Quiet war on world’s highest battleground

Press, 25 July 1984, Page 10

Quiet war on world’s highest battleground

NZPA-Reuter Islamabad, Pakistan Army patrols probing across the world’s highest battleground, a glacier 6000 metres above the sea, have given a new twist to the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. Fragmentary reports from the two countries speak of dozens of casualties in clashes on the Siachen Glacier. On Siachen, the longest ice river outside the Polar regions, men fight to draw breath from the rarified’ air and temperatures oscillate between intense heat by day and bitter cold at night But in the last three months this Himalayan wasteland just beneath the Chinese border has become the arena for the latest stage in a struggle for con-' trol of Kashmir which dates back to independence for India and Pakistan from Britain in 1947. Officials in Islamabad and in New Delhi are saying almost nothing about the incidents in which Western diplomats say that each country may have lost as many as 24 soldiers. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, announced on Saturday that commanders from the two sides had met last week to discuss fighting at the 75km-long glacier. He made the announcement after a

member of Pakistan’s Federal Advisory Council said that Indian troops had captured the glacier and killed many Pakistanis. Islamabad asserts that the border line stretches north-east to the Karakorum Pass, but New Delhi says that the line runs to the north-west along the Saltoro range, west of the Siachen Glacier. The two sides have clashed several times since April this year. One senior Pakistani official said that Indian forces seemed to be still in control of two of the three passes leading on to the glacier.

New Delhi has not officially commented on these incidents, but informed Indian sources said that Indian troops had repulsed Pakistani soldiers trying to set up a position in the Nubra Valley. Military analysts said that neither side could claim to have taken the glacier because troops would have to quit before winter turned the inhospitable area into a death-trap. In the long term both States are anxious over the strategic value of the region. India is worried about Pakistan’s Karakorum highway to China, a possible artery for Chinese military aid to Islamabad and the extension of airstrips near the Indian border. '