The Mass Graves Of Kashmir

For 22 years this contested region has endured a regime of torture and disappeared civilians. Now a local lawyer is discovering their unmarked graves and challenging India's abuses

One sodden evening in April 2010, an Indian army major from the 4 Rajputana Rifles arrived at a remote police post where the mountains gather in a half-hitch around Kashmir, India's northernmost state. Major Opinder Singh "seemed in a hurry", a duty policeman recalled. Up in the heights of the Pir Panjal range, down through which the major had descended, it was snowing and his boots let in water. "The officer reported that the previous night his men had killed three Pakistani terrorists who had crossed over into our Machil sector," the policeman recalled. "Where are the bodies?" the policeman had asked, filling in a First Information Report that started a criminal enquiry. "They were buried where they were shot," the major retorted, before taking off in his jeep.

"It was not unusual," the policeman later told investigators, when questioned as to why he had not insisted on viewing the corpses or checking the identities. Kashmir had been in turmoil since Partition in 1947 and on a virtual war footing for the past two decades, with some estimates placing the dead at 70,000. Strung with razor wire and anti-missile netting, the state had been transformed into one of the most militarised places on earth, with one Indian paramilitary or soldier stationed for every 17 residents. The Pakistani intelligence services and military trained and funded a legion of irregulars, who infiltrated over the mountains to kick-start a full-blown insurgency in 1989, keeping the Indian-ruled portion of the Muslim-majority state permanently alight.

Once picture-perfect, a place of pilgrimage for backpackers and mystics of all religions, Kashmir had become one of the most beautiful and dangerous frontlines in the world. Machil, the sector in which Singh had sprung his operation, was especially treacherous, consisting of a clutch of isolated villages strung along the Line of Control (LoC), a high-altitude ceasefire line that had split Kashmir in 1972. Up here in the thin air, India had created a fearsome barrier, made lethal with the help of Israeli technology, a partially electrified series of fences connected to motion detectors, surrounded by a heavily mined no-man's land.

On 30 April, 2010, an armed forces spokesman in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, confirmed Singh's story. "Three militants have been killed in a shootout," said Lieutenant Colonel JS Brar, detailing how three AK-47s, one Pakistani pistol, ammunition, cigarettes, chocolates, dates, two water bottles, a Kenwood radio and 1,000 Pakistani rupees had been recovered. The standard-issue infiltration kit. The corpseless triple-death inquiry was an open and shut case.

However, a few days later, at Panzalla police station, 30 miles from Machil, a simple missing case was causing everyone problems. Three Kashmiri families from nearby Nadihal village had turned up to report the disappearance of their sons: Mohammad, 19, Riyaz, 20, and Shahzad, 27, an apple farmer, a herder and a labourer. They had not seen them since 28 April and would not be calmed by detectives. Soon, their appeals drew the attention of Kashmir's most dogged human rights lawyer, Parvez Imroz, whose response to what would become known as the "Machil Encounter" was about to create a watershed in Kashmir.

Dressed in the uniform of the Kashmiri bar, a crisp white shirt and sombre morning suit, over the past two decades Imroz had become a fixture at the high court in Srinagar, filing thousands of habeas corpus actions (which literally translates as "produce the bodies") on behalf of families who claimed their relatives had vanished while in the custody of the Indian security forces.

These actions rarely succeeded, the Indian army insisting that the missing had flitted over the LoC to Pakistan, recalling historic scenes at the start of theinsurgency that terrified New Delhi, when tens of thousands of young Kashmiris jumped aboard buses manned by youthful conductors shouting: "Pakistan, Pakistan here we come." But what the writs did achieve was to create a paper trail from which Imroz was able to estimate that 8,000 Kashmiri non-combatants had vanished from army custody in a state the size of Ireland – four times more than disappeared under Pinochet in Chile. "The military grip has been suffocating," he told the Guardian, "and making someone vanish sows far more fear than spilling their blood".

