Deaths put Siachen standoff into
sharp relief By Sudha
Ramachandran
BANGALORE - An avalanche near
the Siachen Glacier, which buried around 140
Pakistani soldiers and civilian contractors a
fortnight ago, has triggered debate in India and
Pakistan over the huge costs of keeping troops in
a stand-off at its icy heights.
Pakistan's
army chief General Ashfaq Kiani is leading calls
in Pakistan for the glacier's demilitarization.
Kiani called for resolution of the India-Pakistan
conflict over the glacier After visiting the
disaster site at Gayari to oversee rescue
operations. "How it is done is to be decided by
the military and civil leaderships" of the two
countries, he said.
India and Pakistan
both claim territorial rights to the glacier,
which is located at the tri-junction between
India, Pakistan and China
and overlooks the
strategic Karakoram Pass. India has been in
control of the disputed area since 1984, when
conflict erupted. Fierce fighting in the region
ended with a ceasefire in December 2003, and while
this has given soldiers some respite, it is
Siachen's treacherous environment rather than
enemy fire that kills.
Neither side has
released official figures on troop deployment. One
estimate is that since the 2003 ceasefire, India
has 5,000 soldiers in the disputed territory, and
Pakistan around half that number.
The
demand for demilitarization is not new. Both
countries agree that they would like to pullout
their troops and demilitarize Siachen. In 2005,
India's prime minister Manmohan Singh even called
for the creation of a "peace mountain" there.
Does Kiani's "peace overture" signify a
shift in Pakistan's thinking? Is it reason for
hope?
Indian opinion on the matter is
mixed. India's Junior Minister for Defense Pallam
Raju said he was "glad" that "Pakistan was also
realizing the challenges and the economic problems
of maintaining troops on the Siachen Glacier."
An editorial in the Times of India
described Kiani's remarks as "heartening".
Stressing the importance of having the Pakistan
military on board any India-Pakistan peace
process, it observed that "the sentiments
expressed by Kiani [are] cause for optimism. It is
an indication that the military may be backing
[President Asif Ali] Zardari's [peace] moves."
Others are skeptical. Writing in the
Firstpost website, Venky Vembu argues that the
Pakistan army chief talked of "peaceful
coexistence" even as he used the occasion to
"launch a propaganda war against India."
Indeed, in saying that Pakistan had not
chosen to send its troops to Siachen, which is
known as the world's highest battlefield, Kiani
was reiterating the long-standing Pakistani
narrative that conflict was caused by India as its
"occupation" of the glacier in 1984 that compelled
Pakistan to deploy troops there. This has prompted
many in India to argue that there is no shift in
Pakistan's position on the Siachen conflict.
Security analyst B Raman, a former
official at India's external intelligence agency
Research and Analysis (RAW), has described Kiani's
remarks as a "tactical" move aimed at responding
to local anger against the army in the wake of the
avalanche.
The 70-kilometer-long Siachen
Glacier slides down between the Saltoro Ridge to
the west and the main Karakoram Range to the east.
The roots of the conflict can be traced back to a
1949 ceasefire agreement, which ended the first
India-Pakistan war over Kashmir. That agreement
defined the ceasefire line in Jammu and Kashmir
rather vaguely as running up to map co-ordinate
NJ9842 and " ... thence north to the glaciers".
When the ceasefire line became the Line of Control
under the Simla Agreement of 1972, the line
remained hanging in the air.
India and
Pakistan differ on their interpretation of "thence
north to the glaciers".
An icy wasteland
where no one lives and nothing grows, the Siachen
Glacier is notorious for its hostile environment.
Temperatures drop to minus 40 degrees Celsius and
blizzards are known to touch speeds of 300
kilometers an hour. The glacier lies at an
altitude of 5,472 meters, making survival here
exceedingly difficult as the air is sparse. High
altitude pulmonary and cerebral edemas are common
among the soldiers deployed there.
The
terrain is dotted with crevasses and avalanches
take a heavy toll of human lives as did the one
that slammed into the Pakistani army camp at
Gayari early this month.
