Kashmir hardliners vow to fight on
By Rory McCarthy
MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan Kashmir: High on a hillside on the outskirts of Muzaffarabad stands a shaded, two-storey, redbrick house covered in vine leaves. By the broken doorbell is a handwritten sign marked "HUM" and behind the white steel gate a young, bearded man in camouflage uniform stands guard, gripping a Kalashnikov.
This is home to Harkat ul-Mujahideen, listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department and the most hardline of the Islamic movements fighting the Indian army in Kashmir.
For 11 years Harkat and a dozen other militant groups have been training thousands of young men to cross the 462-mile Line of Control dividing the Himalayan state of Kashmir and to give their lives in a bitter guerrilla war against Indian security forces.
Pakistan's new military regime says it is willing to talk to India about their rival claims to the Muslim-majority state. India refuses to come to the table until the militants lay down their weapons.
But the leaders of the three main Pakistan-based Islamic groups operating in Kashmir have told The Observer, they are preparing for a new round of heavy fighting this year.
"We will fight until the last drop of blood is running in our veins to seek the blessing of Allah," said one of Harkat 's most senior Kashmir commanders, known as Altaf.
A Harkat splinter group was behind the kidnapping of six tourists in Indian Kashmir in July 1995, including Britons Keith Wells and Paul Mangan whose bodies have never been found.
Harkat was also accused of organizing the Indian Airlines hijacking in Afghanistan at Christmas, in which one passenger was stabbed to death. The group denies it was involved.
"We are not terrorists," said Altaf, crouched on a rug and wearing a camouflage waistcoat over his traditional shalwar kameez clothes.
"This generation will put the last nail in India's coffin. Our companions are fighting in Bosnia and in Chechnya, and we are hopeful Allah will not disappoint us."
As part of a new offensive the militant groups have begun using "death squads" or fedayin, Altaf said.
Well-armed fighters working alone or in small groups take on heavily fortified Indian positions, with little hope of escaping alive.
One militant killed himself and five Indian soldiers when he drove into an Indian army base in Srinagar this month in a car packed with explosives.
Lashker-e-Taiba, another militant group, has led 26 fedayin missions in Kashmir since last summer. Only 14 fighters have returned alive. "Soon we will start a new round of fighting, it will be very dangerous for India, and it will be the final round," said Abdullah Muntazer, a spokesman for Lashker. "India is losing occupied Kashmir and inshallah (God willing) within two to three years we will liberate Kashmir."
The group runs training camps on the Pakistan side of Kashmir, an area Islamabad calls Azad, or free, Kashmir. For three weeks, recruits are given religious training before taking a three-month course in guerrilla warfare.
New Delhi says its intelligence shows squads of fighters massing on the Pakistan side of Kashmir, preparing for a spring offensive when the mountain snows begin to melt.
More than 10,000 people gathering in Muzaffarabad for a conference on Kashmir heard a strident call to arms from militant commanders and even mainstream religious Pakistani figures like Qazi Hussain Ahmed, head of the powerful Jamaat-i Islami group.
Although President Bill Clinton and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook have pushed for negotiations to end the dispute, there is little sign of a thaw in relations.
India and Pakistan have already fought three bloody wars since Partition in 1947, and a year ago the two newly nuclear-armed countries nearly sparked a fourth war in Kashmir's Kargil mountains.
Pakistan's military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is under pressure from religious organizations and right-wing officers in his own army not to curb the actions of groups like Harkat and Lashker.
"If a man is killed by the Indians in Kashmir, people look on his family with shame unless they go to fight with the mujahideen," said one senior officer in the elite Northern Light Infantry.
The militants are in no mood for negotiation. "There is no alternative to the armed struggle," said Syed Salahuddin, 50-year-old leader of Hezbul Mujahideen.
"Kashmir is paradise on earth, but it has become a hell. Kashmiris have never accepted the Line of Control. It is our Berlin Wall."
His group's tactics have moved from hit-and-run attacks to "area domination", where fighters try to take strategic points temporarily in Indian Kashmir as they did during the Kargil conflict last year. Now, he says, the next stage is "area occupation" in which fighters will take and hold areas in Indian- ruled Kashmir.
Salahuddin, like other militant leaders, wants more support from the Pakistan army. "Pakistan should intervene militarily," he insisted. "Moral support is just not enough."
Islamabad denies it is funding or training the militants, but gives open political support to the cause. Yet retired army officers do help to train the militants, and India maintains that the military intelligence service, the ISI, is also heavily involved.
"People very deeply feel that Pakistan has been swindled by the Indians and has been cheated as far as Kashmir is concerned. I do not think it is something that is very easy to forget," said Maj. Gen. Rashid Qur-eshi, who is Pakistan's top military spokesman. "Nations never sacrifice their national objectives."
-- Observer News Service