Sounds like a interesting conference anyone on gupshup heard about it?
Op-ed: Track III diplomacy in San Francisco
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_9-9-2003_pg3_3
Ahmad Faruqui
There is much to be gained and little to be lost by promoting people-to-people contacts between Indians and Pakistanis, even if it happens in San Francisco. The city has a distinguished history of sponsoring peacekeeping initiatives
When official diplomacy between India and Pakistan fails, the governments of both countries sometimes continue their dialogue through the Track-II back channel, though the second track has barely fared any better than the first track in bringing peace or even getting a breakthrough. Hence a strong need for what one might call Track III: direct contact between the people of India and Pakistan on issues that divide them.
One might consider the San Francisco Bay Area an unlikely venue for such contact, since it is halfway around the globe, but it hosts a large segment of Indian and Pakistani diaspora. Regardless of their professional affiliations, these individuals stay in touch with events ‘back home’ courtesy the Internet and satellite TV. Family visits back home during the past few years have provided a grim reminder of how every day life in South Asia has been held hostage by the Kashmir conflict.
In July 2002, the Commonwealth Club of California held a forum on the crisis in India-Pakistan relations. I was asked to share my views along with Shankar Bajpai, a former Indian ambassador to Beijing, Islamabad, and Washington. In the fall, the Fremont Public Library organised a series of four lectures on the Kashmir conflict. Dr Agha Saeed, a Pakistani American who heads the American Muslim Association, was the leading force behind the event. Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai of the Kashmir American Council based in Washington was a key speaker.
Additionally, both the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University hold annual conferences on South Asian issues. These draw speakers from around the world and from the nearby Monterey Institute of International Studies and the Naval Postgraduate School.
Last month, Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy from Quaid-e-Azam University was in the Bay Area and participated in three seminars. The first event, held at Palo Alto, featured a screening of Pakistan and India Under the Nuclear Shadow, a 35-minute documentary written by Dr Zia Mian of Princeton University and produced and directed by Hoodbhoy. The second event, held at the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, included talks by Hoodbhoy and Mian on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and the hypocritical stance of the Bush administration. Mian’s comment that there was not much difference between the foreign policies of Presidents Clinton and Bush drew a lively riposte from the Democrats in the audience.
The third event took place at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. It was organised by the CIIS and People for Peace in Kashmir. Besides Hoodbhoy, the others speakers were Fai and Akhila Raman, an Indian-American Bay Area researcher on the Kashmir Conflict. The audience comprised a cross-section of the Indian and Pakistani diaspora, Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits and native Californians.
This forum was designed to avoid playing the ‘blame game’. Instead, the speakers were encouraged to critique the positions of their own sides. Professor Angana Chatterji of CIIS opened the forum by reminding the audience that there was one Indian soldier for every 10 civilians in the Kashmir Valley. It was not surprising that the local population was in revolt. Zulfiqar Ahmad of the Nautilus Institute introduced the speakers and proposed that the ultimate arbiter of the dispute should be the Kashmiris.
Fai stated that the long-standing dispute was now a nuclear flashpoint and needed an urgent solution. There was a need to end the suffering of not only the majority Kashmiri-Muslim community but also the minority Kashmiri-Pandit community. He stated that a lasting solution would be possible if each of the three concerned parties — Indians, Kashmiris and Pakistanis — could yield ground on their hardline positions.
Fai sought to dispel three key myths about the Kashmir movement. First, it was not a secessionist movement, because Kashmir did not belong to either India or Pakistan. Second, it was not a fundamentalist religious movement, since it was informed by the rich tradition of Kashmiriyat. Third, it was not a terrorist movement but a popular freedom struggle that had begun with a march by hundreds of thousands of civilians on the streets of Srinagar in early 1990. He called for three-way negotiations between Kashmiris, Indians and Pakistanis and asked the US and the UN to help facilitate the negotiations.
Hoodbhoy critiqued the subversive role of the Pakistani military establishment in the Kashmir dispute; he said that they had hijacked an indigenous insurgency. He said the Pakistani government needed to stop its ill-advised covert war, and revert to its stated position of providing moral and diplomatic support for the freedom struggle in Kashmir.
Hoodbhoy was equally critical of the role played by India in the Kashmir valley. It had deployed half a million soldiers to brutally repress an estimated five million Kashmiris. In closing, he asked India to end its permanent occupation of Kashmir, called on Pakistan to stop meddling and requested the media in both countries to tone down their coverage of the harsh rhetoric emanating from Islamabad and New Delhi.
Raman commented that both India and Pakistan were fighting over Kashmir like two pugnacious landlords. She pointed out that India had promised self-determination to the Kashmiris in 1947 but never provided it. (Interestingly, the UN resolutions while granting Kashmiris the right to self-determination, nonetheless, give them only an either-or choice: they can join either Pakistan or India, but cannot go their own way.) She said that the 1989 insurgency would probably continue even without Pakistani involvement until New Delhi addressed the legitimate grievances of Kashmiris.
She said that it was time to consider an ‘Andorran solution’ to the problem, where Kashmir would be converted into an autonomous entity with both India and Pakistan responsible for its defence and foreign affairs. The idea derives from the history of Andorra, a tiny principality located between France and Spain that was a bone of contention between the two countries until they decided to make it a co-principality in 1278, giving it de facto independence. In 1993, Andorra declared a new constitution, becoming an independent European state with a democratically elected parliament.
While cynics will dismiss such proposals as utopian, there is much to be gained and little to be lost by promoting people-to-people contacts between Indians and Pakistanis, even if it happens in San Francisco. The city has a distinguished history of sponsoring peacekeeping initiatives. It hosted the birth of the United Nations, was in the vanguard of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, protested the Gulf War and held one of the largest rallies against the Iraq war in February. It was entirely appropriate that discussions about how to liberate Kashmiris from the tyranny of war were held there in August, the month in which both India and Pakistan were liberated from the tyranny of colonial rule 56 years ago.
Dr Ahmad Faruqui is an economist and author of “Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan”. He can be reached at [email protected]