 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 June 1999 Issue No. 432 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 June 1999 Issue No. 432
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Interview Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Invasion or liberation?
By Gamal Nkrumah
When the conflict over India's disputed Kashmir border-province flared up again this week, there was a sense of inevitability about the whole affair. Springtime is when the cold peace between India and Pakistan is always most turbulent. As the snows melt, and mountain tracts and passes become more accessible, the highly militarised and inhospitable mountain terrain that surrounds the Line of Control dividing Indian-held and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir provides an ideal setting for guerrilla warfare.
According to the Indians, the recent fighting flared up when militant Islamists, armed to the teeth, penetrated six kilometres deep inside Indian territory. New Delhi pointed an accusing finger at Pakistan, and at the Afghan Taliban, charging them with fomenting trouble. The infiltrators are using sophisticated military wireless sets and radar facilities -- evidence, in Indian eyes, that they have the full support of the Pakistani army. India also specifically accused its neighbour's regular soldiers of managing command and control functions for the "infiltrators", providing logistical support and handling signalling functions through the coordinated use of helicopters.
"The Pakistani actions were a violation of the 1970 Simla Agreement," India's Ambassador to Egypt Shiv Shankar Mukherjee explained to Al-Ahram Weekly. New Delhi says that there has been intensive Pakistani artillery and mortar shelling of Kargil, and the provincial backwater's inhabitants have fled to safer havens deeper inside Indian territory. "There has been no action, either accidental or deliberate, by Indian forces on the Pakistani side of the line," Mukherjee said.
The Indian government has accused Pakistan of actively aiding and abetting separatist terrorists for over a decade now. The ambassador was keen to point out that, despite this destabilisation, the situation on the Indian side of the dividing line was essentially under control. "Kashmir has had elections, peace has been restored, tourism and economic activity is back in Kashmir," said Mukherjee. "We were also hoping, after the landmark visit of our prime minister to Pakistan, and the Lahore Declaration that came out of that trip, that meaningful bilateral dialogue was again going to be the order of the day with Pakistan. That is why this current situation is a setback. Before, we were moving in the right direction."
Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (left) gestures to his supporters in New Delhi. India has accepted a Pakistani proposal to send their foreign minister to New Delhi for talks to end the Kashmiri crisis. A displaced Kashmiri mother with her newly-born baby girl sits under a make-shift hut. (photos: AP & AFP) The ambassador was also adamant that India has never sought to stir up trouble in the disputed region. "We're trying to defuse the situation," he insisted. "Pakistani accusations of an Indian invasion of Pakistani-held territory are baseless."
The recent escalation in the fighting in Kashmir has aroused considerable international concern, with President Hosni Mubarak urging both sides to show restraint. The prime ministers of the two countries -- India's Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif -- have talked twice in the past few days.
The Kashmir conflict was never a simple border dispute between two United Nations member states. The UN is still technically the guarantor of the referendum on the border once promised by the Indian government, but never actually carried out.
Over the past couple of years, US President Bill Clinton has twice cancelled trips he was scheduled to make to India and Pakistan. Washington's strategic interests would dictate a rearrangement of the political map of the Himalayas: it would like to see Tibet become an independent political entity -- or, at the very least, a province enjoying a much greater degree of autonomy from the People's Republic than it does at present. A spokesman for India's Bharatiya Janata Party, which runs the caretaker government in New Delhi, recently suggested that Washington's fundamental aim is direct access to and control of the Himalayas. "[Kashmir] would be a nice place for rest-and-recreation for American soldiers," he said in a televised interview.
Nobody doubts the immense strategic importance of Kashmir. It lies at the crossroads of Central Asia and Southern Asia. Afghanistan and Iran form a gateway to the Middle East, while Tibet offers a royal road to China and the Far East.
Moreover, Kashmir is unique in being sandwiched between three nuclear powers -- China, India and Pakistan. India is an uncontested regional superpower -- albeit a desperately poor one, by Western standards. Yet it is a country of over one billion people, and its economy is growing at a healthy rate of five per cent a year, notwithstanding the Asian financial crisis. Neither the UN nor the US has the power to compel India to relinquish Kashmir. NATO cannot bomb India into submission. This nation as vast as a continent is no Yugoslavia, and Kashmir is no Kosovo. The only similarity between the two situations -- which has not gone unnoticed in the Muslim world -- is that the main victims of both conflicts are the Muslim majority populations of the disputed areas.
