Earthquake anniversary: Pakistan reiterates support for Kashmir

'People of Pakistan and Kashmir are bound together historically, religiously and geographically.' PHOTO: PPI/FILE

MUZAFFARABAD:
In a speech marking the sixth anniversary of the 2005 earthquake, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, while announcing a list of projects, reaffirmed the government’s support for the “freedom, development and prosperity of Kashmir”.

“The people of Pakistan and Kashmir are bound together historically, religiously and geographically,” Gilani said, addressing the inaugural ceremony of AJK’s first medical college in Muzaffarabad on Saturday.
The prime minister announced to name the medical college after veteran Kashmiri political leader Mirwaiz Molvi Farooq, who is also the father of All Parties Hurriyat Conference leader Mirwaiz Umer Farooq.
The premier expressed hope that travel and trade between the two parts of Kashmir will lead to a “destination of freedom”.

He also announced the set up of an Information Technology University in Rawalakot and the creation of 2,000 jobs in the AJK police department.Speaking of the success of the reconstruction programme, he said that 99 per cent of earthquake survivors in the rural areas of AJK have completed the reconstruction of their houses with financial assistance from the government.

“It is highly satisfactory for us that the UN has rated our housing project as one of the most successful programmes in the world after a disaster of such magnitude,” he said.He added that 3,752 reconstruction projects, at a cost of Rs58 billion have been completed while work on 2,613 is under progress.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 9th, 2011.

‘If they tell me my son is dead, I’d hug his grave’

Kashmiri mother’s relentless fight to trace her son ends with her death

When the mothers, whose sons disappeared during last 20 years of Kashmir conflict, gather for their monthly remembering assembly this time, they will also be mourning a mother, who died waiting for her son to come back. Mughli — the elderly mother whose relentless fight to know the whereabouts of her only son had become the epitome of the struggle of the parents of disappeared in Kashmir — left for her heavenly abode Sunday last, leaving behind memories of togetherness in struggle, desolation and a renewed hope for the mission ahead.

Mughli’s son — Nazir Ahmad Teli — was a school teacher, who disappeared in 1990 after he was picked up by Indian security forces, never to return. For years, Mughli lived alone in her large family house deep inside Srinagar’s Habba Kadal where narrow streets snake through a cluster of housing blocks. Old age had turned her nearly deaf but the hope that her son may return saw her spending days at the window, looking out at the door. Today, the rusty chain link that would shut the mite-eaten door of her house is locked.

One morning — Mughli once told to a newspaper correspondent — it was in September 1990 when her son, Nazir Ahmad Teli, a teacher by profession, left for school. She never saw him again — and Mughli became one of the first members of the tragic club of several thousand women whose young sons or husbands have disappeared.

“Maine Nazira, aave kha (My Nazir, have you come), she said and closed her eyes,” said Parveena Ahangar, the President of Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). “For the last 19 years, she had been craving to see her son, to know of his fate. She was always full of hope.” Ahangar said.

Mughli’s death was especially tragic for the group. “We feel that we will die one by one, looking for our children,” Parveena said, adding, “Over the years, we had developed such a strong attachment with each other. This bond of mutual pain and hope has turned us into a large family. Now we are losing hope and with her death, one story of pain has come to a sudden end. But it has also left a gaping wound.”

Mougli was laid to rest at her ancestral graveyard at Narwara in Srinagar.

“Medical reason for her death may be renal failure or heart attack but she actually died longing for her only son,” says her nephew Abdul Rashid, at whose house Mougli stayed during past few months.

“I visited her house fortnightly and we used to share our pain. Repeating the same words every time we met, but it really acted as panacea for a while,” shares Fatima of Tankipora, whose son was picked up by the troops from Dalgate in early 90s and is still missing. “I lost my support,” cried Fatima, referring to her friend Mougli. However, Fatima vowed to continue the mission of Mougli. “We will not give up. She left us but instilled new hope as well.”

The APDP, according to its president, will be holding a special program on November 10 as part of their regular meeting at Partap Park Srinagar.

