Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, wearing his traditional dhoti, held talks with President Clinton on Tuesday, hours after Kashmiri rebels executed 35 Sikh villagers in a massacre apparently designed to focus attention on their separatist ambitions.
The killings have moved the conflict in Kashmir to the top of a bilateral agenda already dominated by Washington’s efforts to persuade Pakistan and India to scale down their nuclear arms race and sit down to solve their 50-year dispute over the picturesque Himalayan state.
While bloody raids on villages are not unusual in war-torn Kashmir, it was the first time in 10 years of the separatist insurgency that terrorists have targeted a Sikh community, an action that raises anxiety in India, where Sikhs are the backbone of the military.
The raiders, speaking Urdu, the main language of Muslims in Kashmir and Pakistan, rushed into the small village of Chati Singhpura Mattan 40 miles south of the state capital, Srinagar.
Indian police said the killers shouted their action was a “crackdown” on separatist terrorists. Villagers were told to keep calm.
The Sikhs in Kashmir are mainly engaged in the transport of goods over the winding, precipitous mountain passes that connect far flung villages and make the region a perfect zone for guerrilla warfare.
Police said the assailants herded families, many of whom had been asleep, out of their homes. They separated women and children from the men. Once the separation was complete they shot the men in front of their wives and children.
“They brought out the males from their homes and shot them at point-blank range,” said A.K. Bhan, the director general of police.
The attack clouded the start of the president’s five-day Indian tour and reinforces calls from many leaders on the Indian subcontinent that the United States should help settle the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, two fledgling nuclear powers. The two already have fought two conventional wars over the Himalayan state.
Indian pacifists fear that India, still angry from the Kargil debacle of last year, when its military was caught napping by the invasion of Muslim separatists, is planning a punitive “limited” attack on Pakistan during the summer. Such an action would be explained as retaliation for the type of killing that occurred in Kashmir on Monday.
The massacre at Chati Singhpura Mattan has bolstered India’s claim that its troops in Kashmir are fighting terrorists trained and equipped by Pakistan. Pakistan says it only “morally and politically” supports the insurgents who want unification with Muslim Pakistan or independence for Kashmir.
The execution of villagers has embarrassed Islamabad. Talks with Pakistan’s military regime were included in the presidential tour at the last moment. But Clinton is scheduled to make only a five-hour stopover Saturday in Islamabad.
The massacre follows a week during which Pakistan and India accused each other of escalating hostilities across the troubled “line of control” that divides Kashmir into Indian-held and Pakistani-held territory. Constantly blaming each other for all kinds of incidents, both sides clearly are seeking to influence the American president during his visit.
Pakistan would like to see U.S. mediation. India rejects a third-party interference, afraid it might lead to a referendum in mainly Muslim Kashmir that India could lose.
Bringing the two nations to the peace table remains one of the main issues of the president’s tour and is part of U.S. efforts to lower tension in what Clinton has called the world’s most dangerous region.
One Kashmiri rebel group telephoned an international TV network claiming that Indian military intelligence carried out the massacre to embarrass the insurgents during the president’s visit and to reinforce India’s claim that Pakistan is a nation fostering terrorism and should be isolated.
In a statement on Clinton’s behalf, spokesman Joe Lockhart expressed outrage and said “our most profound sympathies go out to the victims of this brutal massacre.”
Clinton began his weeklong trip to South Asia with a visit to Bangladesh on Monday, in an attempt to show how much things have improved in the beleaguered little country since 1971 when more than a million people died when the nation threw off Pakistani rule in a bloody civil war and from a devastating cholera epidemic.
Bangladesh remains one of the poorest countries on Earth, with a population of 128 million crammed into a territory the size of Wisconsin.
Bangladesh is also regularly ravaged by monstrous floods, nearly 1 in 10 babies dies and the average Bangladeshi earns less than $1 a day.
American leaders, nonetheless, describe the country as a budding success story. In part, that is because Bangladesh generally goes along with Washington’s wishes on global issues; it has signed nuclear agreements and supplied peacekeepers to Kosovo, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, while other nations have been far less accommodating.
“Let me say that I thought it was very, very important for me to come here,” Clinton said in Bangladesh. “I think it’s important for the United States to see its friends.”
Clinton announced an aid package to help that happen: $97 million in food assistance, $50 million for clean-energy production, $14 million to reduce child labor, $6 million in debt reduction in exchange for Bangladesh investing in forest conservation and $3 million to help train exploited women.
