SRINAGAR: The uprising in India held Kashmir has grown enormously threatening to engulf the subcontinent into yet another war. Kashmiris in India, Pakistan and abroad are making a determined and all-out effort to achieve freedom denied them for 41 years.

The Pakistan assembly has been summoned for an emergency meeting in view of the Siarming situation. It is generally felt in Pakistan that this was an opportunity to help suffering Muslim brothers in their hour of need. Both India and Pakistan have mobilized troops and sounded red alert along the border.

There are reports everyday of 9 killed, four killed, curfew extended to so many more towns.” The following are from NYT reports:

In Muzaffarabad, Pakistan on Jan. 26 several thousand demonstrators vowing to “liberate the Kashmir Valley from Indian imperialism’ thronged this mountainous capital of the “other Kashmir’ in one of the largest anti-Indian demonstrations the small city has known,

“We will go and fight If necessary,” a college student said as the chanting of Muslim prayers began on a cold, bleak morning when the gray off the winter sky blended with the dull winter earth. “No sacrifice is too great for our brothers on the other side.”

There is still a strong element of ritual in the anti-Indian diatribes of Kashmiris on this side of the divided region but active militancy Is growing among the young, fed on rumors of atrocities by Indian troops in towns and cities “over there,” where relatives still live in a state that has been put under control of the national Government since new separatist feelings flared this month.

Emotions are running high everywhere in Pakistani and Kashmir, the name for the Kashmiri part of Pakistan that includes a rugged 5,100 square miles of peaks and narrow river valleys. It is home to 2.5 million people, virtually all Muslims, who found themselves on Pakistan’s side of the cease-fire line after the partition of British India in 1947. The modern nations of India and Pakistan, which the partition created, have fought three wars over the former kingdom, most of which is now on the Indian side of the cease-fire line.

Pakistani Marchers Assail India

India and Pakistan have abided by the cease-fire line since 1972, and New Delhi lays no claims to the predominantly Muslim portion of Kashmir that is under Pakistani dominion. Pakistan calls the region Azad, or Free, Kashmir, and Muzaffarabad is the region’s capital,

Students boast of helping guerrillas from Indian Kashmir to buy weapons or to train for com: bat, activities that officials deny are taking place with Government sanction, but do not deny are taking place. People of all age’s talk of jihads and inifadas, holy wars and uprisings. The Government-controlled Pakistani television calls the guerrillas in Indian Kashmir “Muslim freedom fighters.”

A resurgence of secessionist sentiment began nearly two years ago in Jammu and Kashmir, the only state with a Muslim majority in predominantly Hindu India, since 1947, Muslim militants have been demanding independence or union with Islamic Pakistan. The region is famed for its beauty and agricultural wealth

Today in Islamabad, Prime Minister Benezar Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party led a march on the United Nations military cease-fire observer’s office, accusing Indians of carrying out torture across the fortified border.

“We Will Destroy the Wall”

This week, about 5,000 men and boys tried to march into India to rescue relatives or join the fray around Srinagar, about 100 miles away. They were stopped by Pakistani troops before they came within firing range of Indian border forces, the Prime Minister of Pakistani Kashmir, Sikander Hayat Khan, said in an interview Thursday.

That afternoon, men in the border village of Chikoti told a visitor that they were ready to try again. Such forays could provoke a quick and tragic reaction from the tense Indian Army, which is dug into border bunkers.

“We will go and do as the Germans have done,” said one man, Raj Farid. “We will destroy the wall and cross over.

But there is no wall, there are only raging mountain rivers and steep ravines and fragments of flatland that one or another of the armies has mined. Villagers desperate for cropland lose limbs to explosions or their lives to gunfire, the people of Chikoti said.

Comparisons with Indian Side

Pakistanis dug in at altitudes of 8,000 feet or more must rely on mule trains to supply their forces with weapons, ammunition, food and fuel. Huge, muscular army mules are quartered in border villages where the treacherous narrow roads from Muzaffarabad end in tracks.

But while the terrain makes a large-scale logistics a problem, it also eases surreptitious movements of guerrillas in small numbers.

“A big number of youngsters from both sides have been fighting with the Afghan mujahedeen for many months, and most of them have now gone back with weapons,” the president of Pakistani Jammu and Kashmir, Mohammed Abdul Qayyum Khan, said in an interview on Wednesday. He said Afghans and Pathans from Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province had led the fight against India in 1947 and could become involved again.

“India is moving toward a much bigger catastrophe,” he said.

Though Azad Jammu and Kashmir is effectively part of Pakistan, it has far more autonomy than Its India counterpart. That situation has allowed Islamabad to draw comparisons with an almost total integration by New Delhi of Indian Jammu and Kashmir in defiance of the United Nations resolutions of 1948 and 1949.

