According to a communiqué dated July 18 2008, Laura Hickey, a senior British official, told the Americans that “stabilising Kashmir is also important for UK domestic security reasons.” Ms Hickey, the Foreign Office’s Pakistan team leader, said there was “a growing trend of UK-based parents who send their 'problem children’ to madrassahs in Kashmir, and these students are at high risk of radicalisation”.
Later Ms Hickey told the US diplomats of “what HMG internally terms the 'Kashmir escalation effect’. This meant that “while it appears the government of Pakistan has ceased to run militant training camps in Kashmir, the camps continue to operate.
“Terrorist organisations, like al-Qaeda, have begun using these camps as recruitment centres. After additional training … recruitees are then poised to commit terrorist activities.”
Britain was also concerned that “UK passport-holders will be recruited to commit terrorist operations in the UK.
“With the continued presence of militant training camps in Kashmir and over half a million UK passport-holders with ties to the region, HMG is concerned that UK nationals will be recruited to conduct terrorist activities in the UK.”
The cable continued: “As part of the 'Promoting British Islam’ programme, prominent Muslim Britons of Pakistani descent travel to Kashmir on goodwill trips to explain life as a Muslim in the UK.”
The news adds context to comments made by David Miliband, who was then foreign secretary, on a visit to India in the following January, when he told a newspaper that “resolution of the Kashmir dispute would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms”, a remark that outraged many Indians.
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For a far more extensive representation of muslim violence worldwide go to the Religion of Peace website
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