Keeping a truce on track

The guns may not have have fallen silent in Kashmir. But even as the Indian government stares down persistent efforts to derail this second bid to revive talks with the Kashmiris, there is every reason to question whether the Ramadan peace effort will go the same way as the tentative framework for dialogue agreed upon by India and the Kashmiri militants in August.

There are other questions. When Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee stunned the world with the offer to unilaterally cease offensive operations against insurgents in Kashmir for the month of Ramadan last week, diplomatic insiders and informed onlookers alike wondered how it happened, who was behind it and what it means for the future of a region that has been rocked by a continuing insurgency these last ten years, and is faced now with the additional and more potent threat of nuclear war.

In an exclusive interview, Gulf News sat down this week in Dubai with a key player in the new peace equation emerging from South Asia. Widely recognized as a secret envoy with the backing of American President Bill Clinton, but without being part of the US administration itself, Mansoor Ijaz's Kashmiri diplomacy is not his first adventure. In 1997, he negotiated an unconditional counter-terrorism offer from the Sudan to the United States, carrying a letter from President Omar Hassan El Bashir to the Clinton White House.

The New York financier-fund manager and philanthropist offered a rare glimpse into the inner realm of his shuttle diplomacy to bring India, Pakistan and the Kashmiri militants together at the same table to talk peace.
American-born Mansoor Ijaz, has shuttled between Delhi, Islamabad, Srinagar, Muzzafarabad and Washington since December 1999 in an attempt to define a new working framework for peace to end the guerilla war in Kashmir.

Working from his base in Dubai, particularly during the crucial month of August when Hizbul Mujahedeen unilaterally offered to ceasefire, he has held intense discussions with Pakistani Chief Executive Pervez Musharraf, India's national security adviser Brajesh Mishra and according to sources familiar with Ijaz's efforts, with senior intelligence and military intelligence officials in both Islamabad and New Delhi.

He has also conducted substantive negotiations with Kashmiri political and militant leaders. He hand carried a letter from Syed Salahuddin, Hizbul Mujahedeen's Supreme Commander, to President Clinton in late August, the first contact the US administration had with any Kashmiri militant leader, and met with Yasin Malik, chairman of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front, (part of the separatist 18 party All Party Hurriyet Conference) in New Delhi last weekend.

He returned to the region last week to resume his shuttle diplomacy just prior to the Vajpayee announcement. This time, he says he seeks to ensure that India's peace proposal does not fall off the rails as easily at the hands of religious extremists as the Hizb offer did in August.

"The August framework had relied on complete secrecy and a narrow constituency to make it work. With religious zealots in both India and Pakistan having clearly demonstrated their ability and desire
to destroy fragile peace initiatives in the past, we had hoped that once the Kashmiri militants made an announcement, the needed public backing could be developed by having the main players embrace the initiative. We were wrong."

Ijaz believes that Gen. Musharraf failed to publicly embrace the ceasefire initiative which he himself had given a green light to because of the virulently negative reaction from Pakistan's fundamentalist groups. He also says that Vajpayee failed to bring enough of his policy hawks on board and they ultimately forced him into a legalistic retreat on the issue of negotiating inside versus outside India's Constitution. As for Syed Salahuddin, the Hizbul Mujahedeen's Supreme Commander could not withstand the violent reaction from
Pakistani fundamentalists either.

He said the Musharraf faux pax was the most compelling failure of the first ceasefire. Since coming to power a year ago, Musharraf has concerned himself more with attending to Pakistan's domestic problems than with addressing its foreign policy issues. Musharraf is also averse to any agitation on the streets which would disturb Pakistan's domestic tranquility, and without Musharraf's backing, Salahuddin didn't have a leg to stand on. Also, says Ijaz it didn't help that Jamaat e Islami chief Qazi Hussein Ahmed had just walked off a plane from Washington, giving the impression the US had pressured him into selling out the 'jihad'.

"The Qazi has no doubt felt the political compulsion to overcompensate by threatening to bring religious zealots into the streets."
Ijaz says it is important to understand the pressures that the Pakistani leader faces. "On one side he has a failed economy and massive decay of political institutions, on another he has global economic and military sanctions that have forced him to rely on nuclear weapons as the primary deterrent, on the third he has enmity from India and on the fourth he has pressure from Afghanistan and Iran. He has the Kashmir problem on top of him and his Islamic fundamentalists closing in underneath him. With all sides slowly closing in, it is easy to understand why he could not easily embrace a ceasefire on what is easily Pakistan's most sensitive foreign policy problem."

He also reminds you that Musharraf is no longer just Chief of Army Staff and that he is now head of state as well, and that title carries with it a very different type of responsibility and need for judgment. Ijaz has brought this change home to the Indian government repeatedly over the past year.

The very opposite has happened in Delhi. After suffering a humiliating betrayal by Nawaz Sharif in Kargil in the aftermath of his bus trip to Lahore last year, an event that forced him from office, Vajpayee has painstakingly developed a consensus among his hard line hawks in the political and military establishments that only by making increasingly more unconditional offers of dialogue to the Mujahideen, and hopefully soon Islamabad, will the world ever know whether Pakistan and the Kashmiri militants it supports are serious partners for peace.

Jaswant Singh, India's hawkish foreign minister, publicly stated this thesis of pursuing peace to the very end on Tuesday, the day after Ramadan started and the first Hizbul attack had occurred against Indian army targets.

Ijaz is now deliberately working towards lifting the veil of secrecy on this process because he believes the time has come to develop a critical mass of public opinion, parliamentary support and military-intelligence backing for it. There is a fundamentally more important reason that this could succeed. Geostrategically, India is transforming itself into the frontline state for fighting the scourge of radicalism that has consumed Afghanistan, much of western Pakistan and parts of Kashmir.

Says Ijaz "I believe they have strong support from the international community, and particularly the US, for doing so. That's why this peace effort is more l