Tensions rise between India and Pakistan

Midnite Toker

Guardian, Tuesday, 21-5-02:
Three civilians died in gunfire exchanges between Indian and Pakistani soldiers today, hours before the Indian prime minister was to visit the disputed Kashmir region amid fears of another war between the nuclear powers.

The prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was expected in Jammu later today to visit those injured in an attack on an army base last week that killed 34 people - mostly soldiers' wives and children.

New Delhi blamed Islamabad and two Pakistan-based Islamic guerrilla groups for the attack on the outskirts of Jammu. Pakistan condemned the attack and denied any involvement.

Abdul Kader Jaffer, Pakistan's high commissioner in London, said this morning that the international community should be aware of the seriousness of the standoff between the two countries. He told the BBC: "They are very close ... it is necessary for all our friends to get together, bring sanity where there is total insanity."

Three villagers were killed early today and another seven wounded as the two armies traded mortar and small-arms fire in Rajouri, a Kashmir district on the international border, according to an Indian army spokesman, Major Animesh Trivedi.

Elsewhere today, suspected Islamic militants blew up an Indian army vehicle in Bhaderwah, wounding four soldiers, two of them critically, Indian police said. The ambush occurred in the Doda district, 125 miles north-east of Jammu, the winter capital of India's northern Jammu-Kashmir state.

Between them the two nations have sent about 1 million soldiers to their frontier as the dispute flared anew over the disputed Himalayan region, which has provoked two of the three wars the countries have fought since independence from Britain in 1947.

The United States, Britain and the European Union urged both sides to exercise restraint.

Mr Vajpayee planned to address Indian troops along the border tomorrow and to meet moderate separatist groups in Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, to discuss their participation in the state assembly elections in September.

Since Friday, heavy exchanges of fire between Indian and Pakistani troops have occurred along the international border in Jammu, Maj Trivedi said, forcing more than 20,000 people to flee the border villages in India-controlled Kashmir.

Last night, however, he said the firing spread to new areas along the 1972 ceasefire line that divides Kashmir.

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abraxus

things are getting heavy. kashmiri moderate seperatist assasinated, 1 million troops on each side ov the line ov control & as a fellow NewScientist reader, did you see the article in this weeks issue on how india seems to have withdrawn from the 1960 Indus Water Treaty w/pakistan? this initself creates a very tense situation & would be a much more serious bone ov contention than kashmir- which could even become a side issue if india builds damns & floods the whole vale ov kashmir.

Midnite Toker

No, abraxus, I didn't see that article on the online New Scientist, and I'm too stingey to subscribe to the tree-based one.

But I can imagine how the power of directing water will become a new territorial claim. And relatively easier to blame it on a faceless government in a detested neighbouring country than activists in your own (I'm thinking of the Narmada dam).

It is fast becoming modern-day Newspeak, this rebranding of all struggles for independance as "terrorist activity." We see it in Nepal, and now Vajpayee is mouthing the same "war on terror" incantation. Thank you, George W Bushpig.

If you really want to get depressed about the level of the argument, go over to the Times Of India's "readers' opinion" section on the newspage and hear what's being said about Pakistan (and I quote):
It's high time Pakistan is taught a lesson for being a big mouth... is typical of the feedback. Brings to mind the baying for blood of Argentines by Brits in the gutter press twenty years ago.

abraxus

geezer- don't let it get you down. the dalai lama was on tv saying how" much good things" there were in the world - if he can keep happy........

this is the synopsis ov last nights excellent ABC forign correspondant tv show.........

The Chinese are building a railway line to Tibet as they tighten their control over the province. But the Dalai Lama warns this is the prelude to millions of Chinese migrants flooding in and completing what he calls China’s cultural genocide.

Eric Campbell gains special access to the construction site on the Tibetan plateau in a report produced, as always, under strict government censorship. Within minutes of boarding the train taking journalists to this normally restricted area, police and plainclothes security agents intervene to stop Campbell’s crew from filming migrating Chinese workers. For 15 hours the crew is locked in a railway carriage until the train reaches the desert city of Golmud. It’s from there that the new railway is being built to the Tibetan capital Lhasa.

Chinese officials describe the railway as “The Happy Line”, claiming it will bring happiness to the Tibetan people. But the evidence Campbell collects along the route suggests otherwise. At every point, local people who once dominated the population have progressively been outnumbered by Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group.