In Kashmir, Killing Ebbs, but Killers Roam Free

BONIYAR, India — After decades of war, Kashmir is blooming again. Hotels are bursting, roads are being fixed and offices rebuilt. But with the guns silenced, India must soon decide whether justice will be as welcome as the tourists.

Mass murderers walk the streets openly, having killed thousands of people who are buried in unmarked graves in scores of secret cemeteries. This beautiful village has one such graveyard. Nine years after Indian police officers and troops deposited hundreds of bullet-ridden corpses here as part of their campaign to suppress an independence movement supported by Pakistan, dirt mounds still rise above the shallow and unmarked plots as if the circumstances of the deaths left the earth above the bodies unsettled.

Atta Mohamad Raja Khan, the 70-year-old farmer who dug the graves, said one plot contained the remains of a 2-year-old boy. Others held teenagers and dowagers. Mr. Khan’s graveyard quickly filled, so he buried only a fraction of the tens of thousands killed over more than 20 years of dirty warfare.

Many of the buried were militants, including foreign mercenaries whose deaths and quick burials are often accepted as the wages of war. But myriad innocent bystanders were murdered in clumsy government plots. None of the suspected killers from the military has been arrested.

Tensions still lie just below the surface. On Monday, a fire in a revered Sufi Muslim shrine in Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital, set off clashes between the police and rock-throwing Muslim protesters. Six people were hurt after the police fired tear gas. But so far the fire has not led to wider unrest.

Jumma Khan, 45, was one of the bystanders massacred. A blacksmith’s apprentice, he lived in a mud house on a mountainside in the Anantnag district with his wife and 11 children far from any road. At 2 a.m. on March 24, 2000, soldiers broke down his door and dragged Mr. Jumma Khan away. Just four days earlier, more than a dozen gunmen dressed in fatigues had systematically massacred 34 men and boys in a nearby district, and the military was under pressure to find the killers.

Mr. Jumma Khan’s oldest child, Abdul Rashid, said his father had been targeted because he was poor and had a beard, which made him look like a militant.

“They told my mother, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be back in a half-hour,’ ” Mr. Rashid recalled in an interview on the mountainside near his home. She nonetheless threw herself on her husband, and the soldiers beat her, he said.

Later that morning, Mr. Rashid discovered that three other men in the area had been similarly taken.

The next day and miles away, Zahoor Ahmad Dalal, 22, drove home after working all day in the family’s fabric shop. He had dinner at 6 p.m. and left for his customary walk 30 minutes later. He did not return. The family fanned out to find him but never did.

The military soon announced that it had found five foreign militants responsible for the recent massacre hiding in an Anantnag hut. During the battle, the hut was burned and the militants killed, the military said. The charred bodies were buried without autopsies.

After the announcement, Mr. Rashid feared the worst, he said. His village organized a protest march to demand that they see those arrested, but the police shot and killed seven of the protesters — including Mr. Rashid’s younger brother. Local outrage grew. Facing a growing revolt, officials allowed families to unearth the bodies of the alleged militants.

Families recognized the dead immediately. In a bungled attempt to hide the victims’ identities, soldiers had forced each to don military fatigues but had neglected to remove the victims’ old clothing, still visible under the burned fatigues. Genetic tests eventually confirmed their identities. There were no foreign militants.

An investigation by India’s elite Central Bureau of Investigation charged five soldiers with murder. The Supreme Court has ordered the army to decide by the end of July whether to court-martial those involved or allow a civilian trial.

Mr. Rashid said he was not optimistic that the perpetrators would ever be brought to justice. Twelve years have already passed. “We are like worms to them,” he said. “We will be crushed under their shoes and die.”

The New York Times

India tried to suppress a secession movement in Kashmir.

Enlarge This Image

Dar Yasin/Associated Press

Arshad Andrabi with a picture of his brother Jalil, a human rights lawyer who was seized in Srinagar in 1996 and killed.

Rifat Andrabi said much the same thing. She and her husband, Jalil Andrabi, a prominent Kashmiri human rights lawyer, were driving through Srinagar in 1996 when they were stopped at a military roadblock.

Instead of simply checking the Andrabis’ identity papers, Mrs. Andrabi said, Maj. Avtar Singh took Mr. Andrabi into custody. Mrs. Andrabi, also a lawyer and the mother of three young children, panicked. Unable to drive, she hired a motorized rickshaw to follow. But the rickshaw could not keep up, and she returned home.

