World | India
They don't like the sound of war
Kashmir villagers are a worried lot as border skirmishes flare up again.
- Reuters
- Published: 00:04 August 2, 2008
Nambla, Jammu and Kashmir: When Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged fire for 16 hours on the Kashmir border earlier this week, the worst violation of a 2003 ceasefire, the news sent a chill down Usman Khan's spine.
"It is so scary ... my mind goes back to the time when shells would fall in our midst almost at will and the ground would rumble amid deafening artillery exchanges," Khan, 65, said in the small village of Nambla, around 50 metres from the Line of Control (LOC).
After years of relative peace, fear has again gripped villagers in the state's Uri sector who live around 50 kilometres from the site of the latest clash.
"I pray it does not happen again," Khan said.
Nestled among pine forests west of Srinagar, the state's summer capital, Uri has seen itself turned into a battlefield during each of the three wars fought by the nuclear-armed neighbours since independence.
Hundreds of people were killed on both sides of the Kashmir frontier before the 2003 truce amid daily artillery duels and small arms clashes.
Nearby, the shrapnel holes in an abandoned old tin-roofed house are grim reminders of the ferocity of the barrages.
Painful insecurity
"I know pain and I know what peace is," said Mohammad Shamas, another villager, whose daughter was killed when an artillery shell fired from across the border slammed into his house in 2001.
Thousands of weary people living in villages near the LOC fear they will again be caught in the crossfire after the recent border clashes.
One soldier was killed in the latest exchange of fire. It was the third incident in a month's time, and some analysts believe there are deliberate attempts to destabilise the ceasefire line.
"If it flares up we will be sitting ducks, like we were before the ceasefire," said the village head, Tariq Manhas.
"I pray sanity prevails on both armies and they don't turn our villages into a firing range again."
At a distance in a concrete bunker a soldier stands guard, his finger on the trigger of a machinegun.
Says Ramesh Singh, another soldier, a gun hanging over his shoulder: "I don't see or feel any tension here, we are all relaxed."
Barely visible across the border is the black barrel of a rifle poking through a hole in the wall of a sandbag bunker. Big artillery guns are draped with wire netting.
The ridges and trees hide hundreds of military posts on both sides of the UN-monitored Line of Control or ceasefire line along the heavily-militarised border.
"There is nothing serious. I am sure the recent firing was aimed to give cover to terrorists," said a senior army officer on the frontline, who did not want to be identified.
"We have successfully foiled major attempts at infiltration and that has helped us a lot," he said, pointing towards the silver-coloured fence in a gorge on the banks of the Jhelum river, which snakes its way up on a rocky hillside in the Uri sector.
Sceptical villagers
But villagers are sceptical, and fearful.
"I can only pray that madness does not return," said Rashida Bibi, 55, a resident of the border village of Saraie. She lost one eye and a hand in an artillery explosion five years ago. Not too far away, men and women work in maize fields and a sign warns villagers: "Caution, you are within 500 metres from enemy posts."
New Delhi says Islamist guerrillas slip across the frontier under cover of shooting by Pakistani troops to fuel an insurgency in Kashmir that began in 1989. Islamabad denies the charge.
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