This post is dedicated to Atif and the countless and also nameless people of Hunza who have suffered due to the apathy of our ruling elite. Readers are invited to hear Hunza’s Atif today:

ALL I WANT TO SAY IS I AM A VICTIM OF THIS TRAGEDY….. I AM VERY VERY ASTONISHED TO SEE NOT A SINGLE DETAIL IN THE TV OR THE DAILY NEWSPAPERS ABOUT THE SERIOUSNESS AND TERRORS IN THE NORTH REGARDING THIS ISSUE. I LOST MY FAMILY AND HOME AND THIS BLOODY GOVERNMENT CANNOT RETURN THIS. ALL I SAY IS ALLAH DESTROY THIS GOVERNMENT, AND ALL ITS MEMEBRS AS THIS IS IN ALL MEANS REASON FOR THIS DESTRUCTION AND IGNORANCE AND I REALLY CANNOT HELP NOT TO SAY ALL THIS. WHEN YOU LOOSE YOUR FATHER, MOTHER AND YOUNG BROTHER (5) YEARS OLD BEFORE YOUR EYES AND SEE NOTHING BEING DONE TO PREVENT HUNDREDS OF OTHERS FROM JOINGIN MY LIST THEN ALL I CAN SAY IS DEATH TO OUR GOVERNMENT ALSO. 

A more detailed article on the betrayal of Hunza has been written in recent weeks by the man of the moment, the one and only Syed Talat Hussain in the Express Tribune  and I share it below:

Sinking to the Bottom

The accidental Attabad Lake is a metaphor for the way Pakistan is being governed. The tremendous water belly, 23 kilometres in length and as deep as 350 metres, was not formed in a day. Like most problems related to efficient and effective governance in this country, this was a modest accumulation that started about the same time this year did. While the landslide that blocked the path of natural water flow was considerable, it was not an impregnable wall. Moreover, there was plenty of information out there pointing to the potential dangers that official neglect could cause to the villagers on the expanding banks of the lake.

Yet as is the wont and practice of the government, no one paid attention to the looming threat. The local community went blue in the face shouting for help; the media, in spite of being consumed by the many other colourful and attention-catching issues, still managed to provide sufficient space for these apprehensions to be aired and reported. The local politicians, with their ears bent to the ground, too, made noises. Yet the government at the centre were nonchalant. It said nothing except make an occasional statement of perfunctory concern. It required neither a Herculean effort nor the brains of Einstein to nip this problem in the bud. It simply needed attention and deployment of the resources at hand to quickly clear, with foreign help if necessary, the blockade. As with hundreds of other solutions that are available for dozens of basic problems ruining the lives of Pakistan’s ordinary citizens, this solution was not applied. The result is before us. Just like the law and order situation, supply of clean water or regular electricity, Hunza’s gigantic lake has aggravated to become a near catastrophe.

The government representatives’ response to the ringing of the alarm bells on the lake menace has been no different from their reaction to the hue and cry that people raise when they see official inaction. The information minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, who has become the PPP’s strategic weapon of offence against critics, brushed aside all those talking about the coming crisis. Berating media Jeremiahs who were shouting to focus official attention on the issue, he promised to the locals a solution in seven days — after which life would be back to normal. His colleagues in Islamabad, spoke, half seriously and half in jest, of the upside of the lake: an Allah-mandated dam in a country where building one with political effort seems next to impossible. If communities get displaced as a result of natural calamity, one of them was heard arguing at a dinner table, would be so much easier to deal with: they had to accept their fate rather than flying at the government’s throat with relocation and compensation claims. This typified the present-day governance model which promises the moon in seven days and then hopes for divine intervention for the journey to start. (I am sure Mr Kaira has an immensely impressive-sounding defence of his position on this score.)

But the striking resemblances in the formation of the Attabad lake and the government’s governance module doesn’t end here. It tallies in another and a most important respect. In solving the lake problem the government faced no major hurdle. This particular area of government authority was not challenged by the judiciary, nor — to use the president’s mystery phrase — “political actors” of the biased section of the media. There was no intelligence agency hatching lethal plots, and no general was standing in the way of free, swift action. Yet the government looked the other way and pushed thousands of people, including its voters, in harms way, jeopardising a significant part of a centuries old life style.

This unmitigated disaster in Hunza is no different from countless terrible happenings in our lives that could be prevented by timely action — and where the government faces no hindrance from any quarter. The landslide that has caused the lake to come up is indeed the work of nature. But since then every drop that has gone into the making of the hydro hydra belongs to the government’s dripping incompetence. It is not a lake. It is the world’s largest water grave of governance.

