Continued killings in Kashmir keep peace out of reach

By RAHUL BEDI Herald correspondent

NEW DELHI - Insurgent violence in northern India's disputed Jammu and Kashmir state has derailed peace moves that began tentatively five months ago between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, who came close to war last year.

More than 1250 people, including 321 civilians, 172 security forces personnel and 674 Muslim insurgents fighting Kashmir's 14-year-long civil war for an independent homeland have died in terrorist-related incidents in Kashmir since April, when Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee extended a "hand of friendship" to Pakistan and offered dialogue with the separatists.

Security officers said the wave of strikes followed the killing of pro-Pakistani rebel commander Shabaz Khan (better know as Ghazi Baba) by paramilitary personnel on August 30.

Baba had operated in Kashmir for nearly a decade, organising innumerable attacks in the state as well as the December 2001 assault by gunmen on India's Parliament that nearly led to New Delhi declaring war on Pakistan.

"Militant groups in Kashmir desperately want to signal to their cadres operating in Kashmir that Baba's death does not mean their striking ability has diminished.

"So more attacks with heightened intensity and increased frequency can be anticipated," said Inspector General of Police P. L. Gupta. India blames Pakistan, which holds a third of Kashmir and lays claim to the rest, for fuelling the insurgency in the Muslim-majority principality in which more than 32,000 people have died.

Under United States pressure, Pakistan tacitly conceded India's allegations last year, but has denied them ever since. It, however, claims to continue providing "moral, political and diplomatic" support to the Kashmiri separatist cause.

Senior security officials in New Delhi admit that the upsurge in bloodshed across the war-torn region - more than 251 people killed in the first three weeks of September alone - had more or less put paid to peace efforts between the neighbours who have fought two of their three wars since independence 56 years ago over Kashmir.

The two also engaged in an 11-week-long border conflict in 1999 along the mountainous line of control that divides Kashmir between its rival claimants. More than 1200 soldiers died.

"The recent round of violence [in Kashmir] could be a response to the peace initiative that is being held hostage by extremists within the Pakistan-backed insurgent groups," Kashmir expert Praveen Swami said.

It was unlikely, he declared, that the two sides would make any forward movement in the peace process until violence in Kashmir subsided.

After a lull lasting a few weeks the neighbours, locked for over half a century in tit-for-tat confrontation in military, nuclear and diplomatic matters, have once again begun trading accusations, vituperation and insults that are guaranteed to derail all peace moves.

"India has been using the issue of cross-border terrorism to avoid a dialogue," Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, told the United Nations General Assembly in September, adding that Kashmir was the "most dangerous dispute in the world".

General Musharraf accused India of "exploiting" the international anti-terrorist sentiment after September 11 to "de-legitimise Kashmir's freedom struggle".

In response Vajpayee said India would not negotiate with states that sponsored terrorism.

Last October India and Pakistan withdrew their armies 10 months after massing them along their common frontier following the December 2001 strike by five suicide Kashmiri gunmen on the Parliament in Delhi.

The two sides also recalled their respective high commissioners, halved the size of their missions, cut road, air and rail links and began preparing for war.

But the US, fearing that any conflict could escalate into a nuclear exchange, defused the crisis by promising to pressure Islamabad to end cross-border terrorism in Kashmir.

Meanwhile, there has been an increase in recruitment over the past three month of local Kashmiris by Pakistan-backed militant groups.

Many of the recruits, dragooned to "fight for Allah" by groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba ( LeT or Army of the Pure) that is based at Mudrike near Lahore, are teenagers from rural areas, often school dropouts.

Intelligence sources said these boys were given arms training in the heavily forested mountains ringing the Kashmir valley.

Many teenagers are believed to have died in encounters between terrorists and the security forces.