Mr. Andrabi’s mutilated body was found three weeks later in a burlap bag on the banks of the Jhelum River.

Mrs. Andrabi and her husband’s brother, Arshad Andrabi, have spent 16 years seeking justice against Mr. Singh and others. In the meantime, military and government authorities failed to carry out court orders to arrest Mr. Singh. When he was found to be in the United States, they declined to seek his extradition.

On June 9, Mr. Singh shot and killed his wife and two of their children in their California home before apparently committing suicide.

Mrs. Andrabi said that her three children — then 2, 3 and 6 — waited every afternoon for their father to return from work, unable to understand what his death meant.

“Every time they heard a honk at the gate or a knock on the door, they would go running and shout, ‘Papa is back!’ ” Mrs. Andrabi said through tears. “We have gone through hell, but we will not stop.”

The Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission released a report in October confirming the existence of 2,156 unmarked graves in 38 cemeteries in just three state districts. The commission recommended that state officials use genetic tests to identify the bodies, and create a commission to investigate and prosecute those responsible. Under Indian law, the state must respond within a month. Nine months have passed, and there has been no state response.

Top army officials have publicly insisted that the military’s immunity from prosecution in Kashmir, enshrined in law, is sacrosanct. And allowing even a few cases to go forward could expose many to danger, rights activists say.

Mr. Khan, the gravedigger in Boniyar, described an almost industrial body disposal process. An official usually visited a day or two before the bodies arrived to tell him the precise number of graves needed so that he could start digging. The bodies arrived by truck from far-flung areas, so many were involved, he said.

Parveena Ahangar, the chairwoman of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Jammu and Kashmir, said her group had documented hundreds of cases in which officials spirited away people who have never been seen since. In her small office, she has stacks of pink files with pictures and witness statements. The names, ranks and units of soldiers and police officers accused of perpetrating the crimes are sprinkled throughout the documents.

Ms. Ahangar says she knows the identity of the three officers who took away her 16-year-old son, Javid, on Aug. 18, 1990. She has filed repeated court petitions to have the officers punished, but nothing has happened. Military officials have offered her money to drop her petitions but she has refused such deals just as she has refused to accept that Javid is almost certainly dead, she said.

“I want my son back,” she said, “and I want justice.”

(C) Previously Published On The New York Times

Read More

Why The Death of Major Avtar Singh Is Not Justice Served

“… it is not merely of some importance but is of fundamental importance, that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.”

On June 10th, 2012 Major Avtar Singh, wanted in India for the killing of over a dozen men including human rights activist Jaleel Andrabi, shot and killed himself along with his wife and two children in California. This brutal end was seen by many people here as ‘divine retribution’ for his gruesome crimes, but with the death of Major Avtar was justice really served?

Jaleel Andrabi was abducted by a group of Army personnel led by Major Avtar Singh on the Eid of Match 8th 1996, as he was heading home with his wife. His wife and car were left behind and later when the Bar association moved to high court seeking his whereabouts, both Army and BSF denied he had been picked up. The body of Jaleel Andrabi was recovered 19 days later (27thMarch) from river Jhelum near Rajbagh in Srinagar; his upper half torso had been covered in a bag while hands tied behind him with rope and a stone tied to his body.

The SIT formed under the directions of High Court investigated and found that Major Avtar Singh had abducted Jaleel Andrabi and a renegade Sikander (among others) had been complicit in this crime. Barely a week after Jaleel Andrabi’s body has been fished out from Jhelum, seven more bodies were found at Pampore including that of the renegade Sikandar. Further investigations led the team later to another renegade Mohammed Ashraf Khan, alias Umar. Umar’s statement implicated Major Avtar Singh for the murders of Jaleel Andrabi, renegade and complicit Sikandar and his other associates. When these murders took place Major Avtar Singh was part of the 35 Rashtriya Rifles based in Rawalpora, Srinagar. In response to the SIT report filed before the High Court on 10 April 1997, the Army submitted that Major Avtar Singh had been acting in his personal capacity. While Army made this claim, the statement of Umar ran contrary to this. He had earlier confessed that along with Major Avtar Singh ““Six persons, namely Sultan, Balbir Singh, Dr Vaid, Mushtaq and Hyder were also present…” Clearly Major Avtar Singh was not acting alone here and a whole apparatus seemed to be involved in these killings. Ironically none of those mentioned by the witness Umar have been named in the charge sheet and it is more likely they are still in active service. Major Avtar could not have acted in his singular capacity as he used all state tools and facilities to kill and systematically followed up with erasure of evidence. Pertinently lawyer Jaleel Andrabi had addressed the UN Human rights Commission at Geneva sometime before his abduction and killing (in 1995), which at the height of conflict in Kashmir caused much unease to the state.

