UK calls for end to Kashmir infiltration

Britain's High Commissioner to India Rob Young called Thursday for an end to infiltration from Pakistani to Indian Kashmir and urged dialogue to end the five-decade dispute over the Himalayan province.

Young, on a visit to the insurgency-wracked Indian zone of divided Kashmir, stressed that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had promised to end the flow of Islamic rebels across the de facto border.

"The British government along with the American government and other governments have been trying to ensure that the commitments which President Musharraf made last summer are fully carried out and there is an end to cross-border infiltration," Young told a function in Kulgam, 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of the summer capital Srinagar.

At the height of a crisis with India last year following a series of massacres, Musharraf pledged to US officials that Pakistan would do its best to prevent militants from crossing into Indian Kashmir.

The standoff, which had brought a million troops to the common borders of India and Pakistan, eased in October after elections in Indian Kashmir and intense diplomacy by the United States and Britain.

"One of the main messages that I have brought with me is that there must be an end to violence," Young told several hundred people at the function, which was organised by Kashmiri communist legislator Yusuf Tarigami.

"Violence will achieve nothing. All it achieves is the misery and despair of the ordinary people of Jammu and Kashmir," the envoy said, adding that the "only way forward is dialogue and democratic process."

Meanwhile, a top Kashmir separatist said Thursday he had urged Britain's envoy to New Delhi to arrange talks among India, Pakistan and Kashmiris to resolve the five-decade dispute.

Shabir Shah told AFP he met late Wednesday with British High Commissioner Rob Young in Indian-administered Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar.

"I told the ambassador that Britain should at least try to facilitate talks among India, Pakistan and the Kashmiri separatists," Shah said.

Britain -- like the United States and other Western countries -- has in the past declined to mediate over Kashmir, whose status was unresolved in 1947 when the subcontinent was partitioned at independence from London.