October 30, 2005 - 6:35 AM

United Nations hails quake relief accord

By Robert Birsel

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - The United Nations welcomed India and Pakistan's agreement on Sunday to open their Kashmir border to earthquake survivors and relief supplies but said getting aid to millions remained a logistical nightmare.

In a statement early on Sunday after talks in Islamabad, India and Pakistan agreed to open crossings at five points along the military Line of Control dividing Kashmir from November 7.

A U.N.-led effort to get food and shelter to survivors of the October 8 earthquake that killed more than 56,000 people, mostly in Pakistani Kashmir but including 1,300 on the Indian side, has been hampered by landslides blocking many mountain roads.

With a bitter Himalayan winter approaching and three million people homeless or needing shelter, aid workers fear hunger and exposure could kill as many as the number killed in the quake unless help reaches them quickly.

The United Nations, which says the world's slow financial response to the disaster is threatening lives, welcomed the agreement but warned huge difficulties remained.

"It will certainly not do any harm, but it will certainly not solve the logistical nightmare we are facing," said UN emergency co-ordinator Jan Vandemoortele.

"It is absolutely positive, but it will not turn mountains into plains. We are still planning to get a major airlift going throughout the winter."

Natasha Hryckow, UN logistics co-ordinator in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir, said the agreement should make a huge difference when it came to getting aid to people cut off near the border, such as in the Neelum river valley.

"If we had the potential to open it from the other side, we start getting road access to areas we can only fly helicopters to at the moment," she said.

"That's obviously going to make a huge impact on how much we can shift in and how many people we can keep in those areas."

Visiting Muzaffarabad on Sunday, Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said it was a difficult time and Pakistan and India needed to work together. "It's a big disaster and God willing we will help each other," he told reporters.

LARGE MOVEMENTS UNLIKELY

Some Kashmiri families will undoubtedly benefit from the agreement, but large movements of people are unlikely given the massive damage to roads and the complex bureaucratic process involved in getting permission from both governments to cross.

Amanullah Khan, head of the pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, said only a few people would benefit, while the agreement could help make the contested border permanent. "The benefit will be much less than the political costs," he said.

Getting aid across will mean much more work. A Friendship Bridge opened to allow the start of a bus service between the two sides of Kashmir this year has been badly damaged and army engineers on both sides are battling to clear many landslides.

Aid donors have provided $120 million (68 million pounds) for a massive relief effort, but that is far short of the $550 million the United Nations has asked for.

Ann Veneman, the head of the UN Children's Fund, visited the quake zone on Sunday and said the world had to wake up to the scale of the disaster or many more lives would be lost.

"There is a tremendous need for continued resources. Winter is coming on. We could see very difficult times ahead," she said.

News of a series of bomb attacks in New Delhi on Saturday, which killed at least 57 people, overshadowed the Islamabad talks, but did not appear to affect the outcome, even though suspicion inevitably focussed on Pakistani-backed militants.

An obscure Kashmiri group, Islami Inqilabi Mahaz (Islamic Revolutionary Group), claimed responsibility, but analysts said it was probably a front for a larger Pakistan-based organisation.

Despite this, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, the main Pakistani-backed Kashmiri militant group, said the blasts were not the work of guerrillas fighting Indian rule.

The border agreement came after Pakistan strongly condemned the bombings and will go some way to dispel perceptions that New Delhi and Islamabad were wasting time scoring points against each other during the disaster.

Pakistan and India have fought two of their three wars since independence in 1947 over Kashmir and went close to a fourth in 2002 after an attack on the Indian parliament New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-backed militants fighting Indian rule in Kashmir.

They agreed a cease-fire on the Line of Control in 2003 and have resumed a peace process, but progress has been limited by inability to agree a long-term solution for Kashmir.

Pakistan is accepting some relief supplies from India, which has offered $25 million in aid, but has refused to let Indian troops join the rescue work on Pakistani soil.

(With reporting by David Brunnstrom and Raja Asghar in Islamabad)