Leader faces nation's fury on return

President Asif Ali Zardari finally returned to his ravaged country to face a barrage of criticism while thousands of people were evacuated from a major city in Pakistan's heartland as flood waters continued to rise.

The country's leader, under fire for failing to cancel an overseas trip while more than 14 million of his compatriots struggled to deal with the devastating waters, flew into Karachi and was due to return to the capital, Islamabad.

There he will face renewed criticism over his failure seemingly to grasp the scale of the crisis - Pakistan's worst natural disaster.

It is from this saturated heartland that Zardari and the civilian authorities face the most intense criticism for failing to do more.

Yesterday, thousands of people fled from the city of Muzaffargarh in Punjab province after officials issued flood warnings as the swollen Chenab River continued to rise.

"It's really bad, horrendous," said Rashid Javed, a spokesman for the charity Plan International, whose partners are working to help people in the Muzaffargarh area. "In addition to all the water from the northwest, we have had three days of torrential rain. Most of the camps ... set up for people have been moved to higher ground."

Reports said the usually busy city of 250,000 people in the breadbasket of the nation was yesterday largely deserted - large numbers left after warnings were issued the previous evening.

Several men stayed to guard homes and businesses. "There is no doubt that our city is almost empty now," said shop-owner Mohammed Saleem, who sent his wife and children to Multan.

The city's hospital said it was suffering from staff shortages because so many doctors and other workers had decided to leave before floods struck, and workmen had placed sandbags around it in anticipation of damage.

While it was still unsure if the waters would engulf the city, people said they were not taking any chances.

Almost two weeks after the worst floods in more than 80 years started to sweep through northwest Pakistan, there appears little let-up. While the waters have receded in some places, elsewhere they have continued to rise.

Several United Nations bodies have admitted the scale of the disaster has made it difficult to respond adequately, not just for the Government and the armed forces, but for aid groups too.

"Our staff in Pakistan say the situation is among the most difficult they have faced. Thousands of villages and towns in low-lying areas have not seen flooding on this scale in generations," said a spokeswoman for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency.

"[The Government] puts the number of homes destroyed or damaged at more than 300,000, with more than 14,000 cattle having perished and 1 million hectares of crop-land under water. So far, some 1600 people have been killed, but many millions of Pakistanis and Afghan refugees have been affected."

Stephane Lobjois, of the charity Handicap International, said rescuers were travelling to disabled people's homes by foot to deliver emergency supplies. "Not even donkeys can reach - only men," he said. The UN has said the aid response needed to be scaled up "massively" and that it was working on a response plan that would require hundreds of millions of dollars in international assistance.

A spokeswoman for Zardari's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) said one of his first tasks was to meet the chief ministers of the provinces to draw up a rehabilitation programme.

Yet in Karachi, Zardari may have been distracted as the fallout from his Europe visit sparked angry PPP protests outside the television news channel Geo News.

INSULT TO INJURY

What the papers say

"The insensitivity to the mounting suffering at home was thrown into sharper relief by the long duration of Mr Zardari's tour. Even as swelling rivers pushed the number of people affected by the calamity to several million, the President carried on with a visit that had no urgent purpose."
- Dr Maleeha Lodhi in the News

"Surely the situation demanded Mr Zardari's presence in the country. True, there is little he could personally have done to improve things. But just as Bush and Obama learnt, it is the impression of being in charge that is important."
- Irfan Husain, Dawn

What the experts say

Are the floods in Pakistan, bushfires in Russia and landslides in China evidence of global warming?

* "These are events which reproduce and intensify in a climate disturbed by greenhouse gas pollution. Extreme events are one of the ways in which climatic changes become ... visible."
- Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-president of the body set up by the United Nations to monitor global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

* "The odds of such extreme events are rapidly shortening and could become considered the norm by the middle of this century."
- Dr Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the British Met Office

- INDEPENDENT