LINES TO DE-CONTROL

A tale of two borders (The Telegraph, Dec 10 2006, Sunday 'Look') (Photos not uploaded)
A Hurriyat team led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq is scheduled to visit Northern Ireland next week. What can Kashmir see in Northern Ireland? Sujan Dutta reports




Loyalist graffiti in West Belfast warns political opponents to keep away. A wall runs through Belfast separating Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods





IRA graffiti explains how tethered Northern Ireland is by a colonial Great Britain. The lines penned by Mary Ann McCracken read: What a wonderful clamour is now raised at the name of union, when in reality there has always been such a union between England and this country as there is between husband and wife by which the former has the power to oppress the latter.




Irish Republican Army graffiti in Derry / Londonderry. Despite the Good Friday Agreement, sections of the IRA are still taking a hardline. This graffiti was probably written by members of the “Real IRA”


The road from Derry in Northern Ireland to Donegal in the Republic of Ireland runs along a fascinating coastline and through undulating green fields. Next week, a Hurriyat team led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq could be driving down it. Memories of other border crossings closer home will flood in. The contrast will be huge.
Here, a single black marble plaque in memory of Patsy Gillespie in the middle of a bridge is the only marker for the border. Somebody has placed a bouquet of fresh flowers in front of the shrine that remembers a victim of ‘The Troubles’, the three decades of violence.
In October 1990, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) used Gillespie as its first ‘human bomb’. His family was held captive and he was asked to drive a truckload of explosives. The bombs were detonated while Gillespie was at the wheel. Five British soldiers were killed with him.
Such are the memories of the ‘The Troubles’ across Northern Ireland — in the graffiti of the rival parties in Belfast and, most starkly, in the language the people use. If you say “Derry”, you are likely to be Catholic/Republic/Nationalist. If you say “Londonderry,” you are likely to be Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist.
When my guide, a professor with the University of Ulster, offered to drive me to Bridgend I was, at first, nervous.
For me borders mean trouble. Like booming guns, fences of concertina coil, powerful searchlights and trigger-happy men in military uniform with portable radio sets and machine guns.
As I crossed the border, however, there was no one to check my passport and visa. The professor drove me through Bridgend in the Republic and we were back in Magee College in Derry within the hour. We encountered no customs post, army or border police post.
When Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf proposed this week that the Line of Control be made irrelevant — and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said so, too — is this what they were looking at? Does Northern Ireland show what can come of open boundaries in disputed territory?
Kashmiri leaders are about to find out. Borders have other meanings where they come from.
A vignette: The road from Srinagar to Uri on the ceasefire line winds gently uphill along the banks of the Jhelum river and zigzags through the valley before flowing into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The bus to Muzaffarabad takes this road. But at the time of the last Assembly election in Kashmir, it was impossible to cross that border.
At the first post during our drive where our papers were checked, a poster in the army captain’s office, written in Hindi, instructs soldiers “How to identify a terrorist”:
1) He will be bearded and be-spectacled 2) He will display a good knowledge of current affairs 3) He will be able to converse in English and Hindi 4) He will carry a bag containing newspapers, notebooks and medicines 5) He will be travelling in a group 6) He will be reasonably well-built 7) He will have injury/torture/ bullet marks.
I fit the description of a terrorist on six out of seven counts. But despite the intensive frisking and body search, I had no torture/bullet marks to reveal.
It was inevitable that I should recall that experience on the Kashmir ceasefire line here in Ireland. The borders are vastly different but the political landscape bears comparison. During a chat in Dublin, John Cushnahan, an Irish member of the European Parliament who visited the Line of Control from the Pakistani side, said: “There are amazing parallels between Kashmir and the situation in the north of Ireland”. That was not the first time it was said.
So what are the “amazing parallels”? First, both the Irish and Kashmir questions are consequences of partition by the British. Just as the partition of Ireland was also a partition of Ulster, the partition of India in August 1947 was carried out by dividing three major Indian provinces: Punjab and Kashmir in the west and north and Bengal in the east. Just as there are two Irelands today under sovereign governments, so, too, there are two Punjabs, two Kashmirs, and two Bengals.
Second, just as Ireland and Britain, neighbours, lay claim to Northern Ireland, India and Pakistan claim Kashmir. (The Republic has, with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, given up its territorial claim but wants to achieve “unity by consent”.)
Third, in both the contested territories, there is a powerful and often violent movement for secession, and there is a counter-reaction from organisations within Kashmir and Northern Ireland to the demand for secession.
Fourth, military and paramilitary violence has taken an enormous toll on the lives of ordinary people in both Ireland and Kashmir. By official acknowledgement, in Northern Ireland, 3,700 people have been killed in 30 years of ‘The Troubles’ from the late 1960s. In Kashmir, since 1990 alone, the toll has crossed 50,000. For a population of 1.7 million in Northern Ireland, the tragedy of 3,700 deaths can be as heart-rending as that of 50,000 in a population of 13 million in Kashmir.
Fifth, in both, the meshing of religion with ideology has produced volatile politics.
But even if Northern Ireland can be a model to resolve conflict, the agreement to resolve Kashmir has to be tailor-made for it. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, at an interview in his office in Falls Road, Belfast, one blustery winter’s day, told me: “The politics of condemnation, of heaping scorn on them (those who have taken up guns), of marginalising them, censoring them, of vilifying them, of describing them as terrorists, of pushing them to the margins had not worked. So what did work was finding an alternative way to bring about the conditions for peace and justice.”
In New Delhi, the government alleges that the single biggest hurdle to resolving Kashmir is Pakistan’s support of the militancy, the ‘terrorists’. In Islamabad, the government says it extends only “moral, political and diplomatic” support to the Kashmiri ‘mujahideen’.
But since November 2003 the borders have been quieter. Children in Uri and in hundreds of villages along the ceasefire line can go to school without the fear that a shell might explode in their classrooms. This is a huge opportunity to give peace a chance in Kashmir.
It is still a far cry from the border in Ireland. The Indian Army has fenced long stretches of the ceasefire line in Kashmir. In Ireland, there is no fence on the border. But there are huge walls — and I have walked along them — that run through Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods in Belfast. I am told they are called the ‘peacewalls’ and that they are necessary.
Sometime in the future, when the good professor comes to India and I can drive him from Srinagar in Indian Kashmir to Muzaffarabad in Pakistani Kashmir like he drove me from Derry to Donegal, I will know that India and Pakistan are willing to live with each other.
Hopefully, by then, the people of Belfast will find that the peacewalls are unnecessary.
Talking point




The Kashmir dispute “can be resolved somewhat along the lines the problem in Northern Ireland was sorted out”. — Bill Clinton (March 2003)



We cannot ignore the histories of colonialism. I think the governments have big roles to play, because, in our situation — and you will have to translate how this fits in the situation in Kashmir — people were using armed struggle because they felt that they had no alternative way. — Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein leader, in an interview to The Telegraph, March 2004

This is the first visit by the Hurriyat to study the Irish peace process. We have been talking about it but this is the first serious attempt to study it. — Mirwaiz Umar Farooq December 2006