Step Across This Line (35 page)

JUNE 1999: KASHMIR

For over fifty years, India and Pakistan have been arguing and periodically coming to blows over one of the most beautiful places in the world, Kashmir, which the Mughal emperors thought of as Paradise on earth. As a result of this unending quarrel, Paradise has been partitioned, impoverished, and made violent. Murder and terrorism now stalk the valleys and mountains of a land once so famous for its peacefulness that outsiders made jokes about the Kashmiris’ supposed lack of fighting spirit.

I have a particular interest in the Kashmir issue, because I am more than half Kashmiri myself, because I have loved the place all my life, and because I have spent much of that life listening to successive Indian and Pakistani governments, all of them more or less venal and corrupt, mouthing the self-serving hypocrisies of power while ordinary Kashmiris suffered the consequences of their posturings.

Pity those ordinary, peaceable people, caught between the rock of India and the hard place that Pakistan has always been! Now, as the world’s newest nuclear powers square off yet again, their new weapons making their dialogue of the deaf more dangerous than ever before, I say: a plague on both their houses. “Kashmir for the Kashmiris” is an old slogan but the only one that expresses how the subjects of this dispute have always felt; how, I believe, the majority of them would still say they feel, if they were free to speak their minds without fear.

India has badly mishandled the Kashmir case from the beginning. Back in 1947 the state’s Hindu maharaja “opted” for India (admittedly after Pakistan tried to force his hand by “allowing” militants to swarm across the borders), and in spite of UN resolutions supporting the largely Muslim population’s right to a plebiscite, India’s leaders have always rejected the idea, repeating over and over that Kashmir is “an integral part” of India. (The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is itself of Kashmiri origin.) India has maintained a large military presence in Kashmir for decades, both in the Vale of Kashmir, where much of the population is based, and in mountain fastnesses such as the site of the present flash point. This force feels to most Kashmiris like an occupying army and is greatly resented. Yet until recently most Indians, even the liberal intelligentsia, refused to face up to the reality of Kashmiris’ growing animosity toward them. As a result the problem has grown steadily worse, exacerbated by laws that threaten long jail sentences for any Kashmiri making anti-Indian statements in public.

Pakistan, for its part, has from its earliest times been a heavily militarized state, dominated by the Army even when under notionally civilian rule and spending a huge part of its budget—at its peak, well over half the total budgetary expenditure—on its armed forces. Such big spending, and the consequent might of the generals, depends on having a dangerous enemy to defend against and a “hot” cause to pursue. It has therefore always been in the interest of Pakistan’s top brass to frustrate peacemaking initiatives toward India and to keep the Kashmir dispute alive. This, and not the alleged interests of Kashmiris, is what lies behind Pakistan’s policy on the issue.

These days, in addition, the Pakistani authorities are under pressure from their country’s mullahs and radical Islamists, who characterize the struggle to “liberate” (that is, to seize) Kashmir as a holy war. Ironically, Kashmiri Islam has always been of the mild, Sufistic variety, in which local
pirs
, or holy men, are revered as saints. This openhearted, tolerant Islam is anathema to the firebrands of Pakistan and might well, under Pakistani rule, be at risk. Thus, the present-day growth of terrorism in Kashmir has roots in India’s treatment of Kashmiris but also in Pakistan’s interest in subversion. Yes, Kashmiris feel strongly about the Indian “occupation” of their land; but it is also almost certainly true that Pakistan’s Army and intelligence service has been training, aiding, and abetting the men of violence.

India’s and Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons makes urgent the need to move beyond the deadlock and the moribund fifty-year-old language of the crisis. What Kashmiris want, and what India and Pakistan must be persuaded to offer them, is a reunited land, an end to Lines of Control and warfare on high Himalayan glaciers. What they want is to be given a large degree of autonomy, to be allowed to run their own lives. (A dual-citizenship scheme, with frontiers guaranteed by both Pakistan and India, is one possible solution.)

The Kashmir dispute has already exposed the frailty of the Cold War theory of nuclear deterrence, according to which the extreme danger of nuclear arsenals should deter those who possess them from embarking on even a conventional war. That thesis now seems untenable. It was probably not deterrence but luck that prevented the Cold War from turning hot. So here we are in a newly dangerous world, in which nuclear powers actually are going to war. In such a time, the special-case status of Kashmir must be recognized and made the basis of the way forward. The Kashmir problem must be defused, or else, in the unthinkable worst-case scenario, it may end in the nuclear destruction of Paradise itself, and of much else besides.

