17 November 2004	Wednesday	04 Shawwal 1425

URI, Nov 16: India and Pakistan have yet to give the go-ahead for a bus linking the two zones of divided Kashmir but already residents of this town near the line of Control (LoC) border are preparing for the expected boom the service would bring.

A hotel and a large shopping complex are under construction and another three-star hotel is planned. Property is changing hands at record prices and new businesses are springing up.

With constant shelling a thing of the past and peace talks between the neighbour nations about to move into a more substantial phase, life has never looked brighter for residents.

"A year ago I was about to leave this town. I'd had enough of the shelling," said Mushtaq Chowdhury, 40, the entrepreneur behind the mall and the proposed hotel.

"Now I'm sure we're in for better times. The peace process and the end of the firing makes me very optimistic."

Shelling of the town, about 2.5 kilometres from the LoC ended last November 26 when the Indian and Pakistani armies agreed a ceasefire after decades of firing on each other across their border.

Uri, 100 kilometres west of the Indian Kashmir summer capital Srinagar, caught much of the shelling.

"We were living in hell," said textile dealer Nazir Hamid, who travels each day from the nearby village of Tulawadi to his shop in Uri.

"Tulawadi was even more heavily shelled than Uri. We saw our neighbours killed. Some lost their arms and legs. Each day when I came to work I feared my family would be killed by the shells. At night we didn't sleep well."

Since the ceasefire, life had improved dramatically.

"I can now allow my children to play outside without any fear. We sleep peacefully at night," Hamid said.

He said the proposed bus service linking Srinagar with Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir, would be the realization of a long-held dream.

"The bus would stop here and people would come to shop," said 49-year-old Hamid. Business, already up by about 20 per cent since the ceasefire, would take off, he added.

More importantly, he said, the bus would allow relatives cut off from each other by the Line of Control finally to meet after decades in which they could only exchange letters.

"I have a brother in Muzaffarabad, just 70 kilometres away. But to see him I first have to travel to Srinagar, then to New Delhi to get a visa, then to Wagah (the only land crossing between India and Pakistan), then to Lahore and then finally to Muzaffarabad - it takes days."

Restaurant owner Abdul Rashid, 34, believes that in just a few months Kashmiris will be crossing by bus between the two zones of the Himalayan state - and stopping to eat and sleep in Uri.

So convinced is he that Indian and Pakistani officials will approve the service at a meeting in early December that he's started building a 10-room hotel at a cost of 1.2 million rupees. "I'm calling it Gateway Hotel - I've already made the sign," said Rashid, whose Maqbool restaurant is a popular eatery in the mainly agricultural town.

Shopping complex builder Chowdhury, who has hired labour from the Indian state of Bihar, is also convinced the bus will get the nod - despite squabbles between India and Pakistan over what travel documents Kashmiris will use to cross the Line of Control.-AFP