India Offers Kashmir Quake Relief
Officials from India plan to travel to neighboring rival Pakistan to discuss setting up relief camps in Kashmir, officials in both countries said Monday, as the U.N. warned that hundreds of thousands of people who lost homes in an earthquake earlier this month were still without adequate housing as winter approached.
It remains unclear, however, how the proposals offered by each country could be reconciled on bringing relief to the Kashmiri region that lies along the Line of Control, the cease-fire line that acts as the de facto border in the divided region.
"Basically, the delegation is coming to discuss the proposal that Pakistan had given to India on allowing travel," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said Monday. "The Indian proposal can also be discussed at the meeting."
The Oct. 8 quake has pushed Pakistan and India to lay aside their differences. The two governments were inching closer to a deal in which they would overlook their long-standing dispute over the Kashmir region for the sake of helping the quake victims, allowing them to cross the disputed border.
Opening the border is particularly sensitive for New Delhi, which has fortified the Line of Control to prevent infiltration by Islamic militants who fight Indian security forces, seeking Kashmir's independence or merger with Pakistan.
India has proposed opening three aid camps for Pakistani quake victims on its side but signaled Sunday that it could work with Islamabad's suggestions to allow Kashmiris to cross at five points along the border. India has already provided tons of relief goods to its neighbor and traditional rival.
Aslam also said Pakistan was also willing to slightly revise its original proposal, and allow officials from both sides to deliver relief goods at those five points.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, meanwhile, brought help Monday for Pakistani quake victims and the U.S. Army began setting up a field hospital. Pakistan's army will this week send another brigade of about 2,000 soldiers, including engineers, to Muzaffarabad, the capital of its portion of Kashmir, to help in the relief effort and the grueling task of clearing debris, said army spokesman Maj. Farooq Nasir.
Eighteen more bodies were found in collapsed buildings in the city on Sunday, he said.
Powerful aftershocks were still rattling the region more than two weeks after the 7.6-magnitude temblor wrecked a huge swathe of northern Pakistan and the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, killing an estimated 79,000 people, including 1,360 on the Indian side.
A magnitude-6.0 quake rocked Pakistani-held Kashmir on Sunday, and at least two more, the strongest one registering 5.2, hit the area Monday. No one was killed in that aftershock, but an earlier tremor killed five people in Afghanistan's eastern Zabul province near the Pakistan border.
The Afghan president held talks Monday with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. Karzai brought five tons of medicines and medical equipment, as well as 30 doctors and nurses who will travel to the quake zone, said Rafiullah Mujaddedi, an official in the president's media department.
"Afghanistan shares in every way the emotions and suffering of our brothers in Pakistan," Karzai said, adding that like his own war-torn nation, Pakistan faced hard work ahead in reconstruction. He said that about 100 Afghan refugees living in Pakistan had been killed in the quake.
Some 100 American soldiers arrived in Muzaffarabad on Monday in a 40-vehicle convoy to set up the Army's only Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH. Three isolation units had to be left behind as the winding road into Kashmir wasn't wide enough, but the MASH still has a capacity for emergency care and operations, and beds or cots for up to 84 patients.
On Sunday, U.S. Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, said the United States would step up its relief efforts. He said 11 more Chinook helicopters would join the existing 17 U.S. helicopters flying into the quake zone.
On Monday, the U.S. Navy ship U.S.S. Pearl Harbor arrived in the port city of Karachi, bringing in 140 tons of food and blankets. The relief goods, donated by Pakistani nationals in the United Arab Emirates, will be driven to Rawalpindi then flown by helicopter into the quake zone.
More than 3 million people are believed homeless after the quake. Rashid Kalikov, U.N. coordinator for humanitarian assistance in Muzaffarabad, said 800,000 of those people still had no shelter whatsoever, with winter looming.
Over the weekend the New York-based Human Rights Watch accused Pakistani civilian authorities, working under military supervision, of storing tents and other needed relief goods at a supply depot in Muzaffarabad, the city at the heart of the quake-shattered region in Pakistani Kashmir.
Pakistani officials at the scene told the organization this was being done "so that they would be able to avoid problems when senior military and civilian officials demand supplies that otherwise would not be available," the group said in a statement.
The charges came as the United Nations appealed for more aid two weeks after the Oct. 8 earthquake, warning of another wave of deaths if survivors do not get shelter and food before the Himalayan winter sets in.
NATO has agreed to send up to 1,000 troops to Pakistan to boost relief efforts.
"We urgently need tents, shelter and helicopters for inaccessible areas," said Jan van de Moortele, the U.N.'s humanitarian aid coordinator for Pakistan. "Time is against us. We can buy everything with money, but not time."
Van de Moortele said at the current rate, some 200,000 tents will be in the country by winter, only enough to house about half the homeless families.
Pakistan's top relief official, Maj. Gen. Farooq Ahmed Khan, said Sunday the official quake toll is now more than 53,000 dead and 75,000 injured, though central figures have lagged behind regional ones. Figures from officials in the North West Frontier Province and Pakistan's part of Kashmir add up to about 78,000. India reported 1,360 deaths in its part of Kashmir.