JULY 1999: NORTHERN IRELAND

Even before Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern spelled out the details of the latest Northern Ireland peace plan, the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble was describing those urging him to accept the terms as “willing fools.” Since then, his colleague Ken Maginnis has spoken of “betrayal,” and Trimble has announced that he has “great difficulty in seeing how we can proceed with this.” So are Blair and Ahern and Mo Mowlam and the other mediators really history’s idiots, the IRA’s foolish dupes and therefore fellow-travelers of evil, hell-bent on permitting terrorists “into the heart of government,” as the Unionists imply they are?

Newspaper reports speak of a meeting between Blair and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness at which, after recording equipment was switched off, McGuinness said he was now speaking on behalf of the IRA, and made the offer that persuaded the British prime minister that the prize of IRA disarmament was within grasp.

Has Blair been deceived? We know that General John de Chastelain, head of the decommissioning body, thinks he has not. The general’s report states that there is a basis for believing that the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries will fully disarm by May 2000. But Trimble and his team, suspicious of the reasons for delaying the report’s release by a couple of days, are worried that de Chastelain had his arm twisted, and that the final version of his text was slanted toward the Republican position by British spin doctors.

Up to a point, it’s possible to sympathize with Trimble, who took one courageous and politically risky step for peace a year ago, and who is now asked to endorse a further strategy that the unreconstructed masses of Drumcree marchers and the rest of the Unionist faithful will utterly detest. It’s easy, in particular, to understand Unionists’ exasperation with the infuriating brand of doublespeak still practiced by Sinn Fein, whose leaders insist, on the record, that their party is not to be confused with the IRA while, off the record, they speak powerfully on the Provos’ behalf.

It’s clear, too, that between Unionism and Sinn Fein there exists a mutual loathing so deep that no peace process can wipe it away. One remembers the distaste with which the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin took Yasser Arafat’s proffered hand. Trimble feels at least as much disgust for Gerry Adams as Rabin felt for the chairman of the PLO. And it probably hasn’t escaped his memory that Rabin’s handshake cost him his life. But, as Israelis and Palestinians know only too well, peace is not the same thing as reconciliation, it’s not about kissing and making up with the foe you’ve fought for generations. Peace is simply the decision not to fight. Reconciliation may come after that, very very slowly, or it may not. And right now, most citizens of Northern Ireland—like most Israelis and most Palestinians—agree that peace without reconciliation is what they want. The silence of the guns will do.

This is the analysis—the gamble, really—on which the Blair-Ahern peace initiative is based: that the longer the cease-fire in Northern Ireland can be maintained, the harder it will be for the paramilitary war to resume. However imperfect the cessation of hostilities, however vicious the continued punishment beatings, however inflammatory the language still used by the two sides about each other, this lengthening stretch of minimal violence, this breathing space, may just enable peace to take deep enough root to last. It may get the distrustful communities of the Six Counties so used to their unreconciled peace as to make a return to war intolerable.

Risky as it is, this “peace gamble” remains the only game in town, and Unionist refusals will quickly come to be seen (as Tony Blair has warned) as unforgivable sabotage. Right now, Gerry Adams looks like he’s dragging the IRA kicking and screaming toward the war’s end, while Trimble is making us wonder whether he has become convinced that the peace on offer is a mirage, or simply that its price is too high. If he digs in his heels now, those conclusions will be hard to avoid. When, as Blair keeps saying, the prize is so great, then such intransigence looks like a greater folly than excessive “willingness.”

David Trimble is right to insist that there must be no fudges, that disarmament must be real, prompt, and verifiable. But if Unionist stubbornness derails the peace train, the party will always stand accused of being history’s “unwilling fools,” who shirked the risk and refused to travel toward hope. And David Trimble may then be remembered as Northern Ireland’s Netanyahu, not its Shamir or Rabin.

