragedy itself--a lot of people are angry that these people come to them when it's time to look for ...(unintelligible) and haven't come to assess the damage now.

CHADWICK: Muneeza Naqvi, a special correspondent with The Washington Post, joining us from the India side of the border along the Kashmir region with Pakistan.

Muneeza, thank you.

Ms. NAQVI: Thanks, Alex. Thank you.

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