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Indo-Pakistani Peace Summit Collapses As Bloodshed Rises in Kashmir
SRINAGAR, India, July 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A dramatic upsurge in bloodshed struck Indian-ruled Kashmir as Monday's peace talks between India and Pakistan apparently collapsed without the hoped-for conclusion of a joint declaration on the fate of the scenic Himalayan territory.
Forty-two people were reported killed Monday, pushing the toll to 220 in the run-up to the summit since July 4, as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf prepared to leave India after an unsatisfactory close to the summit.
"President Musharraf has decided to return home. The president is leaving without a declaration," Pakistan government spokesman Anwar Mahmood said. "We have been waiting for hours after the two leaders had agreed on issuing a joint declaration."
The discussions had been dominated by the bitter dispute over Kashmir, where Indian authorities said they had foiled a major attack by Muslim activists had planned for Monday to undermine the India-Pakistan summit on its final day.
The activist plans were foiled with the arrest Sunday of two suspected activists in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, the spokesman said.
Earlier Monday, the conservative movement Lashkar-e-Taiba claimed responsibility for an attack on an army camp, which police said left five Indian soldiers dead and more than a dozen wounded.
The attack was likely in retaliation for the army's killing of 19 activists Sunday in the southern Kashmiri district of Poonch.
Police sources claimed the soldiers shot the activists dead in nearly seven hours of fighting after the armed men crossed over from Pakistan.
Meanwhile in Agra - the city of the famed Taj Mahal - the long-anticipated talks between Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had stalled over differences in the wording of the joint declaration.
Senior officials close to the talks said Kashmir had been the sticking point in thrashing out a mutually acceptable formula for the joint declaration, which would have provided a road map for the future course of bilateral negotiations.
Vajpayee and Musharraf had been in Agra since Sunday for talks aimed at ending more than 50 years of hostility and mistrust between the nuclear-capable South Asian powers.
Foreign ministry delegations had haggled for hours over the wording of the crucial declaration, but failed to come to any agreement.
Vajpayee and Musharraf had been ensconced in their respective hotels all afternoon, with the Pakistani leader canceling a visit to a Sufi Muslim shrine in the northern Indian town of Ajmer.
The first day of summit talks had been described as "frank, cordial and constructive" and Vajpayee had accepted an invitation to visit Pakistan later in the year.
Then on Monday, Musharraf appeared to grasp the initiative from his hosts with a passionate appeal for India to accept that a resolution of the Kashmir dispute was the only way forward to a full normalization of relations.
The neighbors have fought three full-scale wars since the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947 - two of them over Kashmir, which is divided between the two countries and claimed by both.
"Let us not remain under any illusion that the main issue confronting us is Kashmir," the Pakistani military leader told a meeting of senior Indian newspaper editors just before his third round of talks with Vajpayee.
"I will carry on saying it whether anyone agrees or not, because this is what we have killed each other for," he added.
"If you see the history of freedom struggle anywhere in the world, there is innocent blood. This is happening in Kashmir also. So what is the deduction? Solve Kashmir, and this will stop."
Musharraf said Pakistan was not "encouraging" the violence in Kashmir; dismissing Indian accusations that Islamabad backs cross-border "terrorism".
"You call it terrorism, we call it a genuine freedom struggle," Musharraf said.
A Muslim separatist insurgency in Indian-controlled Kashmir, which New Delhi alleges is sponsored by Pakistan in the form of a "proxy war", has claimed at least 35,000 lives since its launch in 1989.
Pakistan, which puts the death toll at 70,000, denies the charges of "cross-border terrorism" but extends open moral and diplomatic support to the Muslim-majority Kashmiris' right to self-determination.
Vajpayee, in his opening summit statement, which was released to the press Monday, said India believed that "a framework to address the differences between us on Jammu and Kashmir would have to include the issue of cross-border terrorism in its ambit."
Musharraf had said he was willing to discuss all issues of bilateral concern as long as there was progress on Kashmir.
"I have fought two wars.... I've been in the front," the general said. "I know what it is when one fights.
"What I have learned is ... never close the door shut, ever, on diplomacy. We must always continue with this process of dialogue... which has been extremely fruitful."
Musharraf proposed that the Agra summit - the first official contact between the rival nations since a two-month border conflict in Kashmir in the summer of 1999 - be taken as the beginning of a three-step mechanism for improving relations.
"Step two is the acceptance of Kashmir as the main issue that must be resolved," Musharraf said.
Step three would be to look at all possible solutions to the Kashmir problem and agree on which ones could be mutually discarded as unworkable.
"Having done that, we would have come a little way and can go on to further discussions," he said.
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