Kashmir India

Twenty-one people, including five Hindu villagers, were killed on Sunday in several incidents of separatist violence in Indian Kashmir, police said. The violence comes despite U.S.-led international efforts to pull nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan back from the brink of a fourth war. Police said suspected Muslim rebels shot dead five Hindu villagers in the Himalayan region's Udhampur district on Sunday. Security forces rushed to the village.

After eight months of slow progress toward lasting peace, foreign ministers from India and Pakistan met Sunday to search for solutions to their main dispute, the 57-year conflict over the divided territory of Kashmir. Spokesmen for Indian Foreign Minister K. Natwar Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri said talks on the first day of the two-day summit went well, but gave no details.

Talks between India and Pakistan on the Kashmir dispute ended in a flop Monday, with the countries still so far apart they could not even agree on a date for the next round of negotiations. "We are in the same position as when we started," Indian Foreign Secretary J.N. Dixit told reporters before catching a plane home from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. The continuing stalemate after more than seven hours of negotiations bodes ill for the ability of Indian Prime Minister P.V.

Pakistani leaders said Sunday that military forces they were supporting had begun pulling back from Indian territory in Kashmir, signaling an end to two months of border fighting that brought the nuclear-armed states to the brink of a full-scale war. Pakistani Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz said his government had decided to order the withdrawal of forces from the disputed Himalayan region to avert a larger conflict.

India and Pakistan entered their 48th year of independence this week by exchanging harsh, in-your-face remarks over Kashmir, showing yet again how acrimonious their relations remain after nearly half a century as unhappy neighbors. "With you, without you, in spite of you, Kashmir will remain an integral part of India," Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, vowed Monday in a no-nonsense message directed at Pakistan.

Prospects for peace between India and Pakistan dimmed Friday as Indian leaders charged that six of their soldiers were mutilated and tortured to death while in Pakistani custody. Outrage among Indians crested on the eve of today's peace talks between the two countries, which have been engaged in heavy fighting along their disputed border in the Kashmir region since last month. The fighting has raised fears of a wider war between the two states, which tested nuclear weapons last year.

Indian soldiers killed 11 suspected Muslim rebels and five unarmed Bangladeshis trying to sneak into the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir on Friday, police said. Two Indian soldiers also were killed. Five of the suspected rebels were trying to cross to India's side of the Line of Control -- the boundary that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan -- about 75 miles north of Srinagar, a police officer said on condition of anonymity.

President Clinton opened his five-day tour of India on Tuesday by endorsing New Delhi's position on the volatile region of Kashmir, rejecting calls by longtime U.S. ally Pakistan to referee the dispute. Standing with Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Clinton implored the subcontinent's two nuclear-armed rivals to refrain from attacking each other across the 450-mile contested border known as the Line of Control.

India and the Muslim militants battling for control of northern Kashmir gave starkly conflicting signals Saturday about the situation on the ground and the prospects for a truce. Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said his forces had dislodged Muslim militant "infiltrators" from most of the areas they occupied and that "remaining pockets" would also be cleared. "The enemy's intrusion and aggression in Kargil has now been decisively turned back . . .

Indian negotiators have offered to release jailed Kashmiri militants to gain the freedom of more than 150 hostages on a hijacked jet in Afghanistan, but talks are deadlocked concerning the issue of sanctuaries for the hijackers and the militants, Afghan officials and other sources said Thursday.