Bound together by mutual pain and a shared tale, the APDP says that at least 10,000 persons have disappeared in Jammu and Kashmir, the majority of them picked up by Indian security forces, during the last 20 years of turmoil. On the 10th and 28th of every month, the APDP meet remembering the disappeared, sharing their stories, helping each other cope and urging the government to take necessary action.

In an interview to an Indian daily ‘The Indian Express’ while she was still able to move around, Mughli — who didn’t remember her age — had said that the shock broke her back. “He was born after my husband divorced me. I had no one. I didn’t marry again and raised him. He was the only reason for my life,” she had said. “He had never stayed away from home — not even for a single night. Each day he would return from school and give me a hug. I am still waiting. I wish to hug him once. If they tell me he is dead, I would hug his grave. I don’t know what happened to him and this pain, this uncertainty is unbearable.”

She then took off her thick glasses and wiped her tears with the corner of her shawl. “Every time I tell this story I feel as if I rind my wounds — as if a sharp knife is dipped in my wound again,” she had said. “These walls are my only companion and they don’t ask anything.” She wailed in murmurs, her words inaudible. Where did you search for him? “I waited and waited for him that evening. When the sun went down and it was dark, I knew something was wrong. He would always come straight home after his work,” she had recalled. “I felt my heart sink and called my neighbours. They came and tried to console me till late in the night. I spent that night sitting at the window looking at the door. He didn’t return.”

Mughli had approached police officers and politicians and even visited every jail in Kashmir hoping to find her son. But nothing helped.

The APDP had helped her file a petition in the court which is still going on. Mughli, meanwhile, had taken refuge in faith and every Thursday, she would visit the shrines in the city, seeking divine help.

Mughli had never opened her son’s room ever since he went missing. She had said that her son comes in her dreams. “He (her son) calls me in the dream. He tells me he is alive,” she had said.

Pak equates Kashmir with Palestine

Two days after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made a historic move at the United Nations for recognition of his homeland as an independent State, Pakistan put the issue of Kashmir in the same bracket with the Middle East conflict and sought early resolution of the dispute in South Asia too.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told an annual meet of the 56-nation Organisation of Islamic Confere­nce (OIC) that the world com­munity must strive for resolving the “two oldest unresolved disputes on the UN agenda – Palestine and Kashmir” to ensure the right to self-determination for struggling people in both the lands.

The All Party Hurriyat Conference chief Mirwaiz Umar Farooq too told an OIC Contact Group on Kashmir that Kashmiris supported the Palestinians’ bid for statehood recognition at the UN.

“Let me say to the people of Palestine that the people of Kashmir, proudly, are the first to congratulate you on your bold initiative. Let it be written in history that an oppressed people are overjoyed looking at you in your moment of glory, confident that our time will soon come,” he said.

India pledged support to Palestine’s statehood bid at the United Nations. New Delhi, however, is opposed to drawing a parallel between Kashmir and Palestine. It has been maintaining that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and the OIC has no locus standi in matters concerning internal affairs of India.

Khar joined her counterparts from other OIC member-States to seek an international investigation into the large number of unmarked graves in Jammu and Kashmir.

Mirwaiz also referred to the issue of unmarked graves and called upon the UN to condemn “the atrocities perpetrated upon the innocent Kashmiris, organise a tribunal to ascertain the gravity of the tyranny and to request Jeremy Sarkin, chairperson of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, to conduct an independent investigation”.

The Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission recently recommended the identification of all the 2,156 people buried in unmarked graves in north Kashmir.
The graves were identified through an investigation done by the panel’s police wing last month.

New Delhi, however, is likely to reject the demand for independent international probe into the unmarked graves, pointing out that India was a vibrant democracy, which fully respected rule of law and human rights, with civil liberties and freedoms enshrined as citizens’ fundamental rights in the Constitution.

India maintains that it has many effective mechanisms within its constitutional framework to address aberrations.

UN’s obligations

Mirwaiz said that the UN had moral and legal obligation to help resolving the issue of Kashmir and past disputes should not deter the world body from renewing its efforts to work for a promised settlement of the dispute.

