SOUTH-ASIA: Ceasefire to Hold on World’s Highest Battlefield

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, May 28 2005 (IPS) - The good news, as two days of talks ended on Friday between India and Pakistan’s top defence officials, is that an 18-month ceasefire on Siachen glacier – the world’s highest and perhaps costliest battlefield in the disputed territory of Kashmir – will hold.

The good news, as two days of talks ended on Friday between India and Pakistan’s top defence officials, is that an 18-month ceasefire on Siachen glacier – the world’s highest and perhaps costliest battlefield in the disputed territory of Kashmir – will hold.

A brief statement issued jointly, at the end of the talks in the Pakistani cantonment town of Rawalpindi, by India’s defence secretary Ajai Vikram Singh and his Pakistan counterpart Tariq Wazim Ghazi and made available here said both sides had agreed to ”resolve the Siachen issue in a peaceful manner” and to continue a ceasefire in the region.

”The two sides held frank and constructive discussions with a view to taking the process forward. They expressed satisfaction at the ceasefire currently in place since November 2003 and agreed to its continuation,” the joint-statement said.

Thousands of Pakistani and Indian troops remain eyeball-to-eyeball atop the glacier, 5,500 meters above sea level, where more soldiers have died from arctic conditions than from enemy fire, despite a thaw in relations between New Delhi and Islamabad.

India occupied most of Siachen in 1984 and a bloody clash erupted in 1987 to win supremacy over the glacier, which analysts say has lost much of its strategic value since the two countries became nuclear powers in 1998.

It would appear that the main stumbling block to a quick settlement was India’s insistence that the 110 kilometers long Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL) where both countries’ troops face each other be formally recognised before actual demilitarisation takes place.

On Thursday, at a press briefing here, India’s army chief Gen. J J Singh virtually gave away India’s bottom line saying that New Delhi’s position was that the present AGPL between the coordinate NJ9842 to Upper Saltoro Ridge should remain as it is to safeguard the country’s future interests.

Pakistan’s position refers to a 1989 agreement between the two sides, under which soldiers from both countries would pull back to where they were at the time of the signing of a historic 1972 deal – when neither country had a military presence on Siachen.

Nevertheless, the negotiating teams in Islamabad discussed issues such as disengagement, redeployment of troops and better mechanisms to monitor the ceasefire.

The two countries, nuclear-armed since 1998, have so far held eight rounds of talks to find ways to demilitarise the glacier and provide respite to troops who constantly succumb to temperatures that often fall below minus 40 degrees Celsius and severe altitude sickness due to the lack of oxygen.

One of the major setbacks to the demilitarisation talks was the undeclared but bloody war fought between India and Pakistan at the Line of Control at Kargil, in the disputed territory of Kashmir, in 1999.

In 2001, relations between India and Pakistan plunged rock bottom when a suicide squad, which New Delhi claimed was supported by Islamabad, tried to blow up the Indian Parliament.

The neighbours spent much of the following year preparing for war and amassed between themselves close to a million troops along their common border. They threatened each other with nuclear annihilation, which forced the United States and Britain to step in to mediate a pullback.

The breakthrough in India-Pakistan ties was made in January 2004 at a South Asian summit in Islamabad. Both countries suddenly began to see reason and initiated a ”composite dialogue” designed to address all outstanding issues.

Most importantly, New Delhi and Islamabad agreed to talk about Kashmir.

Since then the only sour note to progress in relations between the two countries was a disagreement that cropped up over a dam being built by India at Baglihar in Kashmir. According to Pakistan, the building of the dam violates the 1960 World Bank-mediated Indus Waters Treaty between the two countries, which lays down the rules for sharing the water flow of the Indus River and its tributaries.

Pakistan approached the World Bank to arbitrate in the matter, and earlier this month it appointed a neutral expert to help both sides reach a settlement on the design of the dam.

Much hope was placed on the latest round of talks on Siachen this week since it was taking place in the background of a quickening thaw in relations between the two countries, since Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s visit to India in April.

Since that visit, the two countries have taken initiatives aimed at converting the Line of Control, that divides Kashmir into its Pakistan and Indian held parts, into a ”soft border” – with an emphasis on people-to-people contact between the Indian and Pakistanis as part of the so- called confidence building measures.

Last week, Musharraf hinted that a solution to the long-festering dispute over Kashmir, a legacy of decolonisation from British rule in 1947 and partition on religious grounds into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu majority India, lay in making borders irrelevant.