Major Avtar Singh remained ‘untraceable’ for police even after the court had asked for the impounding of his passport. The police claimed in 1998, that the Major was not traceable while Army had maintained that Major Avtar, originally from Ludhiana based Territorial Army 103, had been ‘disembodied’ from service (a journalist later had easily located and interviewed Major at the Territorial Army barracks in Ludhiana). The two judges hearing this case were transferred just before the next hearing and before any verdict could be passed; the case falling into cold storage thereafter. 

Other than the Andrabi case, Major Avtar Singh is also accused of killing Batmaloo businessman Ghulam Qadir for extortion (18th February 1996, killed even after ransom had been paid) and in yet another incident Abdul Majid Shah’s dead body was found in the Jhelum with a stone tied to it.

Despite court orders for impounding his travel papers, Major Avtar Singh was successful in obtaining a passport and fleeing to Canada from where he proceeded to USA. While Major Avtar fled in 2005, repeated attempts to get him extradited by the state government from 2006 were lost in New Delhi’s reluctance. If Major Avtar Singh had acted in his personal capacity while committing these gruesome crimes, the Indian state should have no reasons to firewall his conviction. On the contrary his conviction would have cleared New Delhi of accusations that Avtar Singh acted just as a state arm assigned to silence voices in Kashmir. The disinterest of Indian government in wanting to get Major Avtar Singh extradited gave enough indication to reasons and intent, when the same government could get Abu Salim extradited from Portugal in spite of a stay on order from the Supreme Court of Portugal. While Abu Salim was tracked and located in spite of his having forged travel papers and mutated identities, Major Avtar Singh travelled freely on his original travel papers and own identity despite a lookout notice. And all this could not have been possible unless he had support from ‘within the system’.

The system that nurtured him and facilitated him clearly did not want him to stand trial, lest he speak up. Major Avtar Singh is not an exception to Kashmir nor are the efforts of ‘the system’ to protect and cloak such crimes. Such crimes are galore here, but the Major Avtar Singh case stood out for the brazen efforts to shield him, facilitate him and deny justice in spite of overwhelming proof against him. In this fight between Justice and the Jackboot system, ‘the system’ seems to be having its way as always. 

When in February last year his wife lodged a case of domestic violence against Major Avtar and he was located in California, the hopes of extradition and justice were again rekindled. Despite him being publicly located, New Delhi made no serious efforts to seek his extradition. In an interview later given to Open Magazine he had confessed that “If the extradition does go through, I will open my mouth, I will not keep quiet.’’.

Justice would only seem to have been dispensed when Major Avtar Singh would stand trial along with others complicit; but that would have exposed ‘the system’ that helped him and insulated him. While Major Avtar Singh may be dead along with his innocent family, other Avtar Singh’s of these crimes are unaccounted for and left befit of answerability. 

The silence of a dead Avtar Singh means that this case, as with other cases, shall be heading for a quiet burial. Avtar Singh’s death does not mean Justice has been served, it only means Justice has been buried, quietly. Nature may have its own way of retribution with the death of Major Avtar Singh, but Justice in reality is still pending.

(C)  Saadut Hussain is a Srinagar-based blogger

Previously published on Speaking Mind  

Read More

From Kashmir to California: in the footsteps of a wanted killer

Avtar Singh.

Fresno County Sheriff's Office/AP

Journalist Zahid Rafiq tells how he tried to reach Avtar Singh, a former Indian military man living outside Fresno with a dark past in Kashmir. On Saturday, Mr. Singh killed his family and himself.

A former Indian Army major placed a call Saturday morning to police outside Fresno, Calif., to inform them that he had murdered four people. By the time police arrived at the nearby scene, Avtar Singh had killed not just his family but himself, too.

Nearly two months prior, Mr. Singh had called the same Selma Country police for the last time to complain against media who wouldn’t leave him alone. I was that reporter.

I am a Kashmiri journalist studying at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Singh had been discovered last year to be living in Selma, where he ran his own trucking company. I wanted to interview this man, who was notorious back home after a judicial inquiry accused him of murdering a prominent human rights activist.

Like so much from the Kashmir conflict of the 1990s – of my childhood – the case remained unresolved, and the pain of victims left to fester.