Imroz had spent much of his career facing down security forces protected by specially drafted laws. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, soldiers and paramilitaries enjoy total immunity from prosecution, unless the ministry of defence sanction their trial. Using new Right to Information (RTI) laws, Imroz obtained confirmation that despite the fact that hundreds of soldiers stood accused of murder, rape and torture, not a single case had proceeded. In contrast, Kashmiri citizens are dealt with using the Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act, under which they can be jailed, preventively, for two years, if deemed likely to commit subversive acts in the future, with an estimated 20,000 detained, according to Human Rights Watch.

Imroz's campaigning achieved other things. He caught the attention of the UN, and this year Christof Heyns, a special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, warned India that all of these draconian laws had no place in a functioning democracy and should be scrapped. The price for confronting the security forces and the militants they faced down was severe. In 1992, Imroz mourned the loss of his Hindu mentor, an activist who was gunned down by Muslim insurgents. Three years later, Imroz was driving home from court when he felt a cold draught grip his chest. "I slumped over the wheel, inexplicably," he recalled. Bystanders who came to his rescue told him he had been shot. A militant group later claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. In 1996, the Indian army abducted Imroz's friend and fellow lawyer, Jalil Andrabi, whose mutilated body was found after three weeks. Imroz shut himself off. For years he refused to marry or have children, worried they would be targeted. In 2002, his accomplished protégé, Khurram Parvez, a young Kashmiri graduate, was badly injured in an IED attack that killed his driver and a female colleague, Asiya Jeelani. Two years after that, a gunman posing as a client, shot dead another of Imroz's legal allies. In 2005, when Imroz was awarded the Ludovic-Trarieux International Human Rights Prize, first given to Nelson Mandela, he was unable to accept it in person as India declined to issue him a passport.

But Imroz's reputation began to build in the countryside, from where terrified villagers travelled to besiege his rickety chambers on the Bund, in central Srinagar, carrying with them stories. In 2008, these accounts enabled the lawyer to make his greatest discovery. While surveying disappearance cases in villages across two of Kashmir's 23 districts, including Baramulla, from where the three Nadihal men would vanish in 2010, villagers showed him a hitherto unknown network of unmarked and mass graves: muddy pits and mossy mounds, pock-marking pine forests and orchards. According to eyewitnesses, all had been dug under the gaze of the Indian security forces and all contained the bodies of local men. Some were fresh, others decayed, hinting at a covert slaughter that went back many years.

Imroz widened his search, mapping almost 1,000 locations. He was shocked by the implications. Indian law requires that the police probe every violent death and that corpses be identified. But in the village of Bimyar, white-haired Atta Muhammad Khan came forward to describe how he had been forced to inter 203 unidentified bodies under cover of the night – men whose identities and crimes were unstated. "Some corpses were disfigured. Others were burnt. We did not ask questions." It was a similar story in Kichama village, where the lawyer mapped 235 unmarked graves and in Bijhama, where 200 more unidentified corpses had been interred. In Srinagar, Imroz's team alerted the government's State Human Rights Commission (SHRC). "We suspected the missing of Kashmir were buried at these secret sites," he said, publishing a report, Facts Under Ground.

An official response came two months later, just after 10pm on 30 June, 2008. Imroz had at last married Rukhsana, a business woman, and they now had two children, his daughter Zeenish, 12, and a boy, Tauqir, aged seven. The family lived in Kralpora, a tree-lined suburb eight miles from Srinagar city centre. No one called round on the offchance. Rukhsana heard a rap at the door and glanced outside to see that their security lights had been smashed. "I knew what this meant," she said, the door knock immediately conjuring memories of murdered friends. Imroz ran to the back of the house and shouted for his brother, Sheikh Mushtaq Ahmad, who lived next door.

As Ahmad emerged with a torch, a shot was fired, narrowly missing his son. A stranger screamed: "Put that light out." Then, a grenade exploded, shrapnel pitting the front door. Tear gas shells followed, waking neighbours who unlocked the village mosque. The imam mobilised residents to surround Imroz's house, as an armoured vehicle and two jeeps from the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force and police Special Task Force, took off. "They had come to kill us," Rukhsana recalled. "We need protection," she said. Who do you need protection from, I asked her. "From our own government of course. It's jungle law."

