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Repressive measures India and China have seized on the rhetoric of anti-terrorism to steamroller opposition Isabel Hilton Guardian Saturday December 15, 2001 Within hours of Thursday's attack on the Indian parliament, two responses immediately threw into sharp relief the danger it posed. One came from the Pakistani government, condemning the attack and offering sympathy; the second was from VK Malhotra, spokesman for the BJP, the majority party in the governing coalition in India, arguing for a "pro-active and hot-pursuit policy" in Kashmir. Malhotra argued that the solution to the situation in Kashmir was to take a leaf out of the US book and attack the terror at source, a reference well understood in Delhi and Islamabad to mean Pakistan. Since then, anxious outsiders, including Britain, have been leaning on India, trying to calm the tensions that could lead to a third Indo-Pakistan war over the tragedy of Kashmir. (... cut...) Kashmir is an even more alarming case, not only because the death toll is much higher (some 70,000 Kashmiris have died in the last 10 years), but also because it threatens a potential conflict between South Asia's nuclear states, a catastrophe that would dwarf that of September 11. Kashmir, too, is a dispute that has festered because of decades of neglect. Kashmir is a largely Muslim state that was denied a referendum on partition in 1947 because the state's Hindu governor opted to join India, undoubtedly against the will of the population. Despite two United Nations resolutions urging a referendum, India has refused to hold one. A long campaign of popular resistance to Indian rule began as a secular movement. But, during the CIA-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Pakistani secret service, the ISI, encouraged the mojahedin to include Kashmir in their list of liberation struggles. Radical Islamists trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan began to operate in Kashmir. If September 11 was the byproduct of that war, so too - the Indian government would have us believe - is the war in Kashmir. But there would be no rejoicing in Kashmir if India were to use the attack on its parliament as a pretext for further military action. There is no doubt that the history of Pakistan meddling in Kashmir is unfortunate, to put it mildly. But to define the unrest in Kashmir as terrorism sponsored by Pakistan is a monstrous distortion. President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler, inherited a legacy of militant Islam, created in the 1980s, that he has been trying to dismantle. He has supported the US action in Afghanistan, despite the noisy opposition of his own religious extremists and the unease of the wider population. He has placed several religious leaders under house arrest and has moved to close religious schools that preach jihad or to force them to conform to a secular educational curriculum. He has replaced the head of the security services and several senior officers whom he suspected of extremist sympathies. He has repeatedly called for negotiations on Kashmir; there has never been a Pakistani head of state more willing to talk about an issue that arouses violent feelings on both sides. The Kashmir dispute has been ignored by the international community for nearly four decades and it has rarely been more dangerous. A decade ago, the UN general assembly adopted a resolution on measures to eliminate international terrorism - which said, among other things, that nothing in that resolution could be taken to prejudice the right of self-determination, freedom and independence laid out in the UN charter. Kashmir is recognised by the UN as disputed territory. It is time that international attention was concentrated on the dispute before the war against terrorism provides the pretext for further tragedy. ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
