Voting at Indian Gunpoint in Kashmir; New Agreement in Afghanistan

By M.M. Ali

In a May 24 report, New York Times correspondent John F. Burns reported from Baramula, Kashmir: “Indian troops moved into villages and urban neighborhoods across the Vale of Kashmir at dawn, rousing Muslims from their beds to vote…the anger stirred by troops’ action seemed likely to increase the widespread alienation among the six million Muslims living in Indian-held Kashmir, who have borne the brunt of war in which as many as 50,000 people are believed to have died.”

Reported the Los Angeles Times: “Some people claimed that Indian security personnel visited mosques before morning prayers and escorted worshippers to vote.” In a somber, cautionary column in the May 28 Washington Times , Bruce Fein wrote: “The government of India…is employing the charade of elections in Kashmir as an instrument of war, a continuation of carrying out warfare by other means. The international community should not be duped…The May 30 ballot exercise will be no more free than the opportunity Adolf Hitler offered the Austrians in 1938 to vote for Anschluss.”

Harender Baweja, in a feature article entitled “A Risky Gamble” in the May 31 issue of the leading Indian news magazine India Today, wrote: “The valley has been inundated with troops…2,212 polling stations have been categorized as ‘hypersensitive’ and 838 as ‘sensitive’…Nearly 9,000 Urdu-speaking employees have been flown in [from outside] with a lure of one month’s extra salary and a life insurance policy of Rs. 500,000 to work as polling officers.”

In fact, the vast majority of Kashmiris boycotted the elections in response to a call from the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, an umbrella grouping of about 30 Muslim organizations that have been in the forefront of the Kashmir freedom movement since 1989. Even the National Conference of Kashmiris, an organization led by Farooq Abdullah that traditionally has supported the government of India, stayed away from the elections.

Reasons for the reluctance to participate in anything that would tighten India’s grip on Kashmir are documented by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch/Asia organization in a 50-page report, dated May 1996 and entitled “India’s Secret Army in Kashmir.” The American organization details shocking, first-hand accounts of “extra-judicial executions and reprisal killings,” “torture,” “detention procedures that facilitate torture,” and “attacks on human rights activists, the press and the medical workers.” The Indian government quickly branded the report “biased” and “untimely,” but Patricia Gossman, who authored the findings, stood by the contents of the report.

The elections in Kashmir were held at the very end of the multi-stage polling in India for understandable reasons. Even the Election Commission of India itself was not too comfortable with the decision to hold elections for Kashmiri representatives to the Indian national parliament since Kashmir’s own state assembly has remained suspended since 1989, and President’s Rule, meaning direct rule from New Delhi, continues in the Indian-occupied territory. “Reliable rumors” circulating in Washington, Islamabad and New Delhi report that the U.S. State Department has urged India to hold state elections within the next 8 to 10 months. Now that former Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao of the Congress Party has been voted out, Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP has failed to form a government, and a coalition headed by H.D. Deve Gowda of the United Front has just taken office in New Delhi, it is safe to say that a formula to end the stalemate in Kashmir is probably not on the front burner of any political party in New Delhi. No purpose will be served by state elections, either, if they cannot be “fair and free.”

In recent years, Kashmiris on both sides of the India-Pakistan cease-fire line, otherwise known as the Line of Control, have begun to place greater hope on the United States to help resolve the nearly half-century-old dispute that constantly threatens peace on the South Asian subcontinent and now has the potential to spark a nuclear conflagration in which millions would die and the atmosphere of the entire planet could be poisoned. In recent months, however, the hope of a serious U.S. mediation effort has been waning because all signals from Washington indicate a lack of will to follow up the initial inquiries made at the beginning of the Clinton administration. Most U.S. overtures have been only that. It is evident that neither Republican nor Democratic U.S. administrations are prepared to take a firm position on the Kashmir dispute, although both have presented themselves as champions of human rights elsewhere.

Hostages in Kashmir

Unlike the international campaigns that were launched to free Western hostages held in Lebanon for so long, there has been little attention paid to the four men—Donald Hutchings, 43, a psychologist from Spokane, Washington; Keith Magan, 34, and Paul Wells, 24, both from Britain; and Dirk Hasert, 27, from Germany—who have remained detained somewhere inside Kashmir since July 1995. There are sporadic press reports that the government of India is cooperating with the U.S. Delta Force, Britain’s Special Air Squadron, and Germany’s elite counter-terrorism force in finding the men.

“Nobody can even be sure whether the kidnappers, who call themselves Al Faran, are real insurgents or, as many better known Kashmiri guerrillas assert, are Indian-backed renegades who have set out to discredit the entire movement,” reported The New York Times on May 25. The All Parties Hurriyat Conference and other Kashmiri organizations in Indian-held Kashmir have several times disowned the Al Faran group.

It does not make too much sense that the Kashmiris, who desperately need the support of the international community, would risk it all by taking Western hostages. A Norwegian hostage, who originally was taken around the time other four men were abducted, was found dead, and recently a man claiming to have been an Al Faran member claimed to Indian authorities that the remaining four Western hostages also have been killed.

The logic of this would be that whoever had been holding the men did not want them to go out and identify their captors. Indian officials have issued guarded statements on the subject. When asked about the current whereabouts of the hostages and the conditions for their release, an Indian official observed: “First of all, we have to know that the hostages are still alive.”

