New Delhi, India – If calamities bring the promise of pushing adversaries closer together, South Asia’s massive earthquake 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 Pakistan’s 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. About 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 on its side of the line.
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.
