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18 Yrs and Fighting


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Long before the Iraq war, Muslim insurgents began fighting for independence in Kashmir, the only Muslim majority state in India. India sent in half a million troops and kept them there. 18 years later, there is still an insurgency.
MitchKoss

6 responses // 18 Yrs and Fighting

  • I first went to Kashmir with Lisa Ling in July of 1998. We arranged our visit through the Indian Army, and the colonel in charge of our visit showed up at our palatial hotel with two truckloads of soldiers to escort us around the valley. Lisa and I and some Red Cross types were the only guests in the hotel, a former maharajah's palace run these days by Intercontinental. In August of 1999, I returned with Gotham Chopra, and our escort this time, an Indian Army major, Major Purashottam, showed up at our hotel in civilian clothes, and informed us that we would be traveling around the valley in a taxi: "It's safer that way." In the days that we spent traveling around Kashmir, it turned out that the major's parents knew Gotham's grandfather in New Delhi. One afternoon, an Indian Army convoy on the road in front of us was hit by an explosion--it was the first time either of us had heard the now too familiar term, IED. Two months after we left, some militants breached the perimeter of the main Indian Army base in Srinagar. Major Purashottam's office was near the entrance--he was killed but he managed to save the two journalists that he was escorting at that time. He was a very nice man... It was with this history in mind that I went with Tracey Chang--the correspondent in this piece--to Srinigar on Good Friday, 2007. Even though the first thing that Tracey and I saw when we arrived in Srinagar was a shootout between militants and security forces, the situation has become less violent. It's become less violent, but it hasn't become peaceful, and if you draw the graph out from the 18 years that the Indian Army has had hundreds of thousands of troops in Kashmir, you can compare it against the four years that the U.S. has had less than 200,000 troops in Iraq, a much larger and more populous place... Production note: Tracey has a very unusual ability to win over people in the field, but what you see is not an exaggeration of how friendly Kashmiri people are.
    MitchKoss
  • http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/kashmir/index...
    A great web package on Kashmir
    A great web package on Kashmir
    This is an interactive online package that gives a thorough explanation of the history of Kashmir and its political past.
    tchang
  • This is great reporting. The interviewing really showed some solid viewpoints, and I think this is an issue that obviously needs to be brought to public attention.
    CFriedman
  • This was a great piece.

    I respectfully submit that your date of 1989 as the start of the violence is off by a year. I was in Srinagar in August of 1988. On Indian Independence Day (Aug 15, 1988) some local Kashmiris marched to the central government's building and stripped its flagpole of the Indian flag and burned it. Several of these people were shot by the Indian Army. The city was on edge for the next day or so. Then on August 17, 1988, Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq was [presumably] assassinated - the airplane he was flying exploded upon take off. This event set the city of Srinagar which was already on the brink into a riotous rage and marked the beginning of a sporadic campaign of arson and confrontations between Indian Army soldiers and Kashmiri youth. I believe this event marked the beginning of the current close to 20 years of unrest there.
    astanhope
  • 10 people killed a day ...wow..thats pretty scary..the hotel was not like all the others...it looked more like an apartment complex or just a huge house...its really pretty ! ..good reporting..it was interesting to hear from all different types of people..old young..etc.!
    Soldiers everywhere ..thas so abnormal..they do not feel safe with soliders..thats werid..you would think they would want them..its like they aren't really serving the purpose ..to protect the people..
    JenIllescas
  • great to see something about this place on current
    farrahkeepsfilming

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