Let us pray that the ruling elite have learnt from their mistakes in Hunza and that they do not betray Pakistanis affected by Cyclone Phet in Balochistan and Sindh.

The above set of photos sicken me and let me tell you why?

The first photo shows the present non-practising pir and evidently the non-practising Prime Minister of Pakistan showing affection to a baby girl who now resides in a IDP camp owing to the government’s lacklustre response to the Hunza landslide. The Prime Minister is joined by an entourage of ministers who joined him to holiday in Hunza it seems given none of them acted let alone acted swiftly to save Hunza’s people from the impending doom that now awaits them in the coming days.

I wonder how many meetings the Prime Minister of Pakistan and his cabinet have had on the Hunza landslide situation and on what measures the government needed to implement to safeguard Hunza and its people. The answer to my question is obviously none, since no meetings were held about Hunza as no-one cared and cares about Hunza and that is why I am so livid with the government who have failed the people of Gilgit-Baltistan.

What makes it worse is that many measures could have been deployed by the government that could have saved both lives and the livelihoods of the people of Hunza. Take for example the Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) who could have been deployed earlier to create the spillway and made to work faster by way of added resources so as to allow for the seepage of water faster thus saving villages from flooding. At the earlier stage, some local experts were of the opinion that the use of powerful water pumps to ejaculate the water at the blockade site could have reduced the likelihood of the Hunza waterbomb, a suggestion that was not even considered by those who rule in Pakistan’s power corridors.

It is clear that instead of tasking his government to act to save Hunza’s heaven from turning into a hell, Prime Minister Gilani sat idle and apathetic throughout and that is why I am so angry with him personally as well as his failed government. Prime Minister Gilani stooped even lower in my estimation when during his visit to Hunza recently he inaugrated a ‘Benazir Langar’  for the IDP’s who would never have needed such help had he done his ffing job in the first place.

The second photo shows the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mian Nawaz Sharif also showing a child some affection in an IDP camp in Hunza. This photo too gets my blood boiling for the opposition party which Mr Sharif leads has been criminally silent and apathetic on Hunza until it was too late and so they too share some of the blame for Hunza’s heaven turning into hell.

What makes it worse is that the former Prime Minister was on a private visit to the UK for nearly two weeks and said little about Hunza then and even less so when he has been in Pakistan given the landslide occured in January thus giving the opposition party five months to find their voice on helping Hunza.

I acknowledge and support the compensation packages announced by the federal government and the Punjab government in recent days but they are far too little and too late. Prime Minister Gilani and former Prime Minister Sharif have in truth been on a holiday in Hunza for they have done practically little to help Hunza and her people when help was needed and helpful. Indeed Hunza has been betrayed by Pakistan’s prime ministers past and present and that pains me no end.

Credits: Abdul Hameed via Pamir Times

A picture is said to say a thousand words. Indeed the photo above of Janu does exactly that and tells the story of Hunza without the use of words. Janu’s story of prayer is told by Pamir Times and is shared below verbatim:

Jan – e – Alam, also known to his friends as “Janu”, lives in Gulmit, one of the five villages directly hit by the catastrophic lake buildup in Gojal Valley. In the photograph he can be seen praying for the last time at the sinking grave of his mother. Jan-e-Alam’s father had passed away several years ago.

Jan-e-Alam is a special person as he can not speak. The mystic, non – complaining, smile on Jan-e-Alam’s face and his hands raised in prayer, looking towards the heaven, is a soul touching moment captured by a citizen filmmaker and photographer.

Pamir Times has led the way in drawing attention to Hunza’s perilous situation and the credit for this post goes to them again. Janu prays for help in saving Hunza from untold misery and I urge all Pakistanis to join him in that prayer, for Hunza needs our help and above all our prayers, today.

Hunza is in need of urgent help owing to the dam lake that threatens Hunza and Pakistan more widely as forewarned in my earlier post of March and shared again here. The sudden interest in the Hunza dam lake from the esteemed offices of the Prime Minister, President and the Army Chief are acts too little and too late to save the day, I fear.

Indeed I protest loudly at the individual apathy of Messrs Gilani, Zardari and Kayani  in dealing with this issue of life and death for Hunza and Pakistan. As a collective force, all three represent the Pakistani state which has obviously shown criminal apathy in dealing with the Hunza landslide by not building a spillway urgently enough and generally ignoring all the warnings given of an impending disaster for Hunza and Pakistan.