Khar said that Pakistan had repeatedly underlined in its engagements with India the fundamental reality that the prospect of a lasting peace in South Asia was directly linked with “a just and durable solution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute”.

The Pakistani foreign minister had triggered a controversy last July, when she had met Kashmiri separatist leaders –both Mirwaiz and chief of the Hurriyat Conference’s hardline faction Syed Ali Shah Gilani – in New Delhi, just ahead of a meeting with her Indian counterpart S M Krishna.

India had expressed its unhappiness over Khar’s meetings with the separatist leaders of Kashmir.

Krishna and Khar, however, had discussed the issue of Jammu and Kashmir and agreed to “the need for continued discussions, in a purposeful and forward looking manner, with a view to finding a peaceful solution by narrowing divergences and building convergences”.

Now, 2,500 unidentified graves in Jammu

Even the dead would turn in their graves at such a startling revelation. Mail Today has found mass graves in Jammu's Poonch district where 2,500 unidentified bodies were buried by a lone gravedigger.

It is pertinent to note here that the state human rights commission (SHRC) had found in an inquiry over 2,100 unidentified bodies at 38 sites in the Kashmir Valley. The commission's report had come out last month.

But this is for the first time that graves unknown men have been identified in the Jammu region.

Sofi Aziz Joo - the lone gravedigger in this frontier town - claims that he has buried over 2,500 unidentified bodies, sometimes in mass graves, handed over to him by the police and the army.

The 90-year-old gravedigger said the bodies handed over to him by the Indian police and the Indian army were usually bullet-ridden, without limbs or mutilated. He also pointed out that most of the bodies had their faces disfigured beyond recognition.

Sofi used to bury the bodies, and sometimes only heads without any other part the body attached to it, in a graveyard opposite a small shrine near the army garrison. "The bodies would come anytime and burials were to be made without involving townsfolk for fear of provoking " anti- India" protests. So, I used to take the help of two labourers," he said.

None of the dead was known to him or his apprentices, he asserted.

"Once when the police brought 16 unidentified bodies and asked me to bury them, I along with a couple of labourers dug out a single grave to bury them all," said Sofi, pointing towards a raised ground in the graveyard, now covered by grass. "I don't remember the date. But I recall that the police said they were killed in Modpichae village," he said.

There are other mass graves in the graveyard too, he said and pointed out a grave which, according to him, has five bodies.

"They (the police) used to hand over bullet-ridden or disfigured bodies and tell me that they were militants killed by the army in gunfights," he said, when asked about the identity of the persons he buried.

He also pointed out that the faces of most of the bodies used to be mutilated beyond recognition. There have been times when Sofi buried only heads, without bodies, a process that he objected to later on.

"Over a period of time, it appeared fishy and I started refusing heads only. I started asking questions and demanded the full body," Sofi said. He recalled that once the police and the army handed him six heads for burial.

"It was the first time I was witnessing such a horror. I broke down," the gravedigger said. Moreover, Sofi was pressured to give in writing that he received six bodies.

Aslam Khan, a Thanamandi local, shows a grave of a person who was identified by his uncle.

THEY TOOK it in writing from me despite my protests. What could I have done?" In another instance, Sofi was asked to bury seven heads. "I wrapped the heads in shrouds and buried them. But, they took a receipt of seven bodies," he said. However, in the third such incident when the police came up with some 15 heads, Sofi protested. "I thought come what may, I will not do it anymore," he said. "Then they left."

Talking about the time during which he was burying all these bodies, Sofi said the police started giving him bodies with the beginning of militancy in Kashmir - a time when crossborder infiltration and exfiltration picked up. He recalled that he used to get one or two bodies everyday and unlike the Valley, in Poonch, no local was permitted to help him in the burial.

For each body Sofi received, he was supposed to put his signature on a foolscap paper, apparently a takeover. The police personnel, after handing over bodies to Sofi, would remain on guard until he completed the burial process.

The burials have cost Sofi around Rs1.85 lakh, maximum of which was spent on purchasing cloth for shrouds and remuneration to the labourers.