After decades of mostly nonviolent resistance to Indian rule, Kashmiri separatists and Pakistani militants rose up with guns in 1989. India cracked down with a massive counterinsurgency that continues today, more than a decade after quashing the armed uprising. Government figures say at least 47,000 people have died in the conflict and thousands remain missing; other estimates are much higher.

Atrocities committed by Indian forces during the conflict have rarely if ever been punished. Singh’s was the rare case that made it to court in Kashmir, but he then fled the country. The magistrate put out a warrant over Interpol, and in 2011, Selma police alerted India’s Interpol bureau that they had their man.

But Singh was never extradited. In an age when the reach of international justice is growing, Singh’s case highlights how much influence international relations and national politics can still warp the process. 

“It shows the ongoing hurdles that have to be overcome,” says Matt Eisenbrandt, legal director for the Center for Justice and Accountability in Canada. He tried for a time to help locate Singh when he was missing.

“Just because a perfectly innocent human rights lawyer is murdered doesn’t mean that you always bring the bad guys to account. You still have to deal with politics, both domestically and internationally,” he says.

Why I started writing about Singh

I first heard about Singh after I became a reporter in Kashmir in 2007.  Like many reporters in the disputed region, I wrote about him and the struggle of the families of his victims for elusive justice.

Singh was wanted for the kidnapping and murder of human rights activist Jaleel Andrabi in 1996.  Months before his death, Mr. Andrabi had addressed a UN session in Geneva about human rights violations by India in Kashmir.

On the evening of March 8, 1996, Andrabi was driving home with his wife when he was stopped and taken away by Army personnel who were apparently waiting for him.

Twenty days later, police asked Andrabi’s younger brother to identify a body recovered from a jute sack in the Jhelum River. It was Andrabi: his hands tied behind his back, his eyes gouged out.

The Special Investigation Team formed to investigate the case – at the order of the high court in Kashmir – reported that everything pointed to Maj. Avtar Singh of the 35 Rashtriya Rifles unit as the person who had committed the murder. It also found that to eliminate the trail, Singh had murdered four Kashmiri counterinsurgents who had witnessed the killing.

Kashmiri police also claim to have found Singh’s involvement in five other cases of murder, including that of a young man whom he suspected of having an affair with his sister-in-law and an old Sikh tailor whom his wife’s family might have owed some money.

Soon after the death of Andrabi, Singh left Kashmir and the country, even though the court had placed restrictions against his flight abroad.

The victims’ families allege that India’s Home Ministry and External Affairs Ministry smuggled Singh out to save him from legal procedures where he might have given away the names of other officers involved in the case, and also to avoid setting a precedent for Indian soldiers accused of human right violations to appear before the law.  

“If the extradition does go through, I will open my mouth,” Singh said in an interview last year with the Indian magazine Open. “I will not keep quiet.”

JP Singh, an official with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), said he could not comment on the case. Multiple efforts to reach the Home Ministry failed. Neither ministry appears to be talking to the media about the case since Saturday’s killings.

Even before I started graduate school in Berkeley, I checked how far Selma was from campus. I wanted to speak with the man who has claimed that he was being blamed to save other culprits. I also wanted to see him, because his only two available pictures were so radically different that it was hard to believe it is the same man.

Heading to Selma

On March 26, I went to Selma.

There I met police chief Myron Dyck. In 2011, his officers arrested Singh in a domestic abuse case filed by his wife. Singh was now on a 36-month probation, Mr. Dyck said, but otherwise a free man.

I asked about why Singh was never extradited. Dyck said that Singh’s home country never wanted him back.

“When we arrested him in 2011 and found that he was wanted on the Interpol list, we informed the Interpol Washington office and they asked us to hold him till they contacted their Indian counterparts,” Dyck said.

Interpol’s Washington office confirmed this. Interpol is a communications network, designed to pass messages between law enforcement agencies across international borders. Interpol Washington passed the message that Singh was in custody in Selma to the National Central Bureau of Interpol in India.

“Quite a few contacts were made, with little to no response,” says LaTonya Miller, a spokesman at Interpol Washington. “The Indian government has to initiate whatever extradition process needs to happen.”

But they did not.

Interpol in India confirmed they received the messages. “To avoid delay, we asked them to directly contact the MEA, who do the extradition,” said an Interpol official in India who refused to be named.

“We don’t get involved with governments. We deal with police-to-police only,” says Ms. Miller in Washington.

