JKLF backs Hurriyat offer to get jehadis to call a truce

Supporting the Hurriyat’s proposed mission to Pakistan, acting chairman and JKLF’s founder-member Javed Mir said, in an interview with The Indian Express, it was a mature step in the process of reconciliation.

‘‘We will go and talk to our leadership in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, explain the ground realities to them and also tell them the benefits of a ceasefire at this point of time. That will certainly help,’’ he said.

‘‘We are the biggest sufferers of the delay in a dialogue on Kashmir because it is we who are dying in dozens everyday. We have a vested interest in a peaceful solution, and so we will make every effort to get closer to it’’.

He added that ‘‘our priority will certainly be our own Kashmiri militant leadership, like Syed Salahuddin’’.

Mir said the Government ought to reciprocate now. ‘‘The ball is in India’s court now. If they allow the Hurriyat to travel to Pakistan, we are sure we will bring good news. But if they repeat what they did to us after JKLF declared a unilateral ceasefire in 1994, no breakthrough will be possible. Five hundred of our activists and leaders were killed even as we shunned our guns,’’ he said.

‘‘We have always projected this movement as an indigenous struggle of Kashmiri people even as we agree that Pakistan remains an important party to the dispute. And when the JKLF emphasised that it was only a national freedom struggle, we were harrassed. Now pro-Pakistan groups and even Syed Salahuddin speak the same language as there is massive pressure from the international community,’’ he said.

Mir accepted that the ‘‘(separatists) had committed some strategic blunders. If we had kept the aim of our struggle limited to freedom of our land and not given it any other name, the movement would have been in a different position today. The world would have not started calling us terrorists, the way British foreign minister Jack Straw said recently.’’

Mir said the world community was interested in resolving the Kashmir dispute in order to avoid a war in the sub-continent. ‘‘We and our mujahideen leaders should take a lesson from the changing international attitudes towards violence. The gun needs to be immediately stopped on both sides so that a conducive atmosphere is created for a meaningful dialogue,’’ he said.

Asked how he could be so optimistic about international pressure working on both India and Pakistan, if a ceasefire was declared, Mir said: ‘‘If the world community can force the Israelis and Palestinians to meet six times in six months despite so much mistrust and hatred, why can’t they do it here!’’