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Journalism of Courage
WASHINGTON, June 2: Using the nuclear tests in the sub-continent as the alarm, Pakistan has succeeded in forcing the Kashmir issue on to the international agenda, saying there can be no peace and security in South Asia until this core issue is addressed.
Although top US officials have said the matter is best left to be sorted out bilaterally between the two countries, Islamabad’s intransigence in making the nuclear talks hostage to the Kashmir issue has yielded some results: the subject figures in the agenda for the meeting of foreign ministers from the permanent five countries in Geneva on Thursday, albeit as a “long-term concern.”
US officials said the purpose of the Geneva meeting was to develop a “coordinated strategy” to prevent a near-term escalation of tension and a long-term regional and nuclear arms race, and “relatedly, to deal with the underlying political issues between India and Pakistan, including Kashmir.”
“So we want to dramatize the situation. We want to get an agreement on howserious it is,” State Department spokesman James Rubin said on Monday in remarks about the Geneva meeting for which Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her mandarins are making feverish preparations. Dramatise, top Pakistani politicians and officials certainly did at a meeting here on Monday, where they insisted there was “no hope” for any peace in the region unless the United States and the international community took up the disputed Kashmir issue.
“There is no use just trying to cure the headache. One has to look at the cancer now,” Pakistani ambassador Riaz Khokkhar said, while rejecting India’s offer of a no-first-use of nuclear weapons pact as a “ruse.”
India is vigorously rejecting third-party mediation on the issue and saying there were enough bilateral channels to discuss the matter. While top US officials agree with this contention, Pakistan has successfully overlapped the nuclear issue and the Kashmir tangle. Asked if Washington has any indication from India or from Pakistan thatthey are open to third-party negotiation, White House spokesman Mike McCurry said US ambassadors in both countries were in close consultations with the host countries to “determine their disposition on that question.”
McCurry said the Clinton administration would work with others in the international community to form kind of a “matrix of appeals and approaches to both governments.”
South Asia has certainly moved to the front-burner. Even at the daily White House briefing where domestic issues predominate, nuclear issue captured centerstage again on Monday, only punctuated by questions about the latest developments in the Monica Lewinsky case.
The President himself is hands on over the subject (non-proliferation) and the region (South Asia) which many say is close to his heart.
Although the political and diplomatic temperatures in the region has cooled off, Clinton is so exercised over the developments that he has actually rescheduled a trip to the mid-west so that he can be back at the WhiteHouse on Wednesday to confer with Albright before she leaves for Geneva.
White House officials said the President’s proposed trip to the region in November is still under review and “a lot of factors will go into making the decision on whether we go or not.”
Experts on the region said the administration will try and “hammer out some deal between the two sides to control the spiralling” nuclear and arms race. There is little chance of the Presidential trip “if he is going to be snubbed by the two sides like they did in” conducting the tests, they said.
Meanwhile, the issue of sanctions against both countries has been temporarily held up because of the diplomatic manouevres.
A State Department meeting last Thursday to finalise and fine tune sanctions against India was changed to discuss the tests by Pakistan.
First strike threat by Pakistan The Pakistani Ambassador in Moscow has not ruled out the first nuclear strike against India byIslamabad. In an interview to a Russian newspaper, ambassador Mansoor Alam said Islamabad could use nuclear weapons against India in the event of aggression with use of conventional weapons.
