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Kashmir's main guerrilla group urges India to settle Kashmir dispute

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December 20, 2000 

SRINAGAR--(AP) - The state government on Tuesday announced local council elections in India-controlled Kashmir after a gap of more thanö2Wo decades amid indications that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee may extend the monthlong Ramadan cease-fire against the Islamic guerrillas.

But a key militant group said the temporary cease-fire was not enough to settle the Kashmir dispute.

The village council elections, beginning Jan. 15, will be spread over 10 weeks in troubled Kashmir, Ashok Jaitley, the top state bureaucrat, said in Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir.

The voting has been postponed three times in the past four years because of the fighting between government forces and the separatist groups.

The announcement came amid media speculation that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee will announce in Parliament on Wednesday extension of the cease-fire in Kashmir beyond Dec. 28, when the holy month of Ramadan ends.

On Monday, Home Minister Lal Krishan Advani said the cease-fire could be extended in view of a perceptible decline in violence inon to the Kashmir problem, we will take two steps," Commander Masood, a spokesman of the Pakistan-based Hezb-ul Mujahedeen group, said in a statement in Srinagar, summer capital of the Jammu-Kashmir state.

The Hezb is the largest of more than a dozen guerrilla groups fighting Indian security forces in Kashmir since 1989. Of the estimated 3,500 rebels in the Kashmir Valley, nearly half of them belong to the Hezb, Indian intelligence officials say.

Though the guerrilla groups rejected India's temporary cease-fire, Kashmir's main separatist alliance, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, welcomed the Indian initiative.

Both India and Pakistan have stopped artillery shelling along the cease-fire line that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

"It appears that India is not sincere in its initiative and its only aim is restoration of peace, not the resolution of the Kashmir dispute," the rebel group statement said.

Prime Minister Vajpayee had announced the temporary truce last month and invited the guerrillas for talks. But there has been no progress, except for the level of violence ebbing.

The Hezb-ul Mujahedeen had announced a unilateral cease-fire in Kashmir in July. The Indian government accepted the offer, but the initiative failed after the militant group demanded Pakistan's inclusion in three-way talks to end the 11-year-old insurgency that has claimed at least 30,000 lives. India rejected the demand.

On Monday, the Hezb also criticized the Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of almost two dozen groups, for Sunday's clashes between members of two groups, one of them supporting independence for Kashmir and the other asking for merger with Pakistan. The leaders of the alliance are divided on the issue.

The squabbles within the Hurriyat came to an unprecedented climax when members of rival parties began shouting slogans at one other. When Yasin Malik, one of the seven Hurriyat executives whose party wants independence, slapped a member of a pro-Pakistan group, the street skirmish broke out.

"Such incidents only indicate the frustration among the Hurriyat leadership," the Hezb statement said. "The time has come when Kashmiris have to demonstrate to the world that they are in favor of a peaceful and negotiated settlement of the long pending dispute of Kashmir."

India accuses Pakistan of training, arming and funding the Islamic rebels, a charge Islamabad denies.

Human rights groups say at least 60,000 people have died and another 2,500 are missing in Kashmir since the insurgency erupted 11 years ago.