Warming Up in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan presents a worst-case example of what disastrous consequences can follow when a power vacuum is created in a strategically placed country that is bereft of resources and infrastructure and is populated by fiercely feuding tribes. A landlocked country sitting on the crest of the Asian subcontinent, Afghanistan is surrounded by Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China. Add Kazakhstan and it becomes a Muslim neighborhood that is profusely rich in natural resources (primarily oil and gas).

King Zahir Shah, now in exile in Italy, was deposed in 1977 by his cousin. In 1978 a Marxist military regime took over and within months another communist government under Najibullah established itself in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Najibullah furthered Afghan ties with the Soviet Union and in return received large sums of financial and military assistance.

However, right-wing Islamists within Afghanistan put up strong resistance to Najib’s leftist policies, and in December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to help Najib. Close to five million Afghan refugees crossed the southern borders into Pakistan. After initial discussion, debate and hesitation, the United States agreed to send assistance to Afghanistan’s Muslim freedom fighters, the mujahideen, through Pakistan. Over the next 10 years the war in Afghanistan unfolded, producing thousands of casualties annually and spreading devastation over much of the country.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow withdrew its troops from Afghanistan. Ahmed Shah Masoud, an Afghan leader of Tajik background from the north, and Abdul Rasheed Dostam, a former general with Najib, joined forces and moved into Kabul, sending Najib into hiding in the U.N. compound where he reportedly remains to date. The seven right-wing factions headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the Hezb-e-Islami party rushed from the south toward Kabul, but were stopped by the combined Masoud-Dostam forces on the outskirts of the capital. Subsequently, Pakistan tried to broker several deals between the feuding parties.

In 1992 a compromise was struck by which Hekmatyar was named prime minister, Masoud defense minister and Burhanuddin Rabbani president as an interim arrangement until a Grand Jirga (assembly of all tribal leaders) could decide on a permanent government. However, nothing further happened. Instead, the Hekmatyar and Masoud forces have continued to exchange fire in and around Kabul, with civilians suffering most of the casualties. The city has been destroyed.

In early 1995 a new militia called the Taleban emerged. Reportedly the Taleban consists of young Afghans recruited at the madrasas (schools) inside Pakistan. A lot of U.S. funds were expended in the running of these schools. The Taleban very quickly overran southern Afghanistan, but today are held back, along with Hekmatyar's forces, outside of Kabul.

According to Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, former chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan and an authority on the Afghan situation, “the Taleban movement,” which had “the blessings” of several outside powers, has “fizzled out,” and “a new strategy” needs to be worked out to break the stalemate. The general does not see “the will” or “the foresight” in the Bhutto regime in Pakistan to provide that “kind of an initiative.” Hamid Gul expressed these views during a recent visit to Washington during which he shared his opinions with whoever was willing to listen.

Men, women and children continue to step on land mines that remain strewn all over Afghanistan. Thousands are maimed and many killed annually. These numbers are in addition to the estimated 25,000 civilians who have lost their lives from 1992 to date because of the random artillery and small-arms fire in the vicinity of Kabul. In the words of Martin Barber, a U.N. humanitarian aid coordinator from the United Kingdom: “We think it is the longest forgotten tragedy.” In recent months, however, there have been some signs that the United States may finally again be paying attention to the Afghan case. In April, Republican Sen. Hank Brown of Colorado, a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, visited Afghanistan and met most of the leaders in the area. Calling for an enhanced role for the U.N. in mediating between the feuding Afghan parties, Brown asked for the removal of the U.N. representative, Mahmood Mestiri.

Brown’s mission was followed by a “goodwill” visit to Washington by Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Abdul Raheem Gafoorzai. Also significant was the visit of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Robin Raphael to Pakistan and Afghanistan in late April. According to press reports, Afghan leaders asked the United States to play a more “visible” and “serious role” in trying to end the killings in Kabul. On May 27, the Baltimore Sun reported that Mahmood Mestiri had resigned. On May 28 it was announced that Hekmatyar and Rabbani had signed a “peace accord.” Under the terms of the new agreement, Hekmatyar will become the new prime minister and appoint a new cabinet; Ahmed Shah Masoud will vacate the office of the defense minister; and the Taleban will be pushed aside.

This arrangement was said to have been reached in consultation with the governments of Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the United States playing a role in bringing it about. Whether a piece of paper will end the decade of animosity that has torn the already battered country asunder, and replace with sanity the death and devastation that has become the norm in the Afghan nation, only time will tell.

How much the United States is willing to put on the line is not clear. Afghanistan is not an isolated issue. It is very much part of an increasingly important area in several ways. What Los Angeles Times staff writer Robin Wright wrote in her newspaper’s Jan. 26, 1992 issue perhaps still holds true. At that time Wright wrote: “Despite the passage of time since Islam’s emergence as a major political idiom and the burgeoning growth of Muslim movements, the United States still has no more tangible strategy for dealing with Islam than it did with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.” That same Times dispatch quoted “a senior U.S. administration official conceding: ‘We have to be smarter in dealing with Islam than we were in dealing with communism 30 or 40 years ago.’” Four years later it appears that it is not so much the wisdom that is lacking, but the will and the nerve to apply that wisdom. When Afghanistan contributed to the collapse of one superpower, the other just walked away, leaving a mess behind. At this point it is fair to say that the continuing Afghan tragedy is as much the fault of the United States as it is of the former Soviet Union.