Deputy Commissioner Poonch Ajit Sahoo, did not see this correspondent, despite a prior appointment. Sahoo kept the correspondent waiting for two hours inside his office but did not come out to speak.

After the discovery of 2,156 unidentified bodies at 38 sites in the Valley, the SHRC had issued notices to the state government on a petition filed by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), seeking investigation into the graveyards of Jammu division's Poonch and Rajouri districts.

Ironically, there are seven graves of policemen too in this graveyard but all of these bear a proper epitaph. The remaining are housing mysteries along with their dead.

US journalist deported from India over Kashmir graves probe

NEW DELHI: As the Indian government scurried to deal with a growing outrage about unmarked mass graves unearthed in Kashmir, it deported an American journalist on Friday who was known for his critical reporting of human rights violations in the Himalayan region.

Airport sources said David Barsamian, a radio journalist who has worked closely with Noam Chomsky, Eqbal Ahmed and Edward Saeed, was deported on his arrival at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport when he was accused of having violated visa norms during his previous visit to the country.

They alleged that he violated the rules during his visit in 2009-10 by indulging in professional work while holding a tourist visa. He was thereafter put on a watch by the immigration authorities to prevent his entry again.

Mr Barsamian has visited India regularly for more than three decades and speaks fluent Hindi and Urdu. He has reported extensively on the Kashmir resistance against Indian rule in their Himalayan homeland.

He is an accomplished sitar player.

Last November India deported Prof Richard Shapiro, an American academic, on charges of continued “political activism in the state while on a tourist visa”. More recently it has proactively blocked the entry of Indian journalists and human rights workers into Kashmir.

Prof Shapiro’s partner Angana Chatterji is involved with the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir, which was the first whistleblower about the mass graves.

Ms Chatterji, an Indian citizen, was travelling with Prof Shapiro when he was denied entry.

The (in)visible in Indian terrorism | Al-Jazeera

Indian Muslims are often accused of terrorist links, but in many cases it is Muslims themselves who are terrorised.

India's media often rushes to blame Muslims for acts of terrorism, sometimes without serious evidence [EPA]

According to the Indian government and media, many Muslim groups have recently been involved in terrorism. Of these, three stand out: Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), formed in 1976 and banned soon after 9/11 for fomenting “communal disharmony” and “sedition”; Deccan Mujahideen (DM), an outfit which shot to prominence by claiming responsibility for the 2008 Mumbai terror attack; and Indian Mujahideen (IM), a group believed to have been formed after 2001. These groups have been charged with killing hundreds of people. The latest attack came on July 13, when 20 people were killed in a series of bombings in Mumbai.

Shortly after the attack, the police said that IM and SIMI were behind the blasts. A nationwide hunt followed. According to Rakesh Maria, Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) Chief, expert teams fanned out to seven states. Officers from the National Intelligence Agency, formed after the 2008 Mumbai attacks to fight terrorism, raided the houses of two IM suspects in Ranchi, capital of Jharkhand state.

In Indian political discourse, outfits like SIMI, DM and IM appear as a threat to India’s stability and its global rise. While some depict them as domestic groups, others portray them as working in alliance with outfits from Pakistan. It is thus believed that IM was floated by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a militant group formed in 1990 in Afghanistan and active in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Most accounts of these outfits are, however, inconsistent and even contradictory.

By analysing the Mumbai attack and the alleged involvement of IM and SIMI, I make three arguments. First, since the media and the security agencies have a close and uncritical relationship, we should have a healthy doubt about the accuracy of their information, and refrain from immediately pointing fingers at one Muslim group or another. Despite the fact that barely anyone adequately knows what IM is and how it came about, after the July attack several Muslims were arrested as terrorists.

Second, because Muslims are blamed, arrested, tortured, and killed (by the police) after each terror attack, with little or no evidence, such measures might end up creating the danger the Indian state claims to fight.

Third, I contend that the Indian media’s role in “reporting” terrorism is prejudiced.

What is Indian Mujahideen?

