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While the world waits and worries, those who live on the border of India and Pakistan know the grief that might lie ahead.
©Washington Post
May 28, 2002
BHURCHAK, Pakistan -- Mohammad Baboo has lived through the two wars and countless border skirmishes that India and Pakistan have waged over Kashmir since 1947. But not until this month did the festering conflict come crashing into his home.
His 35-year-old daughter, Nazeeda, was killed when three Indian artillery shells hit their house in this nearly abandoned village a quarter-mile from the border with India. Three of his grandchildren were hurt. Nothing is left of the home but the turquoise-painted walls. Baboo remains to tend to a single buffalo.
Over on the Indian side of the Line of Control, the increasingly euphemistic term for the border, shoe salesman Abdul Rashid Sheikh surveyed the ruins of his home, gutted last week by a Pakistani shell.
"For us, the war has already started," said Sheikh, 33, who with his neighbors has spent hours in dank, underground bunkers as the thunderclap of artillery echoed through the valley. "There is no peace of mind. We can't concentrate. If you're in the field, you think of your family back home. If you're at home, you think of your children at school."
"It is constant war," he said.
Although Indian and Pakistani leaders say they are trying to avert a major war, that is far from evident along the heavily militarized, 450-mile border dividing Kashmir between the two nations. Parallel journeys last week on both sides of the frontier revealed the effects of 10 days of ferocious shelling and machine-gun duels that have killed dozens of civilians and forced tens of thousands of people to flee.
Nearly a million soldiers are stationed along the 1,800-mile border between India and Pakistan, behind walls of sandbags and in bunkers of hardened clay, at some points a few hundred yards apart. Hills of dirt and hay, adorned with dead trees and bushes, hide antiaircraft and antitank weapons. More ominous are the weapons in secret locations farther from the border: the scores of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads both nations possess.
The military buildup began in December after 14 people, including the assailants, died in an attack on India's Parliament. India blamed the attack on Pakistan-based Islamic militants fighting to end Indian rule in Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in predominantly Hindu India. Although both countries have frequently traded fire in Kashmir since 1947, when British colonial India was partitioned and Pakistan was formed as a Muslim state, the latest shelling has been the most intense since 1999.
The Indian volleys began in response to a May 14 attack by militants on an army camp in Jammu, the winter capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, in which more than 30 people were killed. The next day, Pakistani troops responded by raining artillery rounds on military positions and villages across the Line of Control.
Accusing Pakistan of training, funding and aiding the militants, India has threatened to escalate the conflict by mounting strikes against what it says are training camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir if Pakistan does not dismantle the militant groups.
Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, contends his government has banned the groups and arrested their leaders. But after intense diplomatic pressure from the United States in recent days, he said he would crack down further on the militants in an effort to ease tensions.
Indian officials said they will wait several weeks to evaluate Pakistan's actions. In the interim, though, India won't commit to stopping the shelling.
Indian officials say the militants infiltrate Indian-controlled Kashmir by trudging through narrow passes in the Himalayan peaks, aided by the Pakistani army and civilians on both sides. In the predominantly Muslim villages that dot the northern part of Indian Kashmir, the militants engender quiet sympathy. Villagers say the Indian military's aggressive operations to root out the insurgents, which have resulted in the killings of thousands of civilians over the past decade, have turned their sympathies toward Pakistan.
Indian officials say the shelling has several strategic benefits. They say it has helped to distract the Pakistani army and civilians, preventing them from helping militants to cross into India. And they contend it is providing a morale boost for Indian troops who have spent the past five months living in bunkers along the border.
In Pakistan's border villages, patience is razor-thin and the thirst for revenge is growing. During a visit late last week to frontline villagers near the town of Sailkot, many residents called for a more aggressive military stance by Pakistan's government.
"There is no point in restraint," said Mohammad Boota, 40, whose 12-year-old son was critically injured by shrapnel from a shell as he walked home from school Friday in a Pakistani border village called Patowl. "It is better to answer them in the same language that they are using toward us."