AL HOCEIMA, Morocco: Several people were hurt when troops quelled crowds attacking a Moroccan governor’s offices yesterday, angry at what they called inadequate official aid in the aftermath of Tuesday’s earthquake.
“There are clashes right now as we speak,” said a local official who witnessed the violence involving about 1,500 people in this Mediterranean port.
“Several people have been wounded,” said the official, who asked not to be identified. Shortly afterwards, a Reuters correspondent in a nearby village saw trucks carrying anti-riot forces heading for Al Hoceima at speed.
The official said the military’s “violent intervention” began when the crowd started looting relief trucks of supplies for the tens of thousands of people made homeless by Morocco’s worst quake in four decades.
Anger at the perceived slowness of the official response has been mounting since Wednesday, when some survivors blocked a main road in a sit-down protest.
Interior Minister Mustapha Sahel said earlier the official death toll from the quake, the worst in over 40 years, had risen to 571, and that the government was doing all in its power to offer psychological help to traumatised survivors.
A five-year-old boy was dug out alive after two days spent under the wreckage of his home, but some foreign rescue workers said they had been left standing idle.
“The senior official in (Ait Kamara) told us 200 people died in the village and that two or three were still alive under the rubble, but that he was too busy to show us where they were,” said Austrian search and rescue team member Wolfgang Wedan.
In another village, Tazagin, his team were told they were 24 hours too late: “We have come here for nothing. We wanted to help but we can’t. They send us away wherever we go,” he said.
“There has been no identification of sites where rescue is needed,” said Eliane Provo Kluit, of the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination Team.
The government has defended its performance, pointing to tent villages set up to provide emergency shelter in low temperatures and pouring rain. Moroccan newspapers said the remote terrain and poor weather were hampering rescuers.
But exasperated survivors have started taking matters into their own hands. Earlier, around 100 people blocked trucks at Al Hoceima airport containing mattresses and blankets.
“I’m not coming down. I’ve lost my father and my grandfather in the earthquake. I don’t want my family to die of cold,” shouted one man from atop one of the trucks.
Interior Minister Mustapha Sahel said the government was distributing 1,300 tents and creating two temporary camps in the village of Ait Kamara and in Al Hoceima.
The authorities’ performance won praise from Henri Benedittini, the French coordinator of EU rescue teams. He said local rescue teams had quickly cleared much of the debris and extracted the bodies.
“When the international rescue teams arrived, the Moroccan civil defence had already done 90-95 per cent of the work. They’d done the work for us,” he said.
Aziz Mahdawi, a doctor at Al Hoceima’s hard-pressed main hospital, said only two survivors had been pulled alive from the rubble on Wednesday.
Injured were still arriving at the overflowing hospital from remote areas, some on donkeys and other farm animals, he said.
Concern remains over the fate of three villages in the Rif Mountains – Ait Kamara, Tamassint and Im-Zouren – where 30,000 people live mainly in mud houses.
Officials expected the toll to climb further and special prayers will be said in the country’s mosques on Friday, which has been declared a national day of mourning.
The quake was North Africa’s worst since 2,300 people were killed last May in neighbouring Algeria. Morocco’s worst recorded quake killed 12,000 in the city of Agadir in 1960. – Reuters