Back in Selma, Dyck said he waited for two days for word on what to do with Singh, but when Interpol Washington couldn’t get any response, “we had to release him,” he says.

Why no deportation proceedings?

The US had another option: deportation. According to Lori Haley, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokeswoman, Singh was arrested by ICE in July 2007 for unlawful presence in the US and placed in removal proceedings.

“At the time of his death, Mr. Singh was pending removal while the ongoing investigation into his case continued,” says Ms. Haley via email, referring to an investigation by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit.

Asked if it is usual for such cases to go on for five years, she responded: “Removal cases are reviewed on a case-by-case basis and timeframe.”

In recent years, the US has been courting India after weak relations during the cold war. The US has been encouraging India to deepen its involvement inAfghanistan and with the navies on China’s periphery. In 2011, the US ambassador to India visited Kashmir but did not meet with Kashmiri separatist leaders, a suggestion at least to some that the US was willing to stay quiet on Kashmir for the good of broader US-India relations.

The US government also remained quiet in 2011 when Singh was not extradited but remained on US soil. A call to the US State Department Monday was not returned.

A low-profile life in California

After talking with Dyck, I drove by Singh’s house on Pine Street and also by his previous house on McCall Avenue. They were quiet neighborhoods, past endless vineyards and peach orchards.

Singh changed houses often enough that neither his neighbors nor the Sikh religious leaders knew much about the family. Harry Gill, president of the local Punjabi organization, knew only that the family kept a low profile.

“Not many people knew him. He didn’t tell anybody who he is or where he came from,” he told the Associated Press after the killings.

I was also asking around about Singh from journalists who had reported his domestic violence story in 2011, and had asked a Fresno-based journalist to arrange an interview for me with Singh, if possible. I was reluctant to meet Singh myself because I somehow knew he wouldn’t talk to me after finding out that I was Kashmiri.

Word had reached Singh that a Kashmiri reporter was inquiring about him and had come seeking an interview. He called me that evening. It was a calm voice, speaking in steady English, and inquired if I was the Kashmiri who was looking for him. I said yes. He asked if I was in Fresno. I lied that I was coming tomorrow. And then he shouted, using expletives.

“You think this is your father’s Kashmir. Do you have any idea where you are coming? You have such guts that you have come from Kashmir. Just set your foot in Selma and I will shoot you. I will kill you,” he yelled, jumping between native Punjabi and Hindi as he got more upset.

I asked if he knew he was threatening with death a reporter who only wanted an interview. He continued making threats, and then hung up.

A restraining order

The next morning, the Selma police called me to say that Singh had filed a complaint and got a restraining order against me that prohibited me from going close to his house, his office, or him and his family.

When I read the news of killings in Selma two days ago, I was shocked. The first thing I remembered was the long email Singh’s wife had sent to me in 2011 after I had written a story about Singh’s past in Kashmir and the need for his extradition.

She had threatened to sue my magazine and me if we didn’t apologize in the next issue. She also wrote that her husband was a soldier who had bled for his country, and had never, and would never, spill an innocent man’s blood.

Had Singh been extradited and made to face the legal system, it would have been a lifesaver for the 10 families in Kashmir who accuse Singh of killing their loved ones. It also, most likely, would have been a lifesaver for Singh’s wife and two of his children killed Saturday. A third child was badly injured but remains alive in a hospital.

“It is an unfortunate end. Not justice in any sense of the word,” says Hafizullah Mir, Andrabi’s lawyer. “Avtar Singh should have faced the court, and we should have heard his side of the story, too, and the side of the victims and then the court.”

(C) Previously published on The Christian Science Monitor

* Ben Arnoldy contributed to this report from Boston.

Read More

Where 5,000 Graves Don’t Speak

Are the mass graves of Kashmir less heinous because they are the handiwork of a democracy?

MIRZA WAHEED

Recently, I came across the work of Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun and found myself unexpectedly distressed, even outraged, after reading his short poem Not the War. In the words “Not the murder, silence brings one back to the scene of the crime”, Salamun is perhaps talking of love. But I am thinking war, and am transported back home, to Kashmir, to scenes of nameless burials and sites of extra-judicial killings.

I was angry at the silence of the Indian State, and more crucially perhaps, the hushedness of the country’s vibrant civil society, at the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves in troubled Jammu & Kashmir. It has been nearly a year since the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC), a human rights body appointed by the state government, released an extensive report on the presence of 2,156 bullet-ridden bodies in unmarked graves in the border districts. It confirmed what a local rights group, the International People’s Tribunal of Kashmir, had revealed in a landmark investigation in 2008. Hundreds of the bodies were of men described as “unidentified militants”, killed in fighting with the armed forces during the armed insurrection of the 1990s. But, according to the report, at least 574 of them were of those “identified as local Kashmiri residents”.

