India, Pakistan to meet on Kashmir amid UN concern

By Robert Birsel

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) – Indian officials were
due in Pakistan on Friday to discuss opening the Kashmir border
to earthquake survivors, as the United Nations said an aid
shortfall could ground a lifesaving helicopter fleet.

The talks about how, where and when to open routes to allow
easier relief access across the cease-fire line dividing
Kashmir will be held in Islamabad on Saturday between
delegations from both foreign ministries.

With the Himalayan winter just weeks away, fears are
growing for tens of thousands of homeless villagers in the
mountainous region straddling the divided Kashmir region worst
hit by the October 8 quake that has already killed nearly
57,000 people.

Relief workers fear the world’s failure to deliver
sufficient emergency funds could mean as many people will die
of hunger and exposure during the bitter winter as in the
quake, which also injured more than 75,000 people in Pakistan.

Even as funds were drying up the World Food Programme (WFP)
said it is was revising up sharply its estimate of the number
of people in need of aid to 2.3 million, or whom fewer than a
fifth had so far been reached.

“Initially, we estimated the number of people in need was
about one million and we had reached about 50 percent of them,”
said WFP’s David Orr. “We’ve had a food security team in the
field and they’ve revised the estimate up quite dramatically.”

MONEY RUNNING OUT

Relief has still to reach many places, particularly valleys
close to the frontier between Pakistani and Indian Kashmir and
many families have been left living in the open or under basic
cover, like cotton and plastic sheets.

With many roads blocked by landslides and the border still
closed, helicopters have been the best means of getting relief
to villages and patients to hospital.

But on Thursday, the United Nations said the helicopter
fleet was just days away from being grounded after a U.N.
conference on Wednesday aimed at raising $550 million secured
just $16 million.

“When the money runs out, the choppers stay on the ground
and that’s what’s going to start happening in the next couple
of days,” U.N. financial expert Robert Smith said in Geneva.

A spokeswoman for the U.N.’s World Health Organization said
24 people in Pakistan had already died of tetanus due to delays
in treating dirty wounds and a large number of people were now
at risk of illnesses brought on by cold weather.

Rachel Lavy said deaths from infected wounds were bound to
rise as only about 22,000 injured had made it to hospital.

“If the helicopters are grounded it would have a huge
impact, not just in terms of getting people to hospital but in
terms of getting shelter and food out to the villages,” she
said.

DISCORD OVER DETAILS

Both India and Pakistan have been criticized for
politicizing the disaster and analysts say Saturday’s talks are
likely to result in only limited crossings for stranded
villagers.

Pakistan has proposed that the de facto border could be
opened in five places but an agreement in principle has been
bedeviled by discord over details.

India wants to open three relief stations.

The quake’s destruction of roads and bridges across rivers
would limit any large scale movement of people across the
cease-fire line, even if the two sides agreed to the opening.

But if some crossing points are sanctioned it could give
some families cut off in valleys close to the border an easier
way out before winter traps them.

The United Nations says it is in a race against time to
shelter and feed the homeless, in an operation experts say is
more difficult than that which followed last year’s Indian
Ocean tsunami.

About 450,000 winter tents are needed, of which nearly
100,000 have been distributed and another 200,000 are in the
pipeline, aid officials say.

That leaves them 150,000 short and not knowing where to
find them before what U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has
said would be a “winter without pity.”

(Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom in ISLAMABAD)