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 would remain a logistical nightmare, Reuters reported. 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 Nov. 7. A U.N.-led effort to get food and shelter to survivors of the Oct. 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 the Himalayan winter just weeks away and over three million people homeless or needing shelter, aid workers fear as many again could die of hunger and exposure unless help reaches them quickly. The United Nations welcomed the agreement and said it would be meeting with the government to assess how it would facilitate relief work, 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 U.N. emergency coordinator 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, U.N. logistics coordinator in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir, said the agreement should make a huge difference when it came to reaching large numbers of 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. "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." --mor 1451 Local Time 1151 GMT