What makes me more angry is knowing the fact that the PPP government has served Gilgit-Baltistan with distinction since 2008 and has the confidence of the people given it has has a PPP Chief Minister in Mehdi Shah who too seems apathetic to life and death issues affecting his very own province.  

The fact that the Prime Minister of Pakistan can find time to stir controversy on another H, namely Hyderabad and visit that promised land and countless other places including speaking in favour of the cheating Jamshed Dasti at his election rally today is indicative of Gilani’s good governance. Given PM Gilani has yet to grace Hunza with his presence since early January from when the landslide occured shows how bothered the Prime Minister really is and shows the level of urgency in his federal government.

The fleeting visit of General Kayani may please the locals but it too is not enough given the Pakistan Army through the Frontier Works Organisation have clearly not done enough to ensure the spillways are ready to drain the water from the dam. The intervention from the Presidency does not merit detailed comment as actions speak louder than words for Mr Zardari and therefore the PPP Chairman will be judged on whether his interest and intervention can help the people of Hunza on the ground.

The best source of information on the Hunza landslide remains the Pamir Times shared here. Indeed I share a number of videos from Pamir Times and the comments of a landslide expert in David Petley on the Hunza landslide from his blog shared verbatim here and below:

The landslide at Attabad – New Videos of the Spillways and the Drowning Land Upstream

The lake behind the landslide at Attabad in Hunza, Pakistan continues to fill, meaning that we are probably only a fortnight or so away from the maximum point. I have not had an update from either NDMA or FOCUS for 48 hours, so am unsure as to how things have developed in the last two days. However, The Pamir Times has tonight posted three videos on Youtube that are worth watching. The first shows the spillway on 8th May:

This shows just how close to the top of the dam the water level has now reached. The second and third show the impact of the rapidly rising water level:

The sight of people destroying their own homes to recover building materials is pretty dreadful. Remember that most people in this area live on the basis of cash crops, and that their only real assets are their buildings, their land and their crops. For this reason, regardless of what happens at the spillway, the Attabad landslide is a disaster for the people of Gojal.

The words of David Petley put fear in my heart and provide the rationale for my words of criticism. Those words of criticism are written with a prayer and a hope that regardless of its failings so far the Pakistani state can act quickly to deal with the situation by saving the people and villages of Hunza as its most urgent priority.

The people of Hunza in Gilgit-Baltistan have had many, indeed too many a sleepless night since January after suffering a massive landslide in Attabad. The impact of the landslide has been considerable and has led to the forming of a natural dam in the Hunza River forming a lake that is consuming villages as it moves upstream.

Catastrophic effects are feared if the dam breaks with a tsunami-like flash flood of up to 20 metres high being feared which will have the potential to devastate not just the heaven that is Hunza, but Pakistan more widely as far and wide as the Tarbela Dam. In such a calamity, experts on the issue opine that the water would sweep down from an altitude of nearly 2,500 metres, being replenished by first the Gilgit River and then the Indus, before hurtling down the narrow northern stretches of the Indus Valley towards the Tarbela Dam, 40km north-west of Islamabad.

Indeed British colonial records from the 19th century report that two similar incidents caused flash floods that killed several thousand people and inundated huge areas of modern Pakistan. One, in 1858, was near the current disaster zone created a dam and a resulting lake appeared, one larger than the one in 2010 and history records show that when the dam broke, it unleashed a torrent of water that lasted for days and swept past Attock Fort, a few hundred miles south.

The lazy and lethargic PPP government has finally shown some interest in dealing with the impending disaster and has tasked the Army’s Frontier Works Organisation to level grounds with a view to making a spillway for the water to pour through. According to Dawn who have led the way in their media coverage as seen here, workers have removed more than 130,000 cubic yards (100,000 cubic meters) of debris with officials hoping the spillway will be open by mid-April.

A media report carried in The National sheds more light on the challenge of saving Hunza from the flash flood and it is shared below:

Race to Save Pakistan’s Shangri-La Valley from Devasting Flash Flood

Army engineers are battling against time and the threat of seismic shakes to save a 500km stretch of northern Pakistan from being devastated by a potential flash flood. The threat has been building since January 4, when a massive landslide temporarily dammed a river in the mountainous area of Hunza, widely believed to be the inspiration for the fictional kingdom of Shangri-La, creating a lake that continues to rise steadily.

