opinion

This year we commemorate "Kashmir Day" beneath the shadow of the Sept 11 tragedy of terrorist killing of innocent civilians in United States, and now the tragedy of the killing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan, which is no less terroristic.

One confession I am not ashamed to make publicly and loudly is about my frequent nightmarish horror of India and Pakistan going to fight a nuclear war over Kashmir, any day soon in the near future.

The conflict over the Kashmir issue had been the root cause of war between India and Pakistan in the past. There is actually nothing to guarantee that the issue will not be the root cause of the next all-out war between the two countries.

And there is absolutely nothing to ensure that the next war between the two countries will be kept at the so-called conventional level and not escalate easily and rapidly into a nuclear exchange.

Thinking the unthinkable, we can envisage a gigantic catastrophe of millions - if not tens or hundreds of millions - dead or maimed seriously within hours and days, and widespread destruction to crops, social and economic infrastructure, homes and health facilities, and the whole environment on both sides.

It could mean the end, or almost the end, of civilisation in large areas of the sub-continent.

It is a horrific scenario, most frightening to even contemplate, but it is something which is not beyond possibility.

Timely call

A few days ago, while visiting Islamabad and New Delhi, US Secretary of State Colin Powell called on both India and Pakistan to resolve the issue of Kashmir through dialogue.

It is a timely call, but I hope the United States government does not once again neglect the issue once its current campaign against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan has ended.

The world faces a grave crisis currently. Crisis in the Chinese language consists of two words: "danger" and "opportunity". I therefore believe that much as we are all in a common crisis, there is also a window of opportunity for peace for Kashmir, as much as for both Pakistan and India.

Powell's call, I believe, is appropriate for another reason. The United States was one of the six member countries of the United Nations which submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council in 1948 on Jammu and Kashmir (the other countries were Belgium, Canada, China, Colombia and the United Kingdom).

The resolution was adopted by the UN Security Council on April 21, 1948, as UNSC Resolution 47 (1948).

In its introduction, Resolution 47 noted "with satisfaction that both India and Pakistan desire that the question of the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India or Pakistan should be decided through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite".

Out of the 18 paragraphs in Resolution 47, 10 - from paragraph 6 to paragraph 15 - were devoted to this utterly important matter of plebiscite. These paragraphs essentially called on the government of India to undertake all the necessary measures to ensure "a free and impartial plebiscite" to resolve the issue.

Alas, after 53 long years, India has failed to implement Resolution 47. Why? This is a blatant insult to the UN and its Security Council, and the UN Charter itself.

For failing miserably to implement its own resolutions after more than 50 years, the UN and its Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, were this year awarded the Nobel Peace Prize! Unimplemented UN resolutions would include those long-standing ones on Palestine. UN Security Council's trade sanctions against Iraq are continuing to kill a few thousand children there every month, and they decided to give the Nobel Peace Prize to the UN!

If anyone deserved a peace prize, it is the suffering people of Kashmir, the suffering people of Palestine, and the suffering children and mothers of Iraq, but of course they and we are all living in a global theater of the absurd.

Coming back to Resolution 47, the US Department of State thought it was important enough to include it in its publication A Decade of American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents, 1941-1949 in 1950, as well as in the revised edition in 1985.

It is therefore significant that Powell has called for the resolution of the Kashmir issue through dialogue.

Evading the real issue

Regrettably, the Indian government is still working hard to evade the real issue of Kashmir. It is taking advantage of the current international campaign against terrorism resulting from the Sept 11 tragedy to divert attention from Kashmir - an issue which India has been evading for the past 53 years. It does so by demonising all armed groups for a free Kashmir as terrorists.

This desperate tactic dishonestly and dangerously ignores the question as to why there are so many Kashmiris who are now prepared to report to armed struggle. It ignores the fact that the armed struggle there has grown precisely in response to the 53-year-old intransigence of the Indian authorities.

The people who killed a few thousand innocent civilians indiscriminately in New York and Washington, D C last month are unmistakably terrorists. They should not and cannot be lumped together with people in pursuit of a legitimate and principled freedom struggle.

There is a book entitled Patriots: Those Who Started The American Revolution , by A J Langguth.

In this book, George Washington, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others are called "heroes", "revolutionaries who risked everything" and "towering figures". And today, the great majority of the American people recognise them as such.

Since they took up arms against the Brits and the English king, were they not civilians, terrorists and criminals? Yes, in the eyes of the British authorities more than 200 years ago, they were. They were all guilty of treason and sedition and terror and other crimes.

It serves nobody any useful purpose, in the final analysis, for the Indian authorities to demonise the Kashmir freedom fighters, by calling them terrorists.

By that same token, Mandela and his ANC comrades were and are "terrorists". So were Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh; so were the Algerian guerillas fighting for freedom against the French.

So would George Fernandes, the Indian defense minister, who was between 1975 and 1977 accused by the then Indian Prime Minister Indra Gandhi and her government of criminal conspiracy to bomb public installations, during the so called "Emergency" imposed by her.

Powder keg

The Indian government should have the courage, maturity and honesty to face the issue of Kashmir squarely and fairly. It should allow plebiscite to be held on Kashmir in accordance with the conditions and provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 47 of 1948. In short, it should let the people of Kashmir decide on their future. Period.

Would the so-called "largest democracy in the world" allow the people of Kashmir to decide "though the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite" their very own future? What has India to fear about democracy and freedom and justice?

Let us remember that without justice for the Kashmiris, there can never be true and enduring peace for India and her people. And the world should realise that so long as there is no justice, freedom and democracy for the people of Kashmir will be elusive.

If the Kashmir issue is not resolved peacefully with justice, there is always the danger that it might trigger off a conflagration which could well dissolve India, Pakistan and others.

After 53 years of terrible tension, the fuse to the powder keg is shorter than we think.

Tied to the mutual time-bomb, a terrible tragedy awaits the people of Pakistan and India. Freed from the increasingly heavy burden of an arms race neither can afford, Pakistanis and Indians will attain levels of development and prosperity beyond and above their fondest hopes and most extravagant dreams.

I hope and pray that they will choose life.

As Frantz Fanon had put it succinctly in his classic The Wretched of the Earth , "Peoples must first decide to wake up and shake themselves, use their brains, and stop playing the stupid game of Sleeping Beauty."

For if we were to sleep too long, we might never wake up one day, or we might wake up to find ourselves as radiation victims envying the dead.

FAN YEW TENG, writer and human rights activist, gave the above speech at the Oct 21 "Kashmir Day" commemoration, organised by the Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement (Abim).