Feuds Hinder Asian Quake Relief

If calamities bring the promise of pushing adversaries closer together, South Asia's massive quake is showing the vast potential and frustrating limits of disaster diplomacy.

With Kashmir, the region at the center of the tragedy, also at the heart of India and Pakistan's rivalry, the neighbors have traded offers and counteroffers as they try to forge a shared relief effort, bringing them tantalizingly close to a diplomatic breakthrough.

But seemingly genuine attempts to reach across the divide are analyzed for their potential propaganda value, with one-upmanship and mistrust threatening to scuttle the tentative steps to move the peace process forward.

Pakistan's "suspicions of Indian malevolence have receded" in the quake's aftermath, said G. Parthasarthy, a former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan.

"If there are very deep suspicions, disaster can mitigate those suspicions to a certain extent," he said. "But gut reactions don't change so easily."

Or, as Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf bluntly told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Friday: "If they don't trust me, I don't trust them ... It's mutual."

The mistrust was clear when Pakistan initially hesitated before accepting tents and other vital supplies from India soon after the Oct. 8 quake, which killed 79,000 people, the vast majority in Pakistan. Some 1,360 died in India.

Since then, however, a seemingly endless back-and-forth between the neighbors has produced little.

India offered helicopters that Pakistan desperately needed to deliver aid to the mountainous regions where whole towns and villages were leveled by the quake. Islamabad said it would take the choppers without pilots an idea that India, predictably, scotched.

Pakistan then said the militarized frontier dividing Kashmir, the so-called Line of Control, should be opened.

New Delhi, after welcoming the idea, came back over the weekend and announced it would instead open three relief camps for Pakistani victims on its side of the line.

Pakistan countered by saying five should be opened, and now both sides are supposed to meet to discuss the proposals on Saturday, meaning that three weeks after the quake, only a trickle of aid will have crossed the border.

"Clearly, there is a lack of trust at work here," said an Indian official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

A major hitch is that with Pakistan bearing the brunt of the quake, aid is flowing one way, and only India's military is capable of carrying out large-scale relief efforts.

Pakistani analyst Talat Masood, a former general, said a two-year peace process between the countries was not far enough along for Pakistan to let Indian troops enter its part of Kashmir.

"I think the peace process and particularly the issue of Kashmir has not sufficiently moved forward (in a way) that gives confidence to the Pakistani military and political leadership to allow Indian helicopters to be flown by their pilots in Kashmir," he said.

Kashmir, a largely Muslim land, was split between India and Pakistan after the bloody partition of the subcontinent following independence in 1947. Both now claim all of it.

Complicating matters further is an Islamic insurgency that has been festering in Indian Kashmir since 1989.

Many of the insurgent groups are based in Pakistani Kashmir, and that has made New Delhi cautious about proposals that would open the Line of Control, said the Indian official.

To others in India, the manner in which Musharraf announced his original proposal to open the line at a news conference in Islamabad without first consulting the Indians appeared to be grandstanding.

It was dismissed by one Indian analyst as a "rhetorical flourish" meant to divert attention from criticism in Pakistan of the country's relief effort.

"This is a major proposal. It can't be implemented overnight," said C. Uday Bhaskar of New Delhi's Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses. "There has to be coordination, mechanisms for screening people who come across."

Along with Indian skepticism, Musharraf faces domestic criticism for his unwillingness to accept aid from India's military.

"It no longer pays to ignore the pain of the stricken population simply to save a bit of Pakistani textbook nationalism from being destroyed by reality," the Daily Times newspaper of Pakistan wrote in an editorial.