After the blast, the police arrested many people from Mumbai’s “sensitive” (read Muslim) neighbourhoods, a practice the residents of such neighbourhoods have grown accustomed to in the last decade. One suspect, Faiz Usmani, died in police custody. The police claimed that his death was caused by “hypertension”; his family believes that he was tortured. Usmani was the brother of Afzal Usmani, in jail for his alleged involvement in the 2008 Ahmadabad blast. Both brothers are reported to be IM members.

Riaz Bhatkal, described as India’s “most wanted terrorist”, is regarded as IM’s founder. He became close with SIMI in the early 1990s when it began to radicalise. Born in 1976, Bhatkal went to an English-medium school and later studied engineering at a Mumbai college. But beyond that, much of IM’s history remains unclear. It's not even known whether Bhatkal is alive or dead. After the July 13 blast, the ATS attempted to nab him. This is surprising, because early this year the media reported that Bhatkal was killed in Karachi by Chhota Rajan, Mumbai’s underworld don.

The media provides differing accounts of IM’s formation and, in fact, is sometimes inconsistent even within a single version. For example, Animesh Roul, the director of the Society for the Study of Peace and Conflict in Delhi, claimed that IM was “conceived at a terrorist conclave attended by top leaders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islami (HuJI) in Pakistani-administered Kashmir in May 2008”. He did not find it contradictory when in the next paragraph he wrote, “IM came into the open for the first time in November 2007”. In Asian Policy, Christine Fair indicated two dates of its formation: 2001 and an ambiguous date of “much later”. According to The Times of India, IM was formed in 2005. To Namrata Goswami of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis in Delhi, “key SIMI members …started supporting the idea of the formation of the IM as early as December 2007”.

IM first hit the headlines after a series of explosions in November 2007. In an email to the media and police, IM claimed responsibility for the blasts. As the email explained, the aim of those attacks was to protest against “the pathetic conditions of Muslims in India that idol worshippers can kill our brothers, sisters, children and outrage dignity of our sisters at any place and at any time and we can’t resist them”. Then, in 2008, minutes before the blasts in Ahmadabad, IM sent an email (entitled “The Rise of Jihad, Revenge of Gujarat”) to the media saying: “We hereby declare an ultimatum to all the state governments of India … to stop harassing the Muslims and keep a check on their killing, expulsion, and encounters.”

The messages are a sign that IM’s aim is to protest against and avenge the killings and humiliation of Muslims at the hands of Hindu nationalists and the state administration. The destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindu nationalists in 1992 is important to IM’s ideological repertoire - hence its description by the media and the terrorism experts as a “home-grown”, “domestic” terror outfit. Since the media regard the Babri mosque as a domestic issue (unlike Kashmir, which is international) and the IM invokes the Babri mosque to rationalise its attacks, the IM is thus considered a domestic outfit.

However, many Indian security experts hold that IM is a tool of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) used to destabilise India. In these accounts, IM is a means to advance ISI’s agenda of destabilising India and at the same time to exonerate Pakistan of any allegations made by India and the West of promoting terrorism. The logic of the security experts is that the word “Indian” in IM points to India’s domestic groups, rather than Pakistani groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, through which the ISI has been operating in Kashmir. On the other hand, experts like B Raman allege that IM and SIMI's reach extends beyond South Asia, characterising the groups as a part of a global network of Islamic radicals without furnishing adequate evidence.

India’s Guantanamo Bays

The media invariably base their stories on the sources of the state. An apt example is Praveen Swami, a terrorism expert cited by everyone writing about the IM. Swami is to print media what Arnab Goswami (of Times Now) is to Indian TV: Their views are rabidly nationalist, some might even say Islamophobic. Swami reproduces the police version (e.g. see his writings in CTC Sentinel, May 2010; The Hindu, Edit-Page, March 22, 2010; and Frontline, June 2-15, 2007) without giving the other side of the story, namely: the viewpoints of the alleged terrorists, their family members, or the Muslim community. It is well-known that the Indian police are biased against Muslims and have been complicit in killing them, as was evident in the state-mediated 2002 Gujarat violence, in which 1,000 Muslims were killed.

