Islamabad, Pakistan – On a stifling afternoon last month, Mohammed Hadiz distributed a petition from his tent.
“We are earthquake victims of Kashmir,” he read from the petition. “The governments of Pakistan and Kashmir tell us to go back. Our houses and lands are totally destroyed in the earthquake. We don’t want to go there because we are afraid of living there.”
Hadiz, 58, collected dozens of signatures from the 15,000 adults in the Khubaih Foundation Relief Camp, also known as Camp H-11.
Whether the sweat-stained petition would influence the camp administrator, he did not know.
“My house was destroyed,” Hadiz said. “I don’t know what I’ll do if they send me back.”
More than six months after a massive magnitude-7.6 earthquake struck northeastern Pakistan on Oct. 8, killing 85,000 people and leaving many more homeless, aid organizations say many displaced people have been forced out of relief camps as the government pushes its reconstruction plans.
About 200,000 remain in the camps. Government officials do not know how many more live in their own makeshift shelters.
A dearth of international aid, the constant threat of landslides in mountainous rural areas and a slow-moving government bureaucracy responsible for dispensing cash assistance have left many with nowhere to go.
“They do have very good reasons not to go back to their homes,” said Fatma Bassiouni, a spokeswoman for the United Nations’ refugee agency. “Villages were totally leveled. They have nothing to return home to. The authorities must find alternatives for people who can’t go back.”
In April, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees cited evidence of intense psychological pressure being applied to move people out, whether they have a village to return to or not. Some camp managers, the commissioner found, have been telling families they must leave on a specific date because it is the only time free transportation will be available to them.
“There was an element, a push factor, being exercised by people eager to see the camps empty earlier,” admitted Jan Vandemoortele, the United Nations’ coordinator of humanitarian efforts in Islamabad. “We have contacted locals and gone to these areas and clarified the situation.”
In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir where the earthquake was centered just 6 miles below the surface, engineer Saqib Awan with the American aid organization Mercy Corps found that police were still telling families to leave the camps.
“They are telling them to go,” he said.
Hadiz has been at the camp since mid-October. He was outside with his wife and three children planting vegetables when the earthquake hit their Muzaffarabad home.
“I saw buildings fall, my house fall,” he recalled.
Hadiz had lived just outside Muzaffarabad. He now spends his days sipping tea, looking for work and swatting at flies in the sultry spring heat. He leaves scraps of cooked chicken outside the tent he shares with two other families to draw away the flies.
“I was a teacher,” he said. “I just need my life back. How long can we stay here? We don’t know.”
Camp administrator Mohammad Norin Qajia denied anyone was being forced out.
“The relief is over,” Qajia said. “We are into reconstruction. A few people have gone. Some have returned to their villages, others just moved on.
“The rest stay. They will all go back one day whether they want to or not. I just don’t know when.”
In February, the government announced that all of the 170 earthquake relief camps would be closed by March 31. The camps remain now in large part because normal life is still far into the future. Government officials concede it will take at least three years to construct 600,000 new housing units and restore 6,000 schools and 400 hospitals.
International aid has not met expectations. The United Nations has received about $352 million in quake aid instead of the urgently requested $550 million. The shortfall has forced the U.N. to reduce and sometimes ground flights to remote villages that need emergency food supplies.
No one argues for the camps to remain open permanently. In the afternoon heat, the camps swelter; they turn into quagmires when it rains. Flies converge on the open toilets and the remains of meals scattered around flickering campfires.
Two to three families share a single tent, cramming what little they own into its narrow confines. There is little room to sleep or eat. Diarrhea is as rampant as inertia.
“This land does not belong to the government,” said Fazal Urrehman, budget manager for the Camp Management Organization in Muzaffarabad, a relief camp of 14,673 families. “So we may move this camp to another tent village on government land. But we are not forcing anyone out.”
Yet soon after Urrehman was interviewed, dozens of families who said they had no home to return to were being transported out of the camp to their villages in jeeps packed chaotically with blankets, pots and pans, and squalling children.
“Yes, yes, we are leaving,” said Arshad Khan, 21, who with his aunt had fled his village of Sultan Pur outside Muzaffarabad after the earthquake. “We were ordered to go back. We’ll just go. I’ll see what is left.”
Hadiz suspects that one day soon he will be told the same thing.
“Where will I go? What will I do?” he said. “I have lost everything.”
