Pakistan Halts Kashmiri Militants’ March : Asia: Police open fire on group near the politically sensitive border with the Indian-held sector. Twelve are killed.

A Kashmiri militants’ “suicide march,” which sharply escalated tensions between India and Pakistan, ended Wednesday in bloodshed and bitterness as Pakistani police showered the pro-independence protesters with rifle fire, tear gas and boulders to prevent them from charging across the Indian border.

At least 12 protesters were killed and more than 150 wounded when police were forced to fire for more than an hour into the crowd of about 1,000 marchers as they tore through rolls of barbed wire on a mountain bridge just miles from the Indian-controlled part of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region. There, thousands of Indian troops waited with orders to shoot marchers on sight.

As a fleet of ambulances rushed the dead and wounded away from the bridge through torrential rains, protest leader Amanullah Khan, who had vowed repeatedly to walk into an Indian bullet this week, was arrested along with 150 of his supporters. They had walked for three days toward the heavily mined, fortified line of control separating Pakistani and Indian forces. The marchers often had to claw their way along a road blocked by dynamited avalanches of boulders, trees and deep mud.

The protesters were detained by the Pakistani army, which has long supported the Kashmiris’ armed insurgency in neighboring, Indian-held Kashmir.

The halting of the march and arrest of Khan--whose Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front has fought for almost two decades for Kashmiri independence from both India and Pakistan--apparently ended the weeklong drama.

But Khan, who had rejected all Pakistani pleas that he break off his march, left behind a highly charged atmosphere between two traditional enemies, both of which acknowledge that they are capable of building nuclear weapons.

Pakistan, which fought two wars with India over the strategic Himalayan region, has served as a logistic and spiritual base for the Muslim Kashmiri militants who intensified their ideological struggle into a guerrilla war for independence from India two years ago.

For Pakistan, Wednesday’s crackdown on the Jammu and Kashmir front’s march here was, in the words of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, “very painful.”

“We are all very emotionally involved in the Kashmir issue,” Sharif told reporters at a news conference after the day of bloodshed capped a week in which politicians and the press in both countries loudly warned of possible war. “It will be difficult for us to do it again and again if this happens.”

Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan, governor of the Pakistani-held part of Kashmir where the shootings took place, stated it even more strongly. “This is the last time Pakistan will do this,” he said. “If they (the Kashmiris) do this again, I just might be with them.”

Indeed, it is the historical and emotional backdrop to the Kashmiri march that escalated tensions between predominantly Hindu India and its western neighbor, Pakistan, which was created as an Islamic state when the British partitioned the subcontinent in 1947.

The first India-Pakistan border war was triggered by a similar movement at the frontier by Pakistani-based Kashmiris soon after the partition and the attainment of independence by the two countries.

India and Pakistan fought a second war in 1965 over Jammu and Kashmir, and there are still occasional skirmishes at the line of control separating the two armies.

Sharif agreed to India’s appeals that he stop the march at all costs only after meeting last week with Indian Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao in Switzerland. Sharif indicated Wednesday that the Kashmir issue could well lead to another war.

“It has put Pakistan into a very difficult situation,” he said, apparently referring to Pakistan’s small but influential fundamentalist lobby, which has staunchly supported the Kashmiri insurgents; that lobby is among the political forces backing Sharif’s coalition government. “We’ve had three wars with India. We don’t want to have a fourth war. But the dispute that is there has to be resolved now. . . . This is increasing the tension between the two countries.”

Sharif insisted that Kashmir be treated as a regional conflict by the West and international bodies such as the United Nations. India has opposed this as interference in its internal affairs. To support his position, Sharif cited India’s appeal last week to the five permanent members of the Security Council to persuade Pakistan to stop the march.

But Sharif also leveled sharp criticism at Khan, the Jammu and Kashmir front leader, for conducting the march. “The insistence of Mr. Amanullah to lead some innocent Kashmiris to the Indian firing line (at the line of control) . . . is like throwing innocent people into the fire,” Sharif said.

Pakistan has given virtually no assistance to Khan’s front, the most popular but poorly equipped of Kashmiri insurgent groups. Khan’s group is the oldest of the self-styled Kashmiri “freedom fighters,” and independence has been the cornerstone of its fight. Instead, Pakistan and its military intelligence wing have favored splinter groups that call for Kashmir to reunite and join Pakistan, which claims the entire region as a natural extension of predominantly Muslim Pakistan.

On the eve of the Kashmiri march, a top Jammu and Kashmir front leader confirmed that the group’s strategy was not to be shot by Indian troops but to draw fire from Pakistani authorities to demonstrate Islamabad’s self-interest in the struggle.

“When they hear on the other side of the border of the blood spilled here by Pakistani hands, Islamabad and its designs on us will be exposed before all the Kashmiri people and the world,” the front leader said. “We hope the whole world sees what Pakistan really is after. And we hope they will see that all we Kashmiris want is our independence.”