Political Limbo

Friday, July 13, 2001

Deep in the Karakoram mountains on the edge of central Asia is Pakistan's Northern Area. On one side is China's Muslim-dominated Sinkiang province. To the east is Buddhist Ladakh in India. West is Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor, a strip of rock and ice carved out of the Pamir Mountains to separate what was once Britain's Indian Empire from the Russian Empire.

For more than 50 years the inhabitants of this once-isolated territory have been denied their civil and political rights by governments in Islamabad. For one reason only: They are considered part of a wider Kashmir which India and Pakistan each claim. And to maintain Pakistan's line that the issue of Kashmir is unsettled the estimated two million people of the Northern Area are made to live in political limbo. They have no access to Pakistan's courts and its assemblies. They cannot vote. They are expected to pay taxes, but none do because they say they have no representation. In effect they are stateless. But they are expected to die for Pakistan, as many of them did as recruits in the Northern Light Infantry Regiment on the heights of Kargil during Pakistan's abortive assault on Indian military supply lines in the Kashmir mountains in the summer of 1999.

As Pakistan's military ruler President Pervez Musharraf attends a summit with India's Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpyaee on July 14-16 to try to settle the Kashmir dispute, this strategic area of Pakistan is restless. Its people want recognition, equal rights with the rest of Pakistan, or independence. "We hate Kashmiris. We are not part of Kashmir," says the Mir of Hunza, a local chieftain of one of the tiny former principalities that dot the mountains. "We do not want to be part of any negotiations. India and Pakistan are making a fool of us all pretending that the other parts of Kashmir are theirs. We have a demarcated line (the Line of Control that separates Pakistan-held and Indian-held Kashmir). We should stick by it."

Behind the anti-Kashmiri sentiment lay a raft of religious and cultural differences that mark the fringes of the dispute. The inhabitants of Pakistan's Northern Areas are mainly Shia Muslims, strongly independent mountain people far distant from the Sunni Muslims of the Kashmir Valley, the heart of the region both countries want so desperately. The valley is where the insurgency is raging between Pakistan-backed insurgents and Indian forces. In Ladakh, another fringe part of Kashmir to the far north of the Kashmir Valley, its Tibetan Buddhist inhabitants last month reiterated their plea to be separated from Muslim- dominated Kashmir and be made a separate territory of India. Within Jammu, the mainly Hindu lowlands of Kashmir, separation from the Muslims of the Kashmir Valley is an issue which crops up regularly when talk of a settlement with Pakistan is in the air. Azad ("Free") Kashmir, the part of Kashmir proper that Pakistan holds and rules through a satrap, is almost irrelevant. Not even Kashmiris from the Valley take it seriously as a state. This collection of disparate regions whose people are mostly cut off from each other by culture and religion is Kashmir -- a balkanised territory that India and Pakistan have fought two full-scale wars over since they went their separate ways at independence from Britain in 1947.

Among young people in Gilgit, the administrative and military center of the region, the issue is not who owns Kashmir. The issue is independence. "There is a very thin line between nationalism and being anti-Pakistan," says Mirza Qaisar Khan, 28, former editor of a local newspaper, K2, which was closed down last year for "anti-state" activities. The newspaper had urged its readers to celebrate Pakistan's national day as a "Day of Deprivation".

The Northern Region, known under British rule as the Gilgit Agency and governed loosely from Srinagar, the Kashmir capital, opted for Pakistan in 1947 after a mutiny in the local barracks that was encouraged by British commanding officers. "We were independent for 21 days and then we gave ourselves to Pakistan," says Mirza. "But we got nothing. It has not brought liberty or self-government. We have none of the rights enjoyed by the rest of Pakistan" All top officials are outsiders from other parts of Pakistan, as if the region were considered too sensitive to be administered by its own people.

And then there is the influx of outsiders. There is strong ill-will in particular against Pathans from Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province and Afghanistan who appear to have taken over the local economy. According to a Pathan shopkeeper, 90% of businesses in Gilgit are owned by Pathans. From the time the Karakoram Highway -- the region's all-weather access to China -- was built jointly by Beijing and Islamabad in the 1970s, Pathan and Afghan traders have flocked to the Northern Area. Today they control the lucrative trade between the two countries, having pushed out local businessmen. "The only economic activity is the China trade and that is controlled by Pathans," says Mirza. "Small fry can't operate. Pathans and Afghans have the capital. We don't."

The sense of bitterness caused by commercial loss leads to an even greater animosity in this Shia-Muslim dominated region toward the infiltration of alien hard-line Sunni Muslim groups, usually Pathan, bent on imposing their separate view of Islamic law and custom and continuing the war in Kashmir. Their presence can be seen as you enter the region beside the Indus River. Written boldly in English on a road sign are the words: "Proud to be an Islamic Fundamentalist". And on buildings and electricity poles in settlements along the Karakoram Highway are signs in Urdu encouraging young men to enlist in the mujahedin groups fighting to "liberate" Kashmir from Indian control. The signs list telephone numbers and addresses for the main training camps. "Everyone here wants to end the conflict in Kashmir except the Fundos (as the fundamentalists are dubbed)," says Zafar Iqbal, a local government official. "They are the only ones that benefit from the war. We don't care how it is settled as long as it is done and we in the Northern Areas get our rights."

The longer the dispute with India over Kashmir lasts, the more the people of the Northern Areas feel alienated and the stronger becomes their demand for separation and independence. "The older generation still support Pakistan," says the Mir of Hunza. "It's the young people who want independence." The nation they dream about is called Balouristan, meaning a place high in the mountains. It is as if they were talking about some Shangri-la that is far distant from the reality of today's Pakistan -- a country under military rule, its democratic institutions in abeyance, and its President in no mood to allow bits of it to break off.