Osama uses Hindu theme to rally Muslim street support: Analysts
SHAUN TANDON
New Delhi, October 15, 19:29
The demand by Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida network that the United States stop supporting Hindus in Kashmir was a new strategy to rally Muslim and particularly Pakistani opinion against US-led strikes on Afghanistan, analysts in New Delhi said on Monday.
"The international terrorist bin Laden calls for a holy war against America and India."
"They may be trying to appeal to Muslims all around the world to enlist their support, as they now feel threatened," said Zafarul Islam Khan, editor of Milli Gazette, a Muslim-oriented newspaper based in Delhi. "This would only embarrass the Pakistani government," he added.
Bin Laden's Al-Qaida, the Afghanistan-based network accused of being behind the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, raised the Hindu issue in a weekend warning of more suicide aircraft attacks. The message, broadcast by the Qatar-based Arabic satellite network Al-Jazeera, reiterated the three main themes of Al-Qaida: an end to US backing for "Jews in Palestine," lifting the economic embargo on Iraq and a withdrawal troops from Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's two holiest shrines.
After reading the three demands, bin Laden aide Suleiman Abu Ghaith added a fourth that Washington and London must "stop your support of the Hindus against the Muslims in Kashmir."
India has already rejected Al-Qaida's threats, with a foreign ministry statement saying Kashmir "is not a Hindu-Muslim issue. It is the core of India's nationhood."
But analysts say the reference to Kashmir is likely part of a strategy to expand protests against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a vital US ally in the strikes on Afghanistan. Counter-terrorism expert Ajai Sahni said that while bin Laden has championed the Kashmiri cause in the past, the new emphasis on the conflict in India's only Muslim-majority state is intended to "whip up as much street support as possible."
"It doesn't matter if this is just a few hundred protesters everywhere (in the Muslim world), it is more to create an illusion of a unified Islamic world and response," he added. "That is what is worrying to strategic observers, particularly in America."
Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, said Al-Qaida could try to take advantage of the vacuum created when Pakistan distanced itself from its blanket support for Kashmiri separatists by describing an October 1 suicide bombing as "an act of terrorism." They will want to show themselves "as the primary warriors or instrumentalist who are opposing such 'oppressive' policies," said Sahni.
More than 35,000 people have been killed since insurgency broke out in 1989 in Kashmir, the focal point of two wars between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. Tensions between the two countries have been rising during the US-led war on terrorism as India pushes Washington to expand the battle to include Pakistani-supported Islamic separatists fighting in Kashmir.
Five days before the September 11 attacks that killed 5,600 people in the United States, Washington's new ambassador to India Robert Blackwill, suggested a further warming of ties between Washington and New Delhi. Among the bonds was their common place on top of bin Laden's hit list, he said.
"The international terrorist Osama bin Laden calls for a holy war against America and India in the same breath," Blackwill said.
But to many in India, the suggestion of an unholy US-Hindu alliance is dismissed as laughable."If anything the (US) position has been biased against India rather than the other way around," Sahni said.
"There's an almost universal feeling in India that America has absolutely, and even criminally, neglected the issue of terrorism in Kashmir." "But these are not contests of fact, these are contests of perception."
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