Former Kashmiri guerrilla recalls path to peace
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-06-06 18:27

MUZZAFARABAD, Pakistan - Yasin Malik talks wistfully of his days as a rebel fighting for Kashmir's independence from Indian rule and of heart-stopping crossings over the border from Pakistan more than 15 years ago.

Last week he crossed the frontier legally with eight other separatist leaders -- to demand a role for Kashmiris in the 18-month-old peace process between India and Pakistan.

The return to the place where he was first given a gun to fight Indian prompted Malik, leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), to recall his personal odyssey.

"You basically need romanticism to become a guerrilla," he said as he rested in a Muzzafarabad hotel.

"I still have that romanticism, but now ... I am committed to total non-violent struggle."

Malik and other separatist leaders from Indian Kashmir, who are visiting Pakistan with India's blessings, are due to meet President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad on Tuesday.

It was on June 2, 1988, that Malik walked through the mountains to the Pakistani side of Kashmir and returned with a gun to fight the Indian Army.

Exactly 17 years later, on June 2, 2005, he came back again.

In the interim, the conflict in Kashmir, India's only Muslim majority state, has taken more than 45,000 lives.

Malik's adult life has been dedicated to the cause. The mop of black hair brushed across the brow and glossy beard belong to a rebel who dreams of a united Kashmir, ruled by Kashmiris who are not beholden to either India or Pakistan.

While the JKLF is a nationalist movement at heart, the rebels who have fuelled the insurgency since the mid-1990s are Islamists, either based in, or supported by Pakistan.

These hardliners want all of Kashmir to be part of Pakistan, and are angry with Musharraf's efforts to reach an accommodation with India.

But their way isn't Malik's.

"Now I have come for peace. I have come with the democratic trust of the people of Kashmir," said Malik whose JKLF enjoys sizable support on both sides of the frontier.

DICING WITH DEATH

At 38, Malik is a dour veteran who gave up the gun in 1994 to agitate peacefully for self-rule in Kashmir.

His choice of favourite Urdu poet is appropriate. The late Faiz Ahmed Faiz's revolutionary verses read like an ode to Malik's history as a serial escapologist.

"The suspense that lasts between killers and weapons as they gamble: Who will die and whose turn is next? That bet has now been placed on me."

Malik bears the scars of his struggle -- most notably from jumping from a fifth floor window to escape capture in 1990.

His injuries left him deaf in one ear and the left side of his face paralysed. He constantly wipes one nostril, and speaks haltingly, though listeners hang on every pause.

Looking back, Malik was nostalgic as he recounted the eight times he had sneaked across the ceasefire line with comrades, many of whom died long ago.

Along with the late Ashfaq Majid Wani, Malik came to "personify the intifada generation of the azaadi (freedom) movement", political scientist Sumantra Bose wrote in a study of the Kashmir conflict, drawing parallels with the early Palestinian uprising in the Israeli Occupied Territories.

For someone who has been arrested countless times and spent more than 10 years in jail -- the last time for eight months in 2002 -- Malik prefers to remember the close shaves.

Like the time an Indian army patrol halted for two hours just a stride away from him and Wani as they rested under a tree. Inexplicably, the soldiers failed to spot them.

"Until now, I can't explain how it happened. It was a memorable event in my life. Death was two feet (less than a metre) away, and had to decide our fate."

Fate caught up with them just months later in early 1990.

Wani was shot by security forces. And within days, Malik almost died jumping from that window in Srinagar.

The soldiers couldn't recognise Malik's smashed face and he was taken to a hospital where a sympathiser smuggled him out and organised his treatment in secret.

The media even declared him dead, but he was recaptured eventually, and the rigours of prison caused an infection in his heart that required surgery.

"Fifty movies can be made on this struggle," he says without smiling.

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