Essay
Siachen, where 'brave' men struggle
Farida Shaikh analyses a pointless conflict
On April 7, 2012 nearly 124 soldiers and 11 civilians were buried alive in an avalanche. It was a huge tragedy that affected troops of 6 Northern Light Infantry, battalion stationed in Gayari area, Skardu, at an altitude of over 4,000 meters the highest battlefield in the world, where Pakistani and Indian troops are entrenched against each other. It was reported that the Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) teams took readings at 26 different points and identified eight sites for further search. Rescue operations for the soldiers buried alive continues, while Pakistan and India are expected to hold discussions on the Siachen glacier row on June 11 and 12, to demilitarize the world's highest battleground. India and Pakistan are fighting on an uninhabited snow-clad mountainous, no-man's land, Siachen, 20,000 feet above sea level. The sounds from the old debate made way for two seminars on Siachen organized at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and Kuch Khaas in Pakistan. The climate affairs advisor for the government said that scientific studies revealed that the eastern glaciers were melting more rapidly than glaciers in western regions. Average temperatures in the northern areas have increased by 0.76 Celsius, causing an increase in the frequency of heat waves that adversely affect the environment in the region. The Siachen glacier is under stress from factors such as global warming, black carbon and human military interventions. The adviser declared that it would be in the interest of both nations to withdraw forces from Siachen. According to legal experts, Siachen is a political issue and is tied to the delineation of the Line of Control (LoC). Pakistan and India initiated talks on the Siachen issue many times in the past, but these kept failing when it was time to draft an agreement, mostly on account of conflicts over the language and contents of the agreement. The expert suggestion was that political and legal experts on both sides must first talk and frame an applicable bilateral agreement for withdrawing forces from the area. The SDPI Water and Energy Advisor and an expert on glaciers said that the rise in temperatures on the Siachen glacier is the direct result of large scale military interventions from both sides. He said soldiers on the glacier have used chemicals to melt and cut through the glacial ice to construct bunkers, camps, helipads and airfields. He rejected the notion that global warming was melting the glacier and cited a NASA report, Advancing Glaciers and Positive Mass Anomaly in the Karakoram-Himalaya, which states that more than 65 per cent of glaciers in the Karakoram Range are growing. An army officer shared his experiences at Siachen, saying that despite weather and health issues, the soldiers' morale is always high and they are always committed to their mission. 'The real enemy is not the person sitting across the LoC, but the weather, which envelopes a person from every side,' the officer said. He narrated that soldiers could not communicate with their families from the Siachen sector for many months and were often unable to even bathe for two months at a time. Besides the freezing temperature, he said, frustration was at an all-time high due to the isolation and often caused scuffles among the soldiers. He noted that they often talked with their Indian counterparts at the Siachen sector on duty and even exchanged dishes and gifts on some occasions. 'But you don't know how and when things change…' On 13 April the Siachen conflict between Pakistan and India entered its 18th year. Ershad Mahmud's book, Siachen Dispute: Background, Current Situation and Future Prospects, analyzes the causes of the failure of fourteen rounds of negotiations on Siachen held at the summit and secretary levels. In June 1989, both sides announced an agreement according to which Pakistan and India were to re-deploy their forces to their 1971 positions, as envisaged in the Simla Agreement. However, Indian officials denied the existence of any agreement after the joint announcement in Islamabad. Thus, on the implementation of the 1989 agreement, Pakistan linked the Siachen dispute with the Kashmir issue in the last round of talks, giving the issue an entirely new perspective. India demands that Pakistan accept the ground realities i.e. Indian position on the land. Further, the study contends that Pakistan' losses are very low, about 10 percent of Indian losses. This is because Pakistani forces are on significantly lower positions, just 32 km (at the most) away from the main road. Most of their bunkers are outside the glacier. The Pakistan army engineering corps has built quite a good road network in the area. This has enabled the army to replace its helicopter and porter system with army trucks, which in turn has resulted in a significant reduction in terms of financial and human costs. India is paying a high cost economically, about Rs 10 billion per year. A comparison shows that what India spends in a day, Pakistan spends during the whole month. The conflict has resulted in thousands of casualties, caused by the harsh terrain and adverse climate conditions, which by far is more than by bullets or shells. Both sides regularly exchange heavy artillery and machine-gun fire, and maintain brigade-level deployments of 3,000 to 4,000 troops. Heights of Madness: One Woman's Journey in Pursuit of a Secret War. 