Religion, however, is only one aspect of the complex quagmire of Kashmir. India, after all, enjoys excellent relations with many predominantly Muslim nations, Indo-Egyptian relations being a case in point. And India has good working relations -- including extensive economic and commercial links -- with countries as diverse as the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and even Iran. Moreover, the substantial immigrant populations of Indian descent that can be found throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific, Africa and Britain, Southeast Asia and North America, make a significant contribution to their motherland's international standing, cultural influence and political clout.
The country is quite rightly known as the world's largest democracy. In the past, India has publicly acknowledged atrocities and human rights violations in Kashmir. But New Delhi insists that in the past few years, great strides have been made in rectifying these injustices, and while the current situation is far from perfect, it still represents a considerable improvement. In 1996, Muslim participation in the state assembly elections was high. However, it is still widely believed that, given half a chance, a majority of Kashmiri Muslims would opt for secession. Reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch Asia and other human rights organisations invariably support this view.
India, however, is not about to volunteer to give up Kashmir, or even to let the people of the province decide their own fate. The recent escalation of the guerrilla war has only reinforced the refusal of a democratic solution. "These infiltrators are armed," Mukherjee told the Weekly. "They've got rocket launchers, they've got artillery guns." The ambassador pointed out that Pakistan was about to be declared a terrorist state by the US State Department. The Harakatul-Ansar, one of the main groups creating problems in Kashmir, has been named a terrorist organisation, as has Al-Faran, which recently captured five Western hostages and beheaded one of them. "A terrorist does not attack the military," Mukherjee insisted. "He attacks innocent civilians, puts a bomb in a school. This is what the security forces have to fight against."
India accuses Pakistan of attempting to occupy remote areas of Indian territory by proxy, using Afghan and Afghan-trained mercenaries, Pakistani irregulars and Kashmiri secessionists supported by the regular army to disrupt road communications with the Kashmiri capital Srinagar. New Delhi also accuses Islamabad of introducing Afghan and other Islamist infiltrators into Kashmir via the Drass and Kargil sectors. It would even seem that some of these "volunteers" are British nationals.
One of the major problems in Kashmir is that there is no face-saving solution to the crisis, no graceful exit that would leave the pride of all involved intact. Indeed, for the Indians, it sometimes seems as if there is no crisis at all. Progress has been made, once-troubled Kashmir has been largely pacified and the majority of local Muslims placated, one is told. Western tourists are back, the Kashmiri economy has been given a new lease of life, and elections held with 50 per cent participation rates. It is in this context that New Delhi is inclined to attribute the recent escalation of violence exclusively to infiltration from outside.
The Pakistanis, of course, violently object to this rose-tinted picture. Islamabad claims that the Kashmiris are not so much resigned to their fate, as up in arms against the Indian "occupation" forces, and that they must be granted their inalienable right to national self-determination.
The Pakistani David has thus taken it upon itself to stand up to the Indian Goliath. The problem, however, is that this David has a nuclear sling, as does his adversary. Mercifully, so far, their mutual taunting has not proceeded much beyond a simple slanging match.
While Pakistan is determined that the international community bring India to book, India is dead set against any internationalisation of the Kashmir crisis. Officially, New Delhi insists that it can handle what it refuses to see as anything other than a modest domestic problem. However, of late, there have been signs that the Western powers are getting ready to wade in. America is Pakistan's major source of armaments, and has traditionally put the screws on American arms companies who tried to do business with India. Meanwhile, Western calls for the UN to play a higher profile role in bringing about a peaceful resolution to the crisis have intensified.
"No conflict can be resolved without mediation," explained Dr Shakil Akhtar, press attaché at the Pakistani Embassy in Cairo. "We are not saying no to bilateral talks. But, they are clearly not enough. Relations between nations cannot be held hostage to bilateralism. India is imposing a de facto Monroe Doctrine in South Asia. Nobody can do anything without Indian consent. That is totally unacceptable to Pakistan," Akhtar told the Weekly.
