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| Wednesday, 14 July 2004 |
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India demines Kashmir borders as ties with rival Pakistan improve R.S.PORA, India, Tuesday (AFP) Indian troops have removed 80 percent of the hundreds of thousands of landmines which were planted on the border in Indian Kashmir following a near-war with Pakistan in 2001, a military commander said. "We had laid 200,000 landmines in the Jammu region but we have demined 80 percent of the area," said Brigadier A.K.Wason, supervising the work in the R.S.Pora frontier sector near Indian Kashmir's winter capital of Jammu. India and Pakistan amassed almost a million troops on their borders following an attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 by Muslim guerrillas New Delhi said were sponsored by Islamabad. The tense 10-month stand-off ended following international pressure on both India and Pakistan, who fought two of their three wars over Kashmir since independence in 1947. Relations between the two countries began to thaw in April last year. Brigadier Wason said the army had imported specialised equipment including demining vehicles to speed up the exercise in a bid to hand back frontier land to local farmers. "We have to clear the border area of another 45,000 landmines and then we will hand over the fields to the farmers within one month," the army engineer told AFP in R.S. Pora, some 22 kilometres (14 miles) from Jammu. Wason said manual demining was abandoned because of fears of accidents after it was discovered many mines had shifted. "Initially manual demining was carried out but when we found several thousand landmines had drifted due to rains we had to use demining tractors," he said. "The task became more difficult when we found that landmines which were planted two to three inches (five to 7.5 centimetres) deep had buried themselves deeper," he said, adding that not more than five soldiers were injured during the ongoing exercise in R.S.Pora. |
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