'At that height, rifles jammed and he used a bayonet and grenades to overcome the enemy.' The book was formally released by a former Indian defense minister, in Delhi on November 15, 2003, in the presence of Jaswant Singh, who was banished from the BJP for his book Jinnah, India, Partition & Independence. This was the first book on Siachen by a woman journalist, Myra MacDonald. She was Reuters chief in New Delhi and had been to both the Indian and the Pakistan-controlled sides of this highest battlefield on earth. She found that on both sides, troops lived in isolated outposts where their common enemy was the thin air and the extreme cold. The devastating calamity on account of the thin air is nakedly narrated in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, a personal account of the 1997 disaster on Mt. Everest. There was, and is, no point in the conflict of Siachen, which costs India Rs. 3 crores a day and where most casualties occur on account of the weather. With minimal editing, in simple, straightforward and highly readable prose, the writer allowed the actors to speak for themselves in this extraordinary story. Through interviews she gave a detailed picture of the lives of the jawans during their tours of duty on Siachen, which left them emaciated, sun-blackened and often frostbitten or psychologically disturbed. Siachen made one believe in ghosts and men left a bed empty for any visiting spirits of soldiers who had died there. Siachen means 'the place of roses', after the wild Sia roses that grow below the snout of the glacier. Prior to partition in 1947 this 'magnificent and terrible terrain' was hardly known. In 1949 a meeting was held in Karachi to draw up a ceasefire line between the Indian and Pakistani forces. However, at the end of the meeting, its status was left undefined. No one imagined that it could ever be a 'flashpoint.' Then, in the 1970s, the Pakistanis began what an Indian brigadier called "cartographic aggression" they started allowing foreign climbers to explore the mountains in the area. This activity made both India and Pakistan suspicious of each other. Both sides embarked on a patrolling exercise suspecting one another of intending to occupy the glacier and the neighbouring Saltoro range. India's first expedition to Siachen in 1978 also scaled the 24,631 feet Taram Kangri peek. MacDonald tracked down the Sherpa, who had scaled the glacier and the adjacent peak without modern equipment, on that expedition. The Siachen conflict began in 1984, the same year as Operation Blue Star, Indira Gandhi's assassination, the anti-Sikh riots and the Bhopal gas disaster. Ladakhi scouts and men of the 4th battalion of the Kumaon Regiment occupied a pass above Siachen in the blizzards of April. According to MacDonald, the aim of India's Operation Meghdoot was to put on a show of force, stake a claim to Siachen and withdraw before the winter. To the Pakistanis, such an unambiguous plan was inconceivable. Convinced that India must be aiming at something bigger, they reacted and the conflict escalated. Bana Singh won India's highest bravery award for an audacious attack on a Pakistani outpost at 21,000 feet in 1987. The book provides details on this act of valour. On her visits to Siachen, the writer found that the altitude made her unable to think or to take coherent notes. She rashly urged helicopter pilots to fly on, even in dangerous weather. Perhaps the effect of altitude was one of the reasons she found that even Indian soldiers' memories of the same events differ while Pakistani and Indian accounts of the same battles were irreconcilable. Discreetly, MacDonald made no attempt to reconcile the differences. Each individual is given his say. On both sides, she found a similar regimental spirit and a similar commitment to keep every inch of territory. However, the Pakistan army to her seemed much richer, its standards of living in the conflict zone higher. Its PR machine bombarded her with information, using power point presentations and scale models that showed the entire region as 'Siachen' and made the frontline seem much longer than it did in India. MacDonald was able to visit Siachen when there was a ceasefire in place. But nature, she reminded us, has declared no such ceasefire. She clearly believed that peace initiatives needed to allow troops down once and for all from those heights of madness.
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