Citizens on this side elect their ‘own government, collect taxes, run their own police force, administrative services and education system, and can enter into development projects or business deals with foreigners, aided by a large exile Kashmir population. There are several Kashmiri regiments in the Pakistani Army. Thus, many troops en: countered by Kashmiris are people of their own region and religion, Islam.

“We feel just as strong,” a young college lecturer said, “We would fight too. Women are half the population and they need us to stop the Hindus from taking over, Hindus and Muslims can never live together.”

‘4 IAF men killed

Militants shot and killed four Indian Air Force men and wounded nine on Jan. 25, and the Indian Army took control of this capital of the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir.

A strict curfew was being enforced in the city after the shootings, and the nearly empty streets were being patrolled by troops in trucks with light machine guns mounted on them, in jeeps and on foot.

The state’s top official warned Muslim militants that they would be responsible for “any damage to property and loss of life” in the event of a crackdown. The board cast by the official, Governor Jagmohan, over the Government-controlled radio set the tone for a possible confrontation between militants and the security forces on Friday, Republic Day, which marks the fourth anniversary of India’s republic Constitution.

Militants in a car fired at a group of air force men waiting for a ride to their air base, wounding 13. Four, including a squadron leader, died of their wounds. The gunmen escaped. A curfew in the city, which had been relaxed, was then re-imposed.

Journalists Sealed Off

On Jan. 25 police officials put: four armed guards outside the Broadway Hotel in Srinagar, where about 30 Indian and foreign reporters and photographers are staying, and asked them not to move out of the hotel on Friday. A police official said those violating the order would be arrested.

Reporters were also asked to leave the main telex office in the telegraph office here, and the place was locked under the supervision of an army officer. The telephone exchange was asked not to accept press calls. Several telephones belonging to reporters went out of order tonight, soon after troops began taking positions.

It was not immediately clear which government authority has decided to restrict journalists here. A Cabinet minister in New Delhi, reached by telephone from here, said the Singh Cabinet had not met to consider the issue.

Diplomats with no involvement in the dispute, all say that they are stunned by the speed with which public order seems to have collapsed in Indian Kashmir.

“We are looking at a whole new power equation,” a Western diplomat said, implying that Jammu and Kashmir may never be the same again.

Criticized By India

Bhutto has made several strong statements in support of Kashmiri self-determination this week apparently to prevent the issue from being taken up by her political opponents. She has also called a special session of Parliament for early February to discuss the issue.

Her actions have drawn strong criticism from India and from the Indian press, which routinely portrays Kashmiri separatism as created by Pakistan.

Sensing an opportunity to rekindle international interest in Kashmir, Pakistani-based Kashmiris are beginning to travel the world in search of support for Kashmiri self-determination.

The cause has a special appeal in Islamic nations, since the majority of more than 12 million Kashmiris living along the India-Pakistan border are Muslims.

Citizens Border Camps

In an interview in Islamabad Mohammed Abdul Qayyum Khan, the President of Pakistani Kashmir, a territory with considerably more political Autonomy than its Indian counterpart, said that he was on his way to Mecca to raise the issue on Friday at a meeting of Islamic nations discussing minority problems,

Mr. Qayyum, who was in the United States in December to lobby for his cause, has been a leader of Kashmiris since 194748, when he led a guerrilla army against the Indians after New Delhi incorporated what is now Jammu and Kashmir state. He said today that Pakistani Kashmiris were discussing plans to set up citizen’s camps along the border with India to demonstrate solidarity with Indian Kashmiris. He said that Pakistani Kashmiris did that in 1958,

“We were called miscreants then,” he said. “The world is different now.”

“We are trying to escalate our struggle on three fronts — political, diplomatic and armed,” Amanullah Khan, the founder and leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation front said, Policemen Go On Strike

One hundred local policemen shouted Islamic and anti-Government slogans today as they briefly went on strike to press for relief of long-simmering frustrations on Jan. 24.

Senior government officials sought to play down the incident. Police officials sald that the strike was ended quickly when senior law enforcement officers agreed to consider demands that include the revival of a trade union disbanded in 1982,

The strikers, all of them Muslims, affirmed police unity and demanded, at a gathering next to their wooden barracks, the ouster of their police chief.

The policemen did not explicitly express support for the separatist agitation spreading across this northern state, claimed by both India and Pakistan, the only Indian state dominated by Muslims. But they loudly spoke of their resentment, saying they were not respected and were often abused, detained and beaten by army troops

Article extracted from this publication >> February 2, 1990