Like many Kashmiris and Indians, I waited for something to happen—international outrage perhaps, a furore, a commission of inquiry and, one might be forgiven for thinking, even the possibility of justice—for the State cannot exonerate itself from its responsibility of delivering justice with a mere investigation. (Surely, one doesn’t hear too often of mass graves these days, except perhaps those of the Balkan conflict of the 1990s or of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq!) But, apart from news reports in the Indian and the international press, and the local administration’s vague talk of a truth and reconciliation commission—I wonder how one can reconcile in the absence of truth—nothing significant has happened.

Kashmiris have, of course, always known that the hundreds of Kashmiri men who disappeared, mostly in the 1990s, but also in subsequent years, did not vanish into thin air—they were buried, unaccounted and unrecorded, in nameless graves in the Himalayan tracks near the LoC. We have also known that not all of them were combatants killed in fighting with the armed forces. Many of them were victims of fake encounters and extra-judicial killings, as has been revealed in the many cases of men previously described as “dreaded militants” found to be innocents killed for medals or money. In one appalling instance of wilful perversion of justice—the Pathribal fake encounter of March 2000, around the time US president Bill Clinton was to visit India—the Indian State has so far refused to prosecute army officers involved in the premeditated murder of five innocent men portrayed as terrorists who had massacred 35 Sikhs of Kashmir. This, when the Central Bureau of Investigation has submitted evidence that the men were “killed in cold blood”. Many in Kashmir have reconciled to the idea that justice may never be done, the guilty may never be punished and grieving relatives may be condemned to Sisyphean waiting.

The publication of the SHRC report last year, confirming the presence of unmarked graves at 38 sites near the mountains of Kashmir, while reopening old wounds also gave fresh hope to the kin of those who had disappeared—that there may be some closure after all; that the Indian State may, in a rare moral turn, address one of the darkest chapters of the 22-year-old uprising against its rule in Kashmir; that it may finally be willing to listen to what rights groups, journalists and the parents of the missing have been saying for years.

Surely one does not hear of mass graves too often these days, unless they are those of Saddam’s iraq or the Balkan conflict? So why the silence over those found in a Democracy’s garden?

Does not such a discovery merit even a customary response from the Indian State? As far as I remember, there has been no official comment by the Central government in Delhi, so deeply entrenched is India’s policy of indifference and denial on Kashmir. And what of its intellectual classes who were on site, and rightly so, when India signed the UN resolution against Sri Lanka for its atrocities against Tamil civilians during the campaign against the ltte? If the conscience of a nation is not stirred by the discovery of thousands of nameless burials in what it claims as an integral part, the claim not only rings hollow, it was and will only ever remain a claim.The report came out last August, and the same commission subsequently ordered a further probe, citing the presence of nearly 3,000 more graves in the remote districts of Poonch and Rajouri—some allegedly with multiple bodies in them. But apart from one impassioned editorial expressing shame, a couple of speciously-framed TV shows attempting, among other things, equivalence between the all-powerful state and a beleaguered people, the media, while running the story, largely ignored the issue. “There is every probability that these unidentified dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves at 38 places of north Kashmir may contain the dead bodies of enforced disappearances,” the SHRC report had said. How can we not, then, express outrage over what could potentially constitute evidence of crimes against humanity? We’d do that if, say, the graves were made in Tripoli, under a dictatorship, wouldn’t we? Somehow, and for reasons unknown, unmarked graves (some with only heads in them) found in the disputed backyard of the world’s largest democracy have been deemed not heinous enough. Are we to assume mass graves made in a democracy are somehow more humane?

In recent months, some well-meaning commentators and Kashmir experts have started talking about moving on, about the dividends of peace, about economics as opposed to politics—as though these dual aspects were congenitally detached. This is more or less consistent with the outpourings of some members of India’s new class of beat intellectuals—they move from issue to issue, or studio to studio, with equal panache—and their callousness towards the tragedy of Kashmir is matched only by their disdain for even contemporary history. Perhaps the most serious and bizarrely anti-intellectual assertion, and therefore an insidious one, seems to project the idea of peace as somehow incompatible with the idea of justice, and those who demand it as some kind of violence fetishists—as though talking about massacres stems democracy and progress.

