Pakistan wants India to withdraw Army from Siachen – India hesitant to trust Pakistan
P. Roman
Jun. 14, 2005

Can India trust Pakistan ever after Kargil? The question reverberates as both sides negotiate on Siachen. Pakistan officially asked India to vacate the “would be mountain of peace.”

According media sources from Ladakh, Pakistan today called on India tounconditionally withdraw its troops from the 21,000-feet high Siachen glacier to make it a "peaceful area."

The response comes a day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to the glacier and his call to convert the world's highest battlefield into a "mountain of peace."

"India committed aggression in 1983, it has to vacate the aggression to make Siachen Glacier a peaceful area," Foreign Office spokesman Jalil Abbas Jilani said at his weekly press briefing, while commenting on Dr Singh's statement.

Pakistan wants a withdrawal of troops to the position as of the Ceasefire Agreement reached after the 1971 war while India seeks authentication of deployment on present positions.

Termed the "highest battleground in the world," the dispute on Siachen broke out in 1984 when India moved its troops to the glacier, a move Pakistan claimed violated the 1948 Ceasefire Agreement.

Since then, the two armies have faced each other in the frigid zone, where the temperature sometime drops to 40 degrees Celsius below freezing point.

Several rounds of talks held since 1984 failed to resolve the issue. In their most round of talks held in Islamabad (May 26-27), the two countries again failed to make any progress on demilitarizing the glacier but decided to continue the talks.

Jilani said that the "Indian takeover" of Siachen was in gross violation of the 1948 Karachi Peace Agreement and the Simla Accord of 1972.

"Once India withdraws its troops, Siachen would certainly be a mountain of peace," he added.

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