Tens of thousands in Kashmir march to UN offices

Tens of thousands in Kashmir march to UN offices

2008-08-18 17:17:01 -

SRINAGAR, India (AP) - Waving green and black protest flags and chanting militant slogans, tens of thousands of Muslims marched to the United Nations offices in Indian Kashmir's main city on Monday to press their demands that India give up its claim to the region.
Separatist leaders said the march was the largest yet in two months of sustained protests that have reinvigorated a decades-long separatist struggle, threatening to sever the ties between India and its only Muslim-majority state.
The weeks of unrest, which have left at least 34 people dead, have also unleashed pent-up tensions between Kashmir's Muslims and Hindu minority, sparking fears that the troubles could spread to the rest of India, which has a history of violence along religious lines.
While the latest unrest has been led by Kashmir's peaceful separatist groups, thousands of protesters Monday chanted the name of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, one of the most violent Islamic militant groups fighting to wrest the predominantly Muslim region from Hindu-majority India.
«Lashkar has arrived. It is your death, India. Lashkar has come,» the crowd chanted as they passed Indian security forces.
Apart from its activities in Kashmir, the Pakistan-based group also has been blamed for deadly terror bombings across India in recent years.
A network of Islamic militant groups have been fighting since 1989 for Kashmir's independence, or to join Muslim-majority Pakistan. The bloody insurgency has killed more than 68,000 over two decades.
On Monday, police and paramilitary forces turned out in full force to guard the streets. No violence was reported in Srinagar.
Separatist leaders had been talking up the demonstration for days, and hundreds of trucks and buses overflowing with protesters _ some sitting on roofs and hanging out of windows _ made their way across the Himalayan region to Srinagar for the protest. Many of them carried Islamic green flags or black protest banners.
The crowd tore down a barbed wire fence to reach the U.N. office, where a group of activists delivered a petition citing human rights violations by Indian authorities and requesting U.N. intervention, said Nazir Ahmed Ronga, a leading lawyer in Srinagar.
Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a prominent leader, told the crowd to demand «the U.N., the U.S., Britain and international community to come and see what people want here.
«This is a struggle for right to self-determination,» he said. «The U.N. should send its peacekeepers to Jammu as well as Kashmir.» Jammu is the region's only Hindu-majority city.
Such talk is bound to irk Indian officials, who see the problems in Kashmir as an internal matter. India's Foreign Ministry last week tartly dismissed statements from Pakistan encouraging the protests.

The crisis in Kashmir has turned into perhaps the biggest challenge Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has faced since taking office in 2004, and on Monday he again called for calm.
«All political parties, all right-thinking people must work together to bring the situation under control,» Singh told reporters outside Parliament in New Delhi.
The crisis caught Singh and most everyone else off-guard when it began in June with a dispute over land near a Hindu shrine. Muslims held protests complaining that a state government plan to transfer 99 acres (40 hectares) to a Hindu trust to build facilities for pilgrims near the shrine was actually a settlement plan meant to alter the religious balance in the region.
A subsequent decision by the state government to scrap the plan angered the region's Hindus, setting off weeks of tit-for-tat protests. At least two Hindus have killed themselves in protest.
Jammu also saw more protests Monday as thousands of people defied a ban on public gatherings there and gathered in large groups hoping to court arrest _ a tactic pioneered by Indian independence leader and pacifist Mohandas K. Gandhi.
One of the organizers, Suchet Singh, said such gatherings would go on for three days and that more than 100,000 people were expected to take part.
There is a long history of separatist movements in India's portion of Kashmir, but most were peaceful until 1989 when than Islamic insurgency began. India accuses Pakistan of aiding the insurgents _ a charge Pakistan denies.