After the attack, Human Rights Watch called on India to "protect Parvez Imroz, an award-winning human rights lawyer" and his case was raised in the European parliament. His family pleaded for him to quit. "I was terrified," the lawyer conceded. "I was starting to have horrible dreams. But being silent is a crime."

Imroz and his team redoubled their efforts, spreading their net across 55 villages in three districts, Bandipora, Baramulla and Kupwara. An ad-hoc inquiry run by volunteers and funded by donations saw the number of unmarked and mass graves mapped rise to 2,700. Inside them were 2,943 bodies; 80% of them unidentified. "These were hellish images from a war that no one has ever reported," said Imroz. "We suspected this to be prima-facie evidence of war crimes," he added. "Who are the dead, how did they die, in whose hands and who interred them?"

The SHRC finally agreed to an inquiry. Soon, it had its work cut out. Using RTI laws, the police were forced to concede that they had lodged 2,683 cases for the covertly interred in just three districts. And a new deposition submitted by Imroz's field workers covering two more districts, Rajoori and Poonch, mapped 3,844 more unmarked and mass graves, taking the total number to more than 6,000. There are still another 16 districts yet to be surveyed, leaving Imroz to wonder how many violent deaths and surreptitious burials have been concealed across Kashmir. Finally, last September, the SHRC made an announcement, stating that Imroz's discovery was correct: "There is every possibility that unidentified dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves … may contain the victims of enforced disappearances." The UN weighed in this year, a report to the Human Rights Council warning India of its obligations under human rights treaties and laws. Kashmiri families had a "right to know the truth" and that "when the disappeared person is found to be dead, the right … to have the remains of their loved one returned to them, and to dispose of those remains according to their own tradition, religion or culture".

After the Nadihal men disappeared, Imroz's field worker, Parvaiz Matta, travelled to the village. He found an eyewitness, Fayaz Wani, a close friend of the missing men. Wani finally revealed the Indian army had offered the men jobs, in a deal brokered by a Special Police Officer (SPO), who had given them a sum equivalent to £7 each, "as a show of good will", before taking them to a remote army camp in Machil.

The families of the missing men filed a complaint against the SPO, Bashir Lone. "This man broke down, admitting his role, claiming that nine soldiers at a remote army camp had shot the three men, so they could claim reward money," Matta said. (The army routinely gives financial rewards to soldiers who kill militants.) On 28 May, 2010, three bodies were exhumed from unmarked graves close to the camp, some of those already mapped by Imroz, and in which the government said were foreign fighters. Their families identified Shahzad, Riyaz and Mohammad by their clothes.

The Nadihal cash-for-killing story and news of a legion of unidentified dead lying in unmarked graves, sent hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on to the streets in the summer of 2010. Sensing the building anger, the army and central government in New Delhi promised an inquiry, offering, without irony, talks to anyone in Kashmir "who renounced violence". However, when no answers came, Kashmir went into convulsions, as crowds of youths armed with stones ambushed soldiers, police and paramilitaries who returned fire with live rounds. I arrived in Kashmir shortly after. More than 100 demonstrators had been killed, many of them children. International news channels briefly took an interest, asking if Kashmir was experiencing its own Arab Spring. But the cameras left quickly, as a vicious crackdown began clearing the streets: the government's own statistics showing that more than 5,300 Kashmiri youths, many of them children, were arrested.

In 2011, Imroz went to work again, investigating how India had restored the peace, and I shadowed him. He took statements from those who had been released and the families of those still incarcerated. "The affidavits made for chilling reading," he said. The majority of youths alleged torture, with independent medical examinations confirming that many had their fingernails pulled and bones crushed. One teenage prisoner told the Guardian: "The police started on our hands and fingers, breaking them with gun butts, and by the end when tears were streaming down our faces, we were hung by our ankles and had chilli rubbed in our wounds." Others claimed to have petrol funnelled into their rectums. One group alleged in court that they were forced to sodomise each other, while a police cameraman filmed.

