India builds Berlin Wall of landmines
Date: 11/01/2002
By Simon Tisdall and Ewen MacAskill in London
India's army and security forces have embarked on an unprecedented
project to lay hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel mines along the
entire length of its 2900-kilometre border with Pakistan.
The operation, in response to tension in disputed Kashmir, reverses gains
made in the past five years by international anti-mine campaigners and
threatens to further entrench the military confrontation between the two
nuclear powers.
The minefields will be up to five kilometres wide in places. Along with
accompanying Indian defensive installations this will create the longest
fully fortified border in the world, running from the Indian Ocean to the
Himalayas. It will dwarf the Western Front of World War I and the Maginot
Line of World War II and amount to South Asia's equivalent of the Berlin
Wall.
Indian troops have been evicting farmers and seeding large areas of
arable land over the past month with anti-personnel landmines outlawed
under the Ottawa mine ban treaty of 1997 - which the United States, India
and Pakistan have refused to sign.
These minefields are in addition to those laid in the three
Indo-Pakistani wars since independence from Britain in 1947.
Jitendra Misra, political counsellor at the Indian high commission in
London, confirmed new mines were being laid. "We do deploy landmines but
we do it in a most responsible manner," he said on Wednesday. "We fence
the areas and mark them very clearly and use them only on the border, not
anywhere else."
Pakistan is also thought to have been laying mines along the border in
recent weeks. A spokesman for the Pakistani high commission was vague
when asked. "We may have," he said.
Kashmiri separatist groups condemned by India as terrorists also use
anti-personnel mines.
In an attempt to calm the crisis, the Bush Administration announced on
Wednesday that the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, will follow the
British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to India and Pakistan next week.
The Indian Defence Minister, George Fernandes, is scheduled to visit
Washington to discuss burgeoning bilateral defence co-operation.
