Gwadar Women & children protest against insufficient relief goods

The Baloch Hal News

GWADAR: Cyclone affected people, mostly women and children, continued their noisy protest on Saturday over an inadequate relief operation, shortage of food items and medical facilities in many areas of Gwadar.

Dozens of women staged a sit-in on Musa Mor in front of Army relief camp while personnel were distributing rations among the affected families. They threw stones and register their protest against the insufficient relief work and not coming to the right expectations of the rain-affected people.

Army closed its camp after the incident as the angry women blocked the road for several hours for normal traffic.

According to reports, some personnel resorted to aerial firing and lobbed tear gas shells dispersing the angry protesters. Two women were reported to be injured and several others sustained injuries in the stampede caused by blank fire in the air to scare the demonstrators.

Affected People also staged a sit-in protest on the Jinnah Avenue protesting against the shortage of food and other necessities of the life. The protestors disrupted the flow of traffic for three long hours. They chanted slogans against the government for not providing adequate relief to the affected families. Enraged residents of Gwadar also staged a protest demonstration on Port Road disrupting the normal traffic to Gwadar deep seas port.

Spokesman of Frontier Corps, Murtza Baig denied the firing incident. “FC personnel were busy in relief operations and they have nothing to do with law and order situation,” he said adding that FC sent a two lady doctors and four males to undertake relief work

The entire Union Council south, one-kilometer from Gwadar port, was up to the two feet of rain water and people were not getting proper relief. The authorities had failed to drain out the stagnant water following torrential rains last week. Affected people also organized protest in Sur Bundar where the affected people claimed that around 20, 000 people were affected by torrential rains and 200 houses had been damaged.

The situation was worse in Jiwanri. Local fishermen were not getting proper relief since the cyclone ‘phet’ hit the area. They said that 400 houses were washed away. “Still 140 small fishing vessels were stuck in the sea,” a notable said that people are suffering due to acute shortage of clean drinking water and scarcity of food items.

It may be mentioned here that all the major political parties supported the street protests of the people, particularly women condemning the Government attitude towards the rain affected people of Balochistan coast.

Political activists who addressed protest rallies in Gwadar condemned the biased opinion of the NDMA Chairman who claimed that the Government had rushed more relief goods than needed for the affected people. After his statement at a news conference in Islamabad, the Government had dispatched yet another plane load of relief goods to Gwadar for distribution among the affected people.

More than 50,000 square miles areas of Mekran and Lasbela regions were seriously affected in the devastating cyclone followed by torrential rains in the region causing massive dislocation.

The speakers condemned the Federal Government for not announcing the amount of relief saying that the Government functionaries are waiting to calm down the sentiments so that a token amount of relief is announced. In the past two cyclones and floods, the Federal functionaries did the same only to deny relief to the people and add to the miseries of the people deliberately

The NDMA functionaries made a gross under estimation about the damages in cyclone and flood. Lt-General (retired) Nadeem Ahmed told a news conference that mere 400 houses were damaged and 200 small fishing boats missing.

When he was addressing the news conference in Islamabad, the local Fisheries Department had received applications from 351 people from Tehsil Gwadar alone that they lost their fishing vessels.  Thousands of houses were completely destroyed in unprecedented heavy rains in Gwadar, Jiwanri and other parts of Mekran and Lasbela Coast, a length of over 1200 kilometer long coast of Balochistan.