GENEVA - Aid workers are seeing a marked spike in casualties
and injuries in Pakistan, fueled by intensifying violence and
anti-Western suspicions in the wake of the U.S. raid in May that killed
Osama bin Laden, a senior Red Cross official said Monday.
Pascal
Cuttat, the departing head of the International Committee of the Red
Cross delegation in Pakistan, said the "violence has increased
considerably since bin Laden was killed, and has spread into urban
areas" such as Peshawar and Karachi, resulting in noticeably more
people dead and injured and arriving at humanitarian and medical
clinics.
"More than we have seen for many years," Cuttat told
reporters at the Red Cross' Geneva headquarters. "Overall, the curve of
violence is increasing, and the time-link is clear."
Al-Qaida
leader Osama bin Laden was shot and killed in an early morning raid by
U.S. Navy Seals at his secret compound in the Pakistani town of
Abbotabad. Since then, Cuttat said, it's gotten tougher for aid groups
to operate in Pakistan — the bureaucratic hoops against getting permits
and visas have multiplied — due to a marked jump in violence and
anti-Western sentiment.
"We are consistently facing suspicion of
any foreigner working in the country," he said. "To live and work and
get permission to do anything has become more difficult. Everyone is
struggling with the bureaucracy."
Cuttat said at the end of a
3-year stint in Pakistan, however, that aid workers are "struggling but
not impeded" as they try to help victims of flooding and armed
insurgencies.
"We can only move through Pakistan in certain areas," he said.
He
said "the effects of last year's floods are not digested entirely yet"
— thousands of people still suffer because of the 2010 monsoon floods.
But, he said, the Red Cross is focused on providing aid for up to a
quarter-million people displaced by fighting last year.
Cuttat
said he regretted that his staff of 1,300 Pakistanis and about a tenth
as many international workers were unable to get better access to
Pakistan's thousands of prisoners and detainees.
He said he could
not directly link to the Red Cross or other aid groups any expected
fallout of the Obama administration's decision to suspend more than
one-third of American military aid to the Pakistan's military. AP