AUGUST 1999: KOSOVO

In the wake of the Gracko killings, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has appealed to the Albanians of Kosovo to set aside their enmities. “We fought this conflict,” Mr. Blair said in the provincial capital Pristina last Friday, “because we believe in justice, because we believed it was wrong to have ethnic cleansing and racial genocide here in Europe towards the end of the twentieth century, and we didn’t fight it to have another ethnic minority [the Kosovan Serb minority] repressed.” These are good-hearted, high-minded, decent words, the words of a man who believes he has fought and won a just war, and for whom “justice” includes the idea of reconciliation. But they also indicate a failure of imagination. What happened to the Albanians in Kosovo was an atrocity whose dark effect on the spirit may lie beyond the power of decent men like Mr. Blair to wish away. What happened may be, quite simply, unforgivable.

Tragically, this is not the first such imaginative failure. In the conflict’s early days, many Kosovar Albanians also failed to grasp the scale of the horror that was coming their way. In many villages, the men decided to flee, convinced that Milosevic’s army was intent on massacring them. They vanished into the woods, over the mountains, out of the Army’s murderous reach. But they made a miscalculation: they left their families behind, unable to believe that their wives, children, and infirm parents would be at risk from the advancing soldiers. They underestimated the human capacity for the atrocious.

Now let us imagine the refugees’ terrible return at the conflict’s end. Nervously, hoping for joy, they near their village. But before they get there they understand that the unimaginable has occurred. The fields are littered with bloodied garments and severed limbs. Carrion birds flap and strut. There are odors. The men of this village must now face a truth in which profound shame and humiliation mingle with great grief. They are alive because they ran away, but the loved ones whom they left behind have been murdered in their stead. The bodies that they now carry in farmyard carts to the burial ground speak accusations through their shrouds.
My son, in the weakness of my old age you were not there to save me. My husband, you allowed me to be raped and slaughtered. My father, you let me die.

The village’s survivors tell the returned refugees the story of the massacre. They tell them how some of the Serbs in the village put on Serbian Army uniforms and used their local knowledge to help the killers flush out the terrified Albanians from their bolt-holes. No, they said, don’t bother to search that house, it has no cellar. Ah, but this house, there’s a cellar under that rug, they’ll be hiding in there.

These Kosovan Serbs have fled now. But Milosevic doesn’t want them in Serbia, where they are the living proof of his defeat. And Mr. Blair, too, wants them to go home and be protected by K-FOR [the UN’s Kosovo peacekeeping force]. They are reluctant to return, fearing vengeance. And guess what? They’re right. They’re right, and Tony Blair, with his vision of a new Kosovo—“a symbol of how the Balkans should be”—is wrong.

I supported the NATO operation in Kosovo, finding the human-rights evidence in favor of intervention to be powerful and convincing. Many writers, intellectuals, artists, and left-leaning bien-pensants thought otherwise. One of their arguments was, if Kosovo, then why not Kurdistan? Why not Rwanda or East Timor? Oddly, this kind of rhetoric actually makes the opposite point to the one it thinks it’s making. For if it would have been right to intervene in these cases, and the West was wrong not to, then surely it was also right to defend the Kosovans, and the West’s previous failures only serve to emphasize that this time, at least, they—“we”—got it right.

The anti-intervention camp’s major allegation was and is that NATO’s action in fact precipitated the violence it was intended to prevent; that, so to speak, the massacres were Madeleine Albright’s fault. This seems to me both morally reprehensible—because it exculpates the actual killers—and demonstrably wrong. Set emotion aside and look at the cold logistics of Milosevic’s massacre. It quickly becomes apparent that the atrocity was carefully planned. One does not make detailed plans to wipe out thousands of people just in case a speedy response to a Western attack should be needed. One plans a massacre because one intends to carry out a massacre.

True, the speed and enormity of the Serbian attack took the NATO forces by surprise (another failure of imagination). That doesn’t make it right to blame NATO. Murderers are guilty of the murders they commit, rapists of their rapes.

But if “we” were right to go in, and the war was indeed fought for idealistic motives, the idealism of the present policy looks increasingly starry-eyed. The reality, as reported by experienced foreign correspondents who have returned from Kosovo to say that they have never seen anything like it, is that there are few Serbs left in Kosovo, and it is probably impossible to protect them. The old, multicultural Sarajevo was destroyed by the Bosnian war. The old Kosovo is gone too, very probably for good. Mr. Blair’s ideal Kosovo is a dream. He and his colleagues should now support the construction of the free, ethnically Albanian entity that seems like a historical inevitability. The aftermath of a war is no time for dreaming.