Aftershocks and afterthoughts in Kashmir

Oct 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition

A little belatedly, Pakistan and India are showing signs of preparedness to put aside their conflict over Kashmir to speed up the rescue of survivors of its massive earthquake. But the United Nations says international aid donations are falling woefully short

AFTER last December's devastating tsunami, it was hard to imagine any bigger natural disaster. Yet some aid workers think the earthquake that rocked the disputed territory of Kashmir on October 8th has brought an even more serious humanitarian crisis. Mercifully, not nearly as many people have died. But the numbers without shelter, their inaccessibility, continued aftershocks and the onset of the long, cold winter make this a calamity that is deepening over time.

Into the second week of the relief effort, the number of confirmed dead kept climbing remorselessly, to 1,300 in Indian Kashmir and well over 40,000 on the Pakistani side, with a further 65,000 injured. Perhaps 3m are homeless. The United Nations reckoned some 500,000 people had still not been reached by rescue teams. The UN's children's agency says they include as many as 120,000 children, of whom 10,000 might die of hunger, hypothermia and disease in the next few weeks. Only half of the needy had received emergency rations.

The outside world, too, was slow to respond. By Thursday October 20th, only 12% of a $272m appeal launched by the UN had been raised. There is a desperate shortage of tents capable of withstanding the Kashmiri winter, of blankets, sleeping bags and warm clothes, as well as of medicine and food.

More than 1,000 affected villages can be reached only on foot or by helicopters, which are also in chronically short supply. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, refused India's offer of army helicopters. The aircraft were welcome, he said, but there were “sensitivities” about allowing Indian soldiers into Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. India, of course, refused to send its helicopters without their crews.

On October 18th, however, came the first sign of hope that the earthquake might, after all, help India and Pakistan edge closer in their long dispute over Kashmir. General Musharraf announced that Pakistan was ready to allow Kashmiris to cross the “line of control” dividing Indian- and Pakistani-controlled areas to help their families. Typically for a man whose diplomacy smacks of his career as a commando, General Musharraf made this offer—laden with symbolic importance—not to Indian officials or leaders, but to reporters at a press conference.
India welcomed it warily. After all, it is Pakistan which has been resisting such “softening” of the line of control, fearing that this would lead to its eventual acceptance as a legitimate international border, an outcome India would love. The next day, India produced its own gift for Kashmir, the temporary opening of phone links to Pakistan, to enable divided families to talk to each other.

India cut the lines in 1990, after the outbreak of a still-simmering insurgency against Indian rule, which has cost perhaps 80,000 lives. Some of the fighters are militants sneaking in from the Pakistani side. The militant groups seem to have taken a heavy hit in the earthquake, with some of their training camps in Pakistani Kashmir destroyed.

An umbrella group claiming to represent the various jihadist groups in Kashmir has announced a ceasefire. But on October 18th, a militant in Srinagar, summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, assassinated the state education minister. It seemed a desperate bid to show that the insurgency has survived the earthquake and still has the power to hurt India, even in its most protected enclaves.

In some villages on the Pakistani side of the border, militant groups have gained prestige, organising relief work long before the arrival of the Pakistani army, whose performance has been widely criticised. That is bad news for its chief, General Musharraf. He has risked unpopularity before, by promising to crack down, at the behest of America and India, on the militants. But the grumbles those promises provoked were trivial compared with the current public anger, as hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis remain at grievous risk and, fairly or not, the army and the government take the blame.

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