In the Indian establishment—and indeed the political philosophy espoused in statist writing on Kashmir employs language disturbingly reminiscent of an ‘establishment project’—there has been a sudden spurt in conversations around the ‘dividends of peace’ in Kashmir. This is, of course, not possible without the buy-in of a thriving comprador class in the conflict-torn land. Translated into realpolitik, this otherwise benign phrase seems to convey to a subject population that it is time they forgot their long-held aspirations for freedom, as also about possible crimes committed by a state that has been nothing but militaristic in its dealings with them. The jackboot comes draped in a flag emblazoned with the words “Let bygones be bygones”.

As for the talk of a truth and reconciliation commission to close the story of unmarked graves, while it is unambiguously noble in its pacifist aspirations and surely the right thing to do to assuage the pain of a people, it seems ludicrously premature in a place that is run by a system of repression. (It must be noted that, for all practical purposes, the Indian State and its client elites operate without a moral system in Kashmir.) One is, again, compelled to ask some elementary questions: truth and reconciliation, yes, but on who on whose terms? Can it mean anything if the terms are set by a repressive state? One hates to suspect this, but the people who tout this as a solution may not even fully understand the import of the phrase and have perhaps forgotten that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa came into effect after the end of apartheid, not while it was in full play. Even if one were to make an attempt to attend to the views of those who preach “moving on”, a single, simple, inquiry stands in the way: How does one move on from thousands of graves in one’s front garden?

Previously Posted on Outlook India

Read More

The Sentencing of Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai (Setting the Record Straight )

On March 30, 2012, Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, the man the international diplomatic community has known for more than 20 years as the ambassador for Kashmir to the United States, stood before Judge Liam O’Grady in a federal court in Virginia and received a sentence of two years for the part he played as Director in funding the Kashmiri American Council, using contributions that allegedly had skirted certain tax regulations regarding how they may be made to a non-profit organization.  The technicalities involved in the sources of that money and how it ended up in the bank accounts of the KAC are still too complex for me to really understand, and probably not worth going into anyway, but its clear from the outcome that some violation of tax laws did occur and Dr. Fai was willing to take the rap for it.  In fact, both he and his wife believe sincerely that the judge was quite fair in handing down the sentence.  Although Dr. Fai’s reputation was sullied momentarily by charges that he was a spy for the Pakistani ISI and illegally lobbied members of Congress and two presidents, none of that proved true, and such charges were voluntarily dropped by the prosecution.  

What is quite dismaying, however, is the mincemeat that was made of this sentence by the press.  Despite the rather mundane issue of so-called tax dodging, many in the press continued to allege falsely that he had been convicted of being on the payroll of the ISI, convicted of being an unregistered lobbyist,  convicted of advocating and propagating the Pakistani position on Kashmir, and convicted of trying to influence the American government for the benefit of Pakistan.  So it is important that we set the record straight.   

Although initially charged under the FARA act [FARA refers to the Foreign Agents Registration Act] as an unregistered agent of Pakistan, Dr. Fai was never convicted on this allegation, which seemed clearly intended to support negotiations the U.S. and Hillary Clinton were engaged in with India at the time. Politically motivated and entirely fraudulent, the U.S. government believed that Dr. Fai’s reputation and career were expendable for whatever trite and meaningless advantage it may have offered in the politics of deal making.   

 

As his attorney, Nina Ginsburg stated during the hearing, “Judge, I think Mr. Kromberg’s arguments to the Court are appalling.  [Federal investigators] have a lot of words that were captured in intercepts, 20 years of intercepts, hundreds of thousands of interprets, and Mr. Kromberg cannot stand in front of this Court with one example of a statement, a public statement by Dr. Fai, a writing by Dr. Fai, a position taken at a conference he sponsored, not one, not one word, that is anything that could be characterized as propaganda for the Pakistani government.  

 

“It is an outrage for [the prosecutor] to say that that is what that man spent 20 years of his life doing when his writings, which we, unfortunately, took up a lot of paper, and I apologize for burdening the Court, every one of his writings, every declaration of every one of those conferences, what came out of the mouth of this man was, [quote] I’m not taking a side.  This is important, tens of thousands of people are dying, pay attention to what’s happening in Kashmir.  

 

“And his letters,” Ms. Ginsburg continued,  “he submitted letters to two Presidents of this country saying, I’m not taking a position, everyone has to give something, no one is going to be satisfied.  