So treacherous is
the Siachen's environment that "no one thought any
one in his senses would like to occupy the place",
wrote General (retired) V R Raghavan, who
commanded troops at the Siachen and authored the
book, Siachen: Conflict Without End.
According to the Indian narrative of the
conflict, by the late 1970s, Pakistani maps were
showing the Siachen to be part of Pakistani
territory. This "cartographic aggression" was
accompanied by large purchases of high altitude
gear, which triggered alarm in India over a
possible Pakistani occupation of the icy heights.
Amid growing signs that Pakistan was moving
soldiers into the Siachen, India in an attempt to
pre-empt Islamabad landed two platoons on two key
passes, Bilafond La and Sia La on the Saltoro
Ridge in 1984. Since then the glacier has been
under India's control.
Neither side has
made public the costs - human, material and
financial - incurred in deploying troops at
Siachen. It is estimated that India spends around
a million dollars daily to keep its troops there.
While both India and Pakistan say they are
in favor of demilitarization, they differ on the
sequence of steps to be taken.
Pakistan
would like to begin with demilitarization and then
withdrawal of troops, followed by delineation and
authentication of the line.
India wants
the situation on the ground; a presence on the
Saltoro ridge and its control of the Siachen
Glacier to be recognized first. "If both sides
have to vacate this position, the Actual Ground
Position Line [AGPL] needs to be marked and, I
would say, internationally approved," India's Air
Chief Marshall P V Naik said a year ago.
Pulling out troops without agreement on
the AGPL has little support in India as that would
amount to squandering the advantage it currently
holds. There are suspicions that after
demilitarization Pakistan would seek to alter the
position "at first dawn". In the circumstances,
"withdrawal from these strategic heights without
any iron clad guarantees that do not extend beyond
declarations of intent would be the height of
folly", argues Vikram Sood, former chief of RAW.
In the wake of the avalanche, some in
Pakistan have called for unilateral withdrawal of
its troops. Peace activists want Pakistan to pull
out troops whether or not India does so. "We
should just withdraw," Imtiaz Alam, the head of
the South Asian Free Media Association, which
works for regional peace, was quoted by the
Associated Press as saying. "If we do that, Indian
domestic pressure will also result in a withdrawal
there. They will say it is madness to continue."
Interestingly, former prime minister and
opposition leader Nawaz Sharif has said that
Pakistan should take the initiative in
demilitarization and not make it a "matter of
honor."
Nawaz has always pushed for
improved ties with India, although opposition
parties in both countries usually articulate
hawkish and obstructionist positions.
Natural disasters are known to have opened
up space for peace agreements. Cooperation during
rescue efforts, relief and reconstruction has
forced enemies to bury the hatchet. The December
2004 tsunami that devastated strife-torn Aceh, for
instance, contributed to the Indonesian government
and rebels signing on to a peace agreement, one
that holds to date.
The same tsunami held
out a similar opportunity to the Sri Lankan
government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam. However, neither grasped that opportunity.
In fact, their differences over tsunami
reconstruction ended up fueling the Sri Lankan
conflict.
Will the avalanche's conversion
of Gayari into an icy graveyard push India and
Pakistan to speed up their quest for a solution to
the Siachen dispute?
Even if the unfolding
shift in Pakistan is tactical, it provides an
opening and an opportunity which Delhi must seize.
"India has nothing to lose and everything to gain
by making a fresh and sincere bid to de-escalate
the costly confrontation," observes Indian Express
in an editorial. "Delhi must be hard-headed in
recognizing the obstacles to a genuine
breakthrough in relations with Pakistan," it says,
"but it will be unwise for the UPA [United
Progressive Alliance] government to forego the
political opening offered by Kiani."
So
far, there have been 12 rounds of defense
secretary-level talks between New Delhi and
Islamabad on the Siachen dispute. Both sides admit
that a solution was within reach several times.
The avalanche disaster has prompted a
public debate on the question of deployment of
soldiers at the Siachen. This is promising.
The question is whether this debate will
prompt India and Pakistan to choose the path of
peace taken by Indonesia and the Acehnese rebels,
or that of confrontation opted for by the Sri
Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers.
Sudha Ramachandran is an
independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore. She can be reached at
sudha98@hotmail.com
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