This year, Imroz and his field workers widened the research to commence the first state-wide inquiry into the use of torture. Their findings will go to the UN and to Human Rights Watch later this summer but a draft seen by the Guardian suggests that not only is torture endemic, it is systemic. In one cluster of 50 villages, more than 2,000 extreme cases of torture were documented, any of which would kick-start an SHRC inquiry, and all of which left victims maimed and psychologically scarred. Methods included branding, electric shocks, simulated drowning, striping flesh with razor blades and piping petrol into anuses.

This work suggests that the statewide ratio for Kashmiris who have experienced torture is one in six. "For the 50 villages, in this small snapshot, we located 50 centres run by the army and paramilitaries in which torture had been practised," Imroz said. The methods, language and even the architecture of the torture chambers are identical. "What we are looking at is not a few errant officers." Files released under RTI laws show how these practises go back to 1989. These documents, seen by the Guardian, also reveal horrific practises, including one sizeable cluster, confidentially probed by the government itself, where men from the Border Security Force (BSF) lopped off the limbs of suspects and fed prisoners with their own flesh.

The Guardian traced one of the victims, a shepherd Qalandar Khatana, 45. Hobbling on crutches, bandages covering his ankles, both feet having been sawn off, he recalled: "I was held down, a BSF trooper produced a knife and then I passed out as the blood gushed from me." His file says a government investigator confirmed the story and produced eyewitnesses.

Another villager, Nasir Sheikh, a carpenter, who lost both legs below the knee and one hand, added: "The smell was of death – urine, shit, sweat. You knew you were about to be slowly murdered. It was like being thrown down a well where no one can hear you scream." His file confirms the story and suggests that compensation be paid. The UN special rapporteur on torture has been refused entry to Kashmir since 1993. Domestic legislation to outlaw torture has stalled. "When will the world start asking as tough questions of India as it is of Syria?" Imroz asked. "Or are we Kashmiris invisible?"

Previously Published on Guardian  by Cathy Scott-Clark

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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

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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.

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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

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Release Dr. Muhammad Qasim | A Prisoner Of The State

Dr. Muhammad Qasim: A mission, A vision 
HE IS DYING BEHIND THE BARS, DOES ANYONE CARE ??? 
Prisoner of State

Dr. Muhammad Qasim is set to complete 20 years of imprisonment in the month of June 2012. he was arrested in Feb 1993 for holding political views that are unacceptable to the establishment, he was released on bail by the TADA court Jammu in March 1999 and was rearrested in the same case in Feb 2000 on his return from UK after attending Kashmir conference there.

      Dr. Muhammad Qasim’s Health condition in prison:He has lost more than half his eye sight (-4.75 D) as he is regularly loosing his vision he has been advised Lasik by the doctors. He has been advised surgery by the orthopedist for his L4-L5 disc. He is regularly taking medicine for erosive duodenitis, chronic gastritis and intestinal ailment .Jail authorities never showed any concern for his ailments with the result his health is deteriorating with every passing day.

              JUDICIAL COURSE AND GOVERNMENT’S HARSH APPROACH:Dr. Muhammad Qasim was acquitted by the TADA court Jammu in July 2001.Government of India instead of releasing him booked him under the so called public safety act (PSA) and challenged his acquittal before the supreme court of India and the supreme court of India sentenced him along with two other persons for life.

Dr. Muhammad Qasim completed 14 years (mandatory period of life imprisonment) in Feb. 2008, accordingly state Review board recommended his release but politically biased government rejected review boards recommendations. It is the lone case in the history of lifers in Jammu and Kashmir where recommendations of the review board for the release of a lifer were rejected by the home department.

