Steve Quayle News Alerts

June 9, 2002

India and Pakistan have toned down their warlike rhetoric and sounded more conciliatory notes, but cross-border shelling persisted Sunday in Kashmir, killing at least one youth on the Pakistani side. And in an interview published Sunday, Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said the chance of war between the two nuclear-armed neighbors was “minimal.”

INDIAN AND PAKISTANI forces fired artillery across the Line of Control that divides the disputed Himalayan province despite statements from both sides on Saturday that tensions were easing in the standoff that has the nuclear-armed neighbors close to war.
Shelling from the Indian side killed a 17-year-old boy early Sunday in Kotli, a city 22 miles from the line, local officials said. Shells fired overnight also destroyed a number of homes in Kotli that had been evacuated, the officials said.
International leaders have been urging a peaceful resolution to the conflict centered on Kashmir, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who visited the region last week, said tensions have come down “measurably.”
“It’s quite clear that there will be some actions on the part of India responding to the messages I brought” from Pakistan, Armitage said Saturday after meeting with Indian officials the day before.
Armitage said he believed, based on his discussions in New Delhi, that the situation has improved markedly.
“It’s quite clear, at least temporarily, the tensions are down,” he said.
Indian officials “are talking about some diplomatic actions, which could include the return of some people to diplomatic postings in Islamabad and some ratcheting down of some sort of military tension.”
India recalled its ambassador and half its diplomatic staff from Islamabad two weeks after a deadly Dec. 13 attack on Indian Parliament by Kashmiri separatists.
Pakistan reciprocated by reducing by half the size of its New Delhi mission. Its ambassador was not recalled, but the Indians refused to deal with him and eventually expelled him last month as border tensions heightened.

MUSHARRAF: CHANCE OF WAR ‘MINIMAL’
On Sunday, Musharraf said he believed the chance of war breaking out with India was “minimal”, but said their long dispute over Kashmir would remain an obstacle to peace.
“I think the chance of war is minimal,” Musharraf said in an interview with Malaysia’s New Sunday Times newspaper published Sunday.
But Musharraf, speaking to the newspaper after he met Armitage in Islamabad on Thursday, said the dispute over Kashmir had to be addressed.
“There is a stumbling block in the way of peace: it is the Kashmir dispute,” he said.

POWELL WORKS THE PHONES
In another development, Secretary of State Colin Powell called on leaders of both nations Saturday to continue efforts to decrease the tension.

Powell called Musharraf and Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh on Saturday to urge the nuclear-armed rivals to cooperate in reducing tensions in the region.
In Islamabad, a Pakistani Foreign Ministry official said Musharraf had renewed his commitment to seek peace with India in the telephone conversation with Powell.
“We look forward to the steps that the government of India has said it will take shortly,” a State Department official told Reuters.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is scheduled to visit Pakistan and India in a few days.

INDIA: ‘ICE HAS BROKEN’
The Indian government said Saturday that Pakistan appeared to be making moves “in the right direction” and Islamabad said the “ice has broken.”
But India is insisting that Pakistan end cross-border attacks by Muslim militants who want Kashmir to be independent or merge with Islamic Pakistan.
Musharraf has pledged to end infiltration across the border. India indicated it would wait to see whether it can detect improvements in Kashmir.
Jammu-Kashmir state is the only Muslim-majority state in predominantly Hindu India, and separatist guerrillas have been fighting against a massive Indian security force there since 1989.

HEAVY FIRING REPORTED
Authorities in Pakistan’s portion of Kashmir also reported heavy firing by both sides in the Kahuta Forward area, in the Bagh district, about 60 miles southeast of the regional capital Muzaffarabad.
NBC: On India's Kashmir frontline
In a remote mountain village on the Indian side, gunmen dragged four Muslim brothers out of their home and shot them to death, apparently believing they were informants, an Indian police official said.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack in Barneli in Udhampur district, 90 miles north of Jammu, the winter capital of India’s Jammu-Kashmir state, the officer told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Pakistani shells hit a bus in the Punch sector close to the Line of Control, injuring its driver, ticket taker and mechanic, the officer said. Police said shells also destroyed a television tower in the Punch sector, which is 125 miles north of Jammu.
Cross-border shelling killed a total of at least 10 people on both sides Saturday. Police said Indian fire let up briefly on Saturday night, giving frightened civilians on the Pakistani side a chance to pack up and flee before the shelling resumed Sunday.
India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir, and a deadly attack on India’s Parliament in December sparked a military buildup that has led to fears of a fourth major conflict between the rivals.
India blamed the attack on Islamic militants it said were backed but Pakistan’s intelligence agency, a claim Pakistan denied.
The insurgency has claimed more than 60,000 lives. Pakistan says it offers diplomatic and moral support to the militants, but denies arming them.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/753586.asp