Clash Between Pakistan and India Snares Fishermen

India and Pakistan have gone to war three times and set off alarm bells with nuclear brinksmanship. They have accused each other of terrorism, slammed shut their border crossings, tailed diplomats and cut off air service.

But largely unnoticed are the poor fishermen in the choppy waters of the Arabian Sea who have borne the brunt of 56 years of enmity by being tossed into jails.

It is a ritual of contempt and mistrust that has ensnared illiterate villagers who toil to earn a few dollars a day fishing from battered trawlers. Those who stray into the wrong waters, accidentally or not, are jailed -- sometimes for years, with no access to lawyers or consular officials and no contact with their families.

“It’s the most frightened I’ve ever been,” Yousuf Kachi, a Pakistani fisherman released by India in November, said of the night in 2002 when his boat was boarded by sailors with machine guns who said his boat was in India’s territorial waters.

Kachi and other fishermen from both nations recently discussed their ordeals in an interview. All expressed hope that recent peace overtures between India and Pakistan would put an end to the arrests.

The two nuclear-armed nations have been gingerly exploring peace since last spring. And in the first visit to Pakistan by an Indian leader since early 1999, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee plans to attend a regional summit today through Tuesday in Islamabad.

As part of their efforts to cool tensions, both sides’ armies have stopped artillery shelling across the line that divides Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed by both, and the governments are reestablishing air, rail and bus service and resuming diplomatic ties.

In recent months, Pakistan and India also have cut back on detaining fishermen and released some prisoners, but more than 130 still languish in jail.

Kachi said that after his boat was boarded, he and 13 other men were forced to follow an Indian patrol boat to the port of Jamnagar, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, about 125 miles southeast of the border.

They were put into a small room along with another boatload of Pakistani fishermen. Kachi said there was no room to sit, and the men were not given food for two days.

Finally, the fishermen were taken to a prison about four hours away. They were given buckets and mops and told to start cleaning.

“The inmates were yelling at us, telling us that Pakistanis were dirty, filthy people,” said Kachi, a slight man with no formal education who thinks he is probably about 60. “The inmates said: ‘You are just here to clean the filth off our toilets. You are nothing.’ ”

Kachi said the Pakistanis were held in a separate part of the jail, but they were subjected to verbal abuse every day as they performed menial tasks in the main cellblocks. Some of the men were beaten, both by Indian guards and by other inmates, he said.

“It was terrifying. There were rapists and serial killers there,” he said. “The Indians were trying to make it clear to us they thought we were the worst type of people, lower even than their criminals.”

Both India and Pakistan claim they hold fishermen who stray into their waters on suspicion they might be spies. But Kachi said he and the other men were never interrogated or accused of anything while they were held.

They were not granted access to Pakistani officials until a few days before they were released. The men had occasionally been given pen and paper to write to their families, but Kachi said that when he returned home, he found his wife and six daughters had not received a single one of the letters he had a literate inmate write for him.

Treatment is no better for Indian fishermen caught in Pakistani waters.

Rameshbhai Tandel, 42, from Salaya village, not far from Jamnagar, said he was asleep when his boat drifted into Pakistani territory last May and was quickly spotted by a coast guard vessel.

“I was scared like anything,” Tandel said, adding that two fellow fishermen started weeping.

Altafbhai Khan, who was arrested with Tandel and spent four months in custody with him in Karachi, said police beat them the first few days. But he said their treatment improved considerably after they were taken to jail, and they count themselves lucky.

“There are so many fishermen who earn their bread on the high seas who remain confined in jails in Pakistan for a year, or sometimes two or three, and come back with marks of torture,” he said.

Pakistan still holds at least 102 Indian fishermen -- 39 of them arrested Dec. 19 just off the coast of Karachi, said Abuzar Mariwala, deputy chairman of Pakistan’s Fishermen’s Cooperative Society. India has 29 Pakistanis in custody, he said.

With the improvement in relations, officials of the two countries are discussing ways to reduce incidents by improving communication between coastal authorities.

For fishermen like Kachi, the thaw is long overdue.

“Both countries should stop doing these things to us poor people. They are giant nations and we are just fishermen, not important people at all,” he said. “What threat could a dozen fishermen possibly pose?”

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Associated Press reporter Rupak Sanyal in Okha, India, contributed to this report.