Given that the Indian media is uninterested in reporting “facts” and multiple views, can an anthropologist like me make sense of the mediatised world of terrorism? Thomas Eriksen holds that a concept like globalisation has “no meaning to an anthropologist unless it can be studied through actual persons, their relationship to each other and to a larger surrounding world”. I thus agree with Peter Van der Veer that “behind the growing visibility [of media] is a growing invisibility”.

What is rarely visible in the Indian media, however, are the brutal, illegal methods used against suspected terrorists: torture cells, illegal detention, unlawful killings in “police encounters”; elimination of evidence against the illegal actions of the law-enforcing agencies; and rampant harassment of Muslims. In July 2009, The Week reported on the existence of at least 15 secret torture chambers meant to extract information from the detainees. The methods to extract information include attaching electrodes to a detainee’s genitals as well as the use of pethidine injections. To quote The Week, these chambers are “our own little Guantanamo Bays or Gitmos”, which a top policeman called “precious assets”.

In May 2008, a Muslim boy aged 14 was abducted by the Gujarat police. He was dragged to the police car at gunpoint and taken to a detention centre where he was tortured. He returned home ten days later when the court ordered his release following his mother’s petition. The police subsequently threatened the boy’s family with dire consequences if they pursued the case in court. The police harassment becomes even more acute in light of the fact that most lawyers often hesitate to take up the cases of “terrorists”. As a disempowered community - as the government-appointed Sachar Committee report (of 2006) minutely demonstrates - Muslims themselves don’t have adequate and qualified lawyers to pursue such cases. Muslims’ marginalisation thus renders their voice invisible in the media too.

It is believed that after SIMI was banned, soon after 9/11, its radical members formed IM. During my fieldwork (2001-2004) on Jamaat-e-Islami and SIMI I did not hear anything about IM. SIMI activists and other Muslims I met felt terrorised themselves. It is worth noting that since 2001 far more people have been arrested as “SIMI terrorists” than the actual number of SIMI members, which in 1996 was 413 (when founded in 1976, SIMI’s members numbered 132). Until today, the Indian government has still not legally proved its rationale for banning SIMI.

The story untold

In the fight against terrorism, evidence and the rule of law are subservient to prejudice. As of this writing, the Indian government has not yet tracked the perpetrators of the July 13 attack. However, only two days after the attack, Subramanian Swamy, a prominent politician and former minister (with a doctorate from Harvard University) wrote an article called “How to Wipe Out Islamic Terror”. Without any evidence, he blamed Muslims for the attack, in the same way that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Sun suspected Muslim involvement in the Norway shooting nine days later.

What Swamy did is standard practice in Indian media. In September 2006, a blast killed 35 people at a Muslim graveyard in Malegaon (in the state of Karnataka). The media blamed Muslims. Likewise, in 2007, after a blast killed 10 Muslims praying in Hyderabad’s Mecca mosque, Praveen Swami freely wrote about the Muslim terrorists he believed caused it and about what he perceived to be the “Islamist threat to India’s cities”. However, investigations later showed that Hindu nationalists carried out the Malegaon and Mecca mosque terror attacks.

Returning to Subramanian Swamy, Swamy wrote: “We need a collective mindset as Hindus to stand against the Islamic terrorist. The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindus. That they do I will not believe unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors were Hindus”. Those refusing to acknowledge this, Swamy advocated, “should not have voting rights”. He proposed declaring India “a Hindu Rashtra [state]”.

Stories of Muslim terrorists abound in both the Indian and Western media. Since the July 13, 2011 Mumbai bombings, vitriolic pieces like Subramanian Swamy’s have appeared frequently in the media. These pieces subtly influence the analyses of many liberal intellectuals.

By contrast, stories portraying Muslims as the terrorised remain fairly sparse. One wonders if, and how, such stories will be told.

Irfan Ahmad is a political anthropologist and a lecturer at Monash University, Australia and author of Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami (Princeton University Press, 2009) which was short-listed for the 2011 International Convention of Asian Scholars Book Prize for the best study in the field of Social Sciences.


The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.