• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

India, Pakistan to meet on Kashmir amid UN concern

Posted on: Friday, 28 October 2005, 01:12 CDT

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)

Source: REUTERS

More News in this Category