The landslide removed 120 metres of mountainside, destroyed the village of Ata-abad, killing 19 residents, isolated 25,000 residents upriver from the landslide-dam, and severed a two-kilometre stretch of the Karakorum Highway, Pakistan’s only land link with China. The temporary lake, fed by glacia meltwaters, has since grown dramatically, and now stretches 15km back from the blockage, and is more than 70 metres deep.

Engineers of the army’s Frontier Works Organisation have been working since last month on the construction of a spillway that authorities hope will gradually drain the water.Scientists said the lake could grow to 20km in length by the onset of summer as, from April onwards, rising temperatures would significantly increase glacial melt and water flow into the lake. Although the scientists, who have surveyed the site, have endorsed the engineers’ strategy, they warn that the instability of the dam made the eventual outcome unpredictable and potentially disastrous. The 900-metre-long mass of landslide debris that formed the dam is largely made up of powder-like sediments.

David Petley, director of the International Landslide Centre at Durham University in the United Kingdom said: “The most likely scenario is that the water will flow over the dam when it reaches the top. The other scenario is that the overflow could wash away the top of the dam, after which there would be rapid erosion and collapse. It’s very difficult to forecast, “it would be a prudent conclusion to assume the worst when the water reaches the top, at which point it would be sensible to evacuate all the people downstream”. He stressed that a flash flood was “by no means an inevitability”, but historical evidence and a report submitted by Nespak, a state engineering firm, have highlighted the potential for disaster.

The National Disaster Management Authority, which is overseeing recovery efforts in Hunza, has told local legislators that the collapse of the dam would send a 20-metre-high tsunami-like flash flood crashing down the Hunza Valley. In that event, the water would sweep down from an altitude of nearly 2,500 metres, being replenished by first the Gilgit River and then the Indus, before hurtling down the narrow northern stretches of the Indus Valley towards the Tarbela Dam, 40km north-west of Islamabad. British colonial records from the 19th century report that two similar incidents caused flash floods that killed several thousand people and inundated huge areas of modern Pakistan.

The force of the flash flood would wreak catastrophic damage, destroying all communities and infrastructure, including most of the Karakorum Highway, a marvel of modern engineering built between 1966 and 1978 that ended centuries of isolation for the people of the region, now known as Gilgit-Baltistan, the scientists said.

The region is also among the most seismically active in the world because it is located at the junction of the Asian and Indian geological plates, where the Himalaya, Karakorum and Hindu Kush mountain ranges meet. Much of it sits upon an island plate squeezed between the two continental landmasses, when they collided hundreds of millions of years ago.

The danger of a massive landslide at Ata-abad had been apparent since February 2003, when a huge crack appeared in the terrain four months after an earthquake hit the region, the officials said. Authorities have since been urging residents to relocate, but they have refused to move unless they were provided with alternative residential and farming land.

Officials, backed by community-based non-government organisations sponsored by the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of Hunza’s predominantly Ismaili population, finally persuaded people living at higher altitudes to move just days before the landslide.

The weight of evidence last week prompted Hameed-ullah Jan Afridi, Pakistan’s environment minister, to order preparation of an emergency plan, including mass evacuations. “Preparations must start immediately,” he said in an official statement. However, local politicians said the government had wasted vital time dithering, unwisely focusing all initially on relief efforts and issuing unrealistic estimates on how long it would take to remove the debris before finally deciding who would undertake the mammoth task.

Nazir Sabir, a local politician and Pakistan’s premier mountaineer, said: “There were serious errors in understanding the longer-term threats posed by the artificial lake and formulating a strategy based on the right perspective. “There was too much bureaucracy, both in terms of decision making and assignment of blame [for the landslide], for due attention to be paid to the complicated process of debris removal.”

David Petley featured in the article above, is a landslide expert from Britain’s Durham University who has advised the Pakistani government and has visited Hunza in recent days. Indeed he continues to monitor the landslide via his personal blog and readers can follow it here. Pamir Times is another source of information being a blog focused entirely on Gilgit-Baltistan. Indeed it has the best and most updated news and readers can follow it here.

It is time for urgent action on the part of the federal government who must tackle this issue on a priority basis. It is also a time to pray for Hunza and her people some of whom have perished already owing to the landslide. Pakistanis inside and outside of Pakistan must work together to raise our voices to force the go-slow Gilani government into urgent action to save Hunza and Pakistan and do so quickly, for time is not on our side.