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 Press Coverage |
A park to give peace a chance
Mohua Chatterjee
Copyright (C) 2001 The Times of India; Source: World Reporter (TM)
NEW DELHI: "A peace park in Siachen is the best way to stop the unannounced war in the region, since the park could be maintained by the governments and both India and Pakistan could have their own sattelite surveillance systems to keep away infiltrators," says Aamir Ali, who retired from the International Labour Office and has been a mountaineer all his life, with four Himalayan expeditions to his credit.
The Siachen glacier that derives its name from "Sia" meaning roses in Baltic, no longer grows the wild roses in abundance. Since 1984 the Indian Army has been cutting rosewood for tent pegs and other functional purposes. In 17 years, it has become famous for being the world's highest battleground, highest helipad (19,000ft), highest drop zone (22,000 ft) and the highest cemetery.
With troops stationed there, the glacier which is the source of river Indus, has become a dumpyard of cans, drums, tetrapacks, aluminium foils and medical waste. A thousand kg of human waste is packed in metal dumps and shoved into crevices every day, which amounts to 4000 metal drums per year.
This degradation of the Himalayas is a major cause for concern, especially for mountaineers. Some of whom have got together to propose that Siachen be turned into a peace park and are planning to suggest this to the Prime Minister, as an agenda for the forthcoming Musharraf-Vajpayee talks in July. "Since 2002 has been declared as the International Year of the Mountains, if Vajpayee makes this proposal to Musharraf, it'll be a great public relations coup for India," feels Ali.
On June 23, 1951, the first Indian expedition climbed a major peak, Trishul. The summit team included Gurdial Singh, Roy Greenwood, Dawa Thondup, Nalin Jayal and Surendra Lall. The achievement marks the beginning of Indian mountaineering, according to Himalayan Club and Indian Mountaineering Foundation which will join Doon School Old Boys' Society to commemorate the day as the 50th anniversary of Indian mountaineering.
On this occasion, the `Peace Park proposal' will be made at a meeting chaired by Kapila Vatsayan, who will, thereafter, carry it to the Prime Minister with a request to include it in his talks with Musharraf.
"Transfrontier parks have been coming as buffers in conflict areas in the last 70 years," says Ali. Like, the Amistad Peace Park between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, a park in the Balkan area between Macedonia, Greece and Albania, between Czekoslavakia and Poland, Indonesia and Malaysia and Hungary, Yugoslavia and Croatia was agreed upon for setting up in 1999. "The idea has really caught on in Southern Africa, a troubled region in recent decades. The Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park was formed by joining two parks in South Africa and Botswana in May 2000. South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have agreed on one too.