Word: kashmir
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Give Peace A Month January saw peace threatening to break out in a number of global hot spots, as if world leaders had made a collective New Year's resolution for harmony. India and Pakistan - who not so long ago were at the nuclear brink over Kashmir - met for warm talks in Islamabad and promised to keep talking. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared the commitment to talk a victory "for all those peace-loving people of the world." Syria and Turkey also seem to have gotten over long-standing territorial feuds: last week, Bashar Assad became the first Syrian leader...
...lucky," he says, of surviving 14 years of incoming Pakistani fire. "Our crops spoiled, and our goats and cattle starved because we were too scared to go out, but nobody died. In the next village, a girl was killed and five houses destroyed." The return fire from Indian-held Kashmir gave Khan little comfort as it whined over his head, slid over the precipitous valley, and smashed into the Pakistani side of Kashmir a kilometer away. "Most of my family lives over there. I just hope they were hiding like...
...Like thousands of Kashmiris, Khan found himself living on the front line of what would become Asia's most bitter conflict when the U.N. drew a Line of Control through Kashmir in 1949, dividing the disputed Himalayan region into Indian and Pakistani parts. Because the Line of Control also split the area around Khan's village of Uroosa, he was cut off from all but his most immediate family. The divide deepened in 1989, when separatist rebels, incensed at India's heavy-handed rule of its only Muslim-majority state, began an uprising in the meadows of the Kashmir valley...
...revenge from al-Qaeda and the Taliban was expected, especially as many of them are believed to be hiding out in remote tribal areas of Pakistan itself. With his crackdown on the militants?many of whom Pakistan had previously trained and helped sneak into the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir?Musharraf has been playing a perilously nuanced game. To satisfy both the U.S. and India, he closed the offices and training camps of militant organizations, but has yet to dismantle them. For his efforts, he's been branded a traitor by supporters of the Kashmiris' fight for independence from India...
...Moreover, without Musharraf the Kashmir conflict would likely heat up again. In November, he declared a unilateral cease-fire along the Line of Control bisecting Kashmir, bringing peace to those districts for the first time in memory. Last month, he made a statement suggesting that Pakistan might not insist on a plebiscite in Kashmir to resolve the dispute?an iron demand for five decades. India has responded with several conciliatory gestures, including the lifting of a ban on flights into the country by Pakistan's national airline...