Title: Clinton attributes
Sikh killings to his visit
Author: TV Parasuram
Publication: The Economic
Times
Date: April 16, 2000
THE US President Bill
Clinton has said the massacre of 35 Sikhs in Chattisinghpura in Jammu and
Kashmir on March 20 was carried out because he was visiting India and was
perpetrated by those who do not want the turmoil in the state to be eased.
"I'm sure they were murdered
because I was there. Those people lost their lives because I went to India
and Pakistan," he said during a fund-raising luncheon for Georgia Democratic
Represen-tative Cynthia Mckinney at Atlanta yesterday. "The people who
don't want their turmoil to be eased used my trip there as a pretext to
highlight the difficulties. And somebody, we do not know who, killed perfectly
innocent people-who, I might add, had never before been targeted in all
the conflicts in Kashmir," Mr Clinton told the gathering which was attended
by many members of the Sikh community.
Mr Clinton expressed
his outrage over the killings. He said that if the difficulties over Kashmir
could be resolved, people in South Asia would explode as there is literally
no limit to the potential of the life that could be had there.
"But they are sort of
kept back from the modern world by this ancient tension," he said.
Although Mr Clinton did
not directly accuse Pakistan of conducting cross-border terrorism, a US
think tank, the centre for international studies said, "the long term outlook
depends partly on whether the Pakistan government is willing or able to
discipline militant groups. If it cannot or will not, prospects for US-Pakistan
relations and for regional stability are poor." Praising the Indian
effort to penetrate computers in remotest of its villages he said, "I was
in a remotest of Indian villages and I saw how computers worked there and
the use of Hindi, the mother of languages in the computers." The way the
internet is transforming life, Mr Clinton said that no country can be isolated
from it. Two years ago there were two million internet users in China;
last year there were nine million; this year there will be over 20m; within
two years there will be over 100m.
The centre for strategic
and international studies said that about 65 per cent of the software requirements
of the US come from India or Indians, and some 30 per cent of the world's
software engineers are of Indian origin.
Mr Clinton, however,
expressed grief over the per capita income of an average Indian, standing
at $450 a year, labelled "very poor" by international standards.-Agencies
