Hijacking Cripples Prospects for Peace in Region

The hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet by Muslim militants is likely to have political repercussions across South Asia and could even quash President Clinton’s plans to visit the region next year, senior U.S. officials say.

The most serious casualty is the prospect of peace talks between India and Pakistan next year. “Whatever dim hopes there were for talks in 2000 are now down the tubes,” a senior Clinton administration official said. “This is a huge blow to hopes for any kind of dialogue.

“The atmosphere was already explosive, and now you have a huge human drama, with many of the passengers newlyweds coming back from their honeymoons,” the official said. “No matter how this ends, the hijacking will make it harder for people to talk to each other any time soon. And if there’s 1/8more 3/8 bloodshed, then we begin to really worry.”

The hijacking has heightened tensions between the two long-standing--and nuclear-capable--rivals because Indians assume that Pakistan is behind any effort by Muslim militants to win concessions or draw attention to the disputed region of Kashmir, which both countries claim. The predominantly Muslim region has been the cause of two of the three Indian-Pakistani wars since 1948.

The unidentified hijackers’ links to the Kashmir dispute became clearer Tuesday when they increased their demands to include the release of several Kashmiri guerrillas imprisoned in Indian-held Kashmir. They had already demanded the freedom of Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani religious leader arrested in 1994.

Azhar was the chief ideologue of Harkat Ansar, a Muslim militant group active in Kashmir that is on the State Department’s list of extremist organizations and is now known as Harkat Moujahedeen.

The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan have engaged in mudslinging accusations about the role of each other’s country in the hijacking of the Airbus A-300, which still had 160 passengers and crew members on board, including one American.

Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh charged that the hijacking began shortly after a Pakistani plane landed in Nepal, where the Indian Airlines plane originated. And the Indian media have alleged that four of the five hijackers are Pakistanis.

Pakistan’s new military leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said Tuesday that his government had “absolutely no involvement in the hijacking.” Pakistani officials instead earlier implicated Indian intelligence.

The timing of the hijacking could not be worse, U.S. officials say. It is the third in a sequence of events undermining one of the most hopeful prospects for peace talks in the volatile subcontinent.

“The hijacking follows a steady trend of deteriorating relations since last spring,” a second U.S. official said. “You don’t get stability in South Asia unless you can get these two countries on track. And the hijacking takes it even further off track.”

The first flash point was new fighting in Kashmir from May to July, which stopped when then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif reluctantly agreed to back down after talks with Clinton in Washington. Sharif ordered the army to pull back despite strong popular support for the military’s role in contesting Kashmir.

The second flash point was the Oct. 12 coup led by Musharraf, an army general whom India considers a prime supporter of Pakistani intervention in Kashmir. The coup against Sharif, a democratically elected leader, was in large part a reaction to his decision concerning Kashmir.

Pakistan and India are the only two nuclear states sharing a border that are active rivals. Both tested nuclear devices last year in defiance of pleas by the international community to refrain. U.S. officials say the two countries came closer than is widely recognized to becoming the first developing countries to cross the nuclear threshold during fighting this summer.

Clinton’s trip may also be canceled in the wake of the hijacking, U.S. officials say. Almost two years ago, the White House planned a trip to India and Pakistan, but it has repeatedly postponed it for domestic and foreign reasons.

Since Pakistan’s coup 11 weeks ago, the Pakistani leg of the trip has been in doubt. U.S. officials initially insisted that the president would proceed with plans to visit India, but they now concede that the premise of the trip had been urging negotiations that now seem unlikely to happen before Clinton leaves office in January 2001.

“A big part of the logic of the president’s trip was to urge dialogue over the past few days,” the second administration official said. “Both the hijacking and the reaction to it will make that much tougher.”