THE CLOCK ticks to an awesome anniversary today - Blackburn hostage Paul Wells will have spent a whole year in captivity in remote Kashmir; a year in which the 25-year-old student's mountain trekking holiday turned into an enduring ordeal beyond our imagination.

He is not alone.

Also held by Kashmiri rebels are fellow Briton Keith Mangan, American climber Donald Hutchings and German student Dirk Hasert, all of them innocent travellers like Paul who were snatched as pawns for their captors' separatist cause.

Yet, as that awful shared fate drags out into a year, the turn of the calendar must make Paul and his fellow hostages wonder whether they are forgotten.

We must let them know somehow they are not.

And we must let them know that hope and action for their release is undiminished.

For, if it is possible to conceive even a fraction of their anguish, then the direst depths of it must be the times when they wonder how long their ordeal must last and if anyone in the outside world still cares.

And though none of us can truly realise the suffering which also extends to the loved ones of the hostages - so cruelly compounded when rumour spreads on whether they are still alive - at least for those at home it is mitigated.

We learn that from Paul's family, who tell us today that their pain is eased by the confidence that all that can be done is being done, and by the knowledge that hundreds of people in countries all over the world are at work at that task.

And, we are sure, it is eased also by the prayers and good wishes of countless people.

But let it now be ended. And let Paul and his colleagues know that it will.

For no cause warrants such cruelty.

The whole notion of Kashmiri independence, no matter what legitimacy it claims, is set back and besmirched by this evil.

And if, on this anniversary, the cold logic of that truth cannot convince Paul's captors of the futility of their action, then let the ignominy of it reach their hearts so that he and his fellows are freed at last.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.