Pakistan, which has never accepted the accession of Jammu and Kashmir's last king to India, attempted to resolve the issue by force in 1947 by sending tribal infiltrators to drive out minority Hindus, and succeeded in installing an Islamic regime in the third of the state it captured. About a decade ago, it put into action a plan for supporting an Islamic insurgency in the state under Indian control. One of the primary aims of this plan was to drive the minority Hindu population out of Kashmir valley. The unarmed Hindu population was subjected to gruesome murders, rapes, intimidation and harassment.

The 300,000-strong Hindu population dwindled down to a few families very quickly, and many became refugees in their own country, living in squalid ‘migrant' camps. Although the back of the insurgency in the valley of Kashmir was broken by the Indian military in the next few years, Pakistan had succeeded in its aim of ethnically cleansing the valley.

This process is now being repeated in the southern regions of the state. Over the past few years, numerous such massacres of minority Hindus have been carried out by Islamic terrorists supported and armed by Pakistan. The victims have often included women and children. It is evident that the Pakistani design is to clear the whole state of Hindus in order to drastically change the composition of its population. With total ethnic cleansing accomplished, Pakistan believes that it would be much easier to lay its claim on the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Balkanization, made famous by the likes of Karadzic and Milosevic in erstwhile Yugoslavia, has been perfected by Pakistan in Kashmir for decades. This central tenet of the tragedy in Kashmir has been long ignored by much of the international media.

Pakistan has tried to deflect attention on its support of international terrorism and ethnic cleansing by claiming it only provides ‘diplomatic and moral support to Kashmiri militants. The hollowness of this claim is apparent in countless reports of infiltration of heavily armed militants and mercenaries, trained in Pakistan-based terrorist camps, into Jammu and Kashmir and the gruesome horrors perpetrated by them. Harkat-ul-Ansar, recognized as a terrorist group by the US State Department last year, is only one of many such groups operating out of Pakistan.

It is time that the United States, as the leader of the free world, take steps to apply pressure on the Pakistani government and help in stamping out this dangerous Islamic terrorism emanating from that country. A beginning could be made in this direction by clearly threatening to put Pakistan on a list of terrorist countries such as Libya, Syria and North Korea, and demanding that it stop any further support of ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir.

 Having accomplished their goal of driving most Hindus out of Kashmir valley, the current spate of terror attacks on soft targets in Jammu and adjoining areas is clearly meant to replicate their strategy in this region.

 Indian authorities need to take immediate steps to provide effective protection for the Hindu population in this area, flush out terrorists hiding in the mountainous regions of the area, and to seal the border with Pakistan, from where terrorists and arms have been flowing in freely for the last decade.

 In a statement on June 24th, 1998, he said the US should focus more attention on the role of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate for the recent wave of violence against Hindu civilians in the region. ''Pakistan's support for insurgency in Kashmir goes far beyond that country's claim of only providing diplomatic and moral support to separatist groups,'' Pallone said.

 He called on top US diplomats to coordinate their efforts through the United Nations to address the cause of human rights of the Hindu community. Pallone said he would write to the US ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke, US ambassador to India, Richard Celeste and US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Nancy Rubin to focus more attention on the Hindu victims of the insurgency in Kashmir.

 If these reports are true, it may be a wake-up call in the West to the dangers posed by an immature, unstable country that has been militarized to the teeth by countries like China and North Korea, actively supports international terrorism, and thrives on one of the most strident forms of Islamic fundamentalism.