 

“There is not one word that Mr. Kromberg can point to that Dr. Fai ever uttered that was propaganda for the government of Pakistan.  

 

“He received suggestions from people who would participate in these conferences. He accepted some and rejected some.  Topics, one of the topics that appears in these communications, the Pakistanis want him to raise the matter of 2,700 mass graves discovered in Kashmir.  

 

“Well, the Pakistanis didn’t have to tell him that that is a topic that should be discussed at an international peace conference.  There were 2,700 mass graves discovered in Kashmir,” his attorney added. 

 

Dr. Fai was greatly honored and supported by people from all faiths.   Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and even atheists wrote dozens of letters regarding Dr. Fai to the judge.  These were people from the Unites States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Canada, Bahrain, Qatar, Turkey, from both sides of the ceasefire line in Kashmir, and many other countries.  The courtroom was filled to capacity with people who came from places like California, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Washington DC, North Carolina, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and other states.  

 

The judge publicly took the note of the letters, acknowledging the people in the court in a positive manner at least twice, and demonstrated great appreciation for the cause of the people of Kashmir.  It’s an interesting and ironic twist that, although the government may have gained some short-term advantage with India in filing spurious charges against Fai,  the case against India regarding Kashmir gained greater mileage and publicity in the long run since it also became obvious that an airing of the issues convinced a number of people involved directly and indirectly with the case, including the judge, that the many years of sacrifice given by Dr. Fai to his country was sincere and justified. 

 

“I learned a whole lot reading this material,” Judge O’Grady declared.  “I don’t for a minute question that [Dr.] Fai is a true patriot of Kashmir, even though he is a U.S. citizen, and the people that he has advocated for.  I think he also loves the country and its people, and it’s reflected in his writings and it’s reflected by the people that are here today.”  

 

Efforts by the prosecutor to paint Dr. Fai as a “shill” for Pakistan fell on deaf ears.  Pointing out the prosecutor, Ms.Ginsberg said angrily,  “Mr. Kromberg’s arguments to the Court are appalling in light of the fact that the Government originally charged Dr. Fai with a FARA offense, elected to drop that offense, and is now essentially making a closing argument that he would make to a jury if Dr. Fai was charged with violating the FARA statute, all without giving him the slightest ability to refute with facts.”    The prosecution had dropped the charge entirely on its own, without negotiation or effort by the defense, before the case ever reached the court.  

“Judge,” she said,  “Pakistan would have Kashmir annexed to Pakistan. Dr. Fai is a Kashmiri.  He doesn’t have to have Pakistan tell him that India shouldn’t be murdering tens of thousands of Kashmiri people.”    

 

It was the genuineness of the cause of Kashmir and the succinct articulation of Dr. Fai which caused the judge to make clear that he was totally convinced that the accused in no way misrepresented the people of Kashmir when he said in his closing remarks, “I see no reason why you can’t continue to advocate on behalf of the Kashmiri people and to write.”  He shared his belief in that cause when he added, “I hope that this cause continues to be identified as an important international matter.  And good luck to you.”  

 

The people of Kashmir should remember that Kashmir is not a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan but that it has its own international dimension as mentioned by Judge O’Grady.  While the efforts of Dr. Fai have been somewhat muddied by these waters, the river flows on and the water will clear by these facts that have been revealed through this legal process.  Dr. Fai continues to stand strong and, God willing, he will continue to advocate the cause of Kashmir while he is incarcerated.  

 

Once he is released, he will again advocate this just cause before the international community, because he has been given the full support and confidence of American jurisprudence and was in fact encouraged by the judge to continue his work.  That should be evidence in and of itself that the original allegation that he was acting as a foreign agent for Pakistan was completely false and without substance.  The judge was eminently clear in recognizing the ongoing tragedy in Kashmir, acknowledging the many years of labor by Dr. Fai for his own homeland, and a full acknowledgement of those facts was made possible in public through this legal process.  

 

A hero is someone who is willing to give his life for the cause of others. That description fits this man.  He has given all that he could and more.  No one I know or have known in my extensive experience in the political arena has demonstrated the selfless commitment and dedication I have seen in Dr. Fai.  Kashmir is blessed and the world is blessed as well by his fine example.   It is time that we all recognize that Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai is a true hero for having raised the plight of Kashmiris to the level of global consciousness, and I personally owe him a deep sense of gratitude for the beautiful example he has been to me. 

Previously Published on Al-Jazeerah by Paul Barrow 

Read More