JK High court (SB) asked government you reconsider the review boards recommendations for Dr. Muhammad Qasim’s release with in 90 days in June 2010.Governmnet of India yet again showed her ruthless attitude and challenged the said order before the double bench of the JK high court. JK high court while setting aside the SB order adding that his case can be considered only after 20 years , made an important observation as under: 31:Irrespective of the provisions i.e. section 401 and 402 of the state code of criminal procedure, which corresponds to section 432 and 433 of the central code. The power of the executive is absolute and unfettered to remit sentence.(LPA No:120/2010)

Government of India did not give any head to this observation this , Dr. Muhammad Qasim remains in prison. You can do a lot!

Join The campaign spread the word

By becoming a member of this campaign all you have to do is to forward this brief profile of Dr. Muhhamad Qasim to all such organizations, Committees, Media men and individuals who are working for human rights and political prisoners, by doing this you are not supporting an individual but a just cause.

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Please Sign The Petition:  Amnesty International: Release Dr. Muhammad Qasim Campaign

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Kashmir: The Untold Story of Indian Occupation

By Tara Dorabji

A few days before I left for India, American journalist, David Barsamian, was deported from New Delhi for his coverage of Kashmir. Barsamian reports for AlterNet one of the few national free speech radio outlets in the US. News reports quoted officials saying that his deportation resulted from his reporting on Kashmir during his 2009-10 trip to India, while on a tourist visa. If reporting the truth in Kashmir can get you deported, I was in danger.

On my first day in Srinagar, the local head of surveillance let me know he was fully aware of my arrival. It was a discreet enough interaction, but served its purpose: I was being watched. My threat? A pen and paper to record the stories of Kashmiris.

The silence of India’s occupation of Kashmir blankets the valley, like the morning smog obscures the Himalayan Mountains. There is a new face to the hundred-year-old struggle for Kashmiri sovereignty and independence. Sahil, age 12, lit up when I asked what his hope for Kashmir is. “I have a hope that there is a freedom in Kashmir.” Sahil’s father was disappeared in 2002. For nine years he and his mother have searched for his father, only his absence is present. Every day after school Sahil comes home to help his mother work—embroidering cloth to earn a few rupees.

The strong current of popular, nonviolent uprising for freedom continues to grow in Kashmir. It distinguishes itself from the armed rebellion of the early 90s, yet the demand is the same: liberation from occupation—the independence of Kashmir. Despite the Indian government’s own estimate of only 500-700 armed militants in the area, Kashmir remains the most densely militarized land on earth. There are approximately 700,000 Indian military and paramilitary in Kashmir, policing a population of 12.5 million.

Under the British partitioning of India in 1947, Kashmir joined India as a quasi-independent region. For a short time, Kashmiris enjoyed much self-rule, self-determination and indigenous leadership. Kashmir led the world in revolutionary land reform, implementing a broad redistribution of resources that created a population relatively equal in wealth. Was it that the Indian ruling elite feared that Kashmir would serve as a model for India? Could there have been a broad redistribution of resources in the subcontinent?

There are many interpretations of how the trust and relationship between Delhi and Srinagar eroded. The result was a deliberate stripping of Kashmiri independence, which on paper was protected under article 370 of the India constitution. While most of these rights have diminished, land protection in the valley is still observed and only Kashmiris can own land in the region. It is this provision that has prevented a complete repopulation of the area.

With the erosion of Kashmir’s autonomy, came the military repression and arguably an attempted genocide. From 1989 to 2011 there have been 8,000 documented disappearances and 70,000 deaths of Kashmiris resulting from the Indian occupation. Torture is rampant. Khurram Parvaiz, Liaison of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kashmir (IPTK), works documenting the cases of torture. “The most underreported phenomenon in Jammu and Kashmir is torture. If you go to any village hundreds of people in every village have been tortured, not just men, but women, children and old people as well.” Parvaiz was involved in documenting the torture of over 1,500 people who became impotent because their genitals were electrocuted. He goes on to explain that there have been hundreds of boys who were raped by soldiers. In one case the abuse by the army was caught on video, still there were no convictions. Parvaiz continued to describe another case of torture, “I have documented very horrible cases, but this is the most horrible.” The army kept a 60-year-old man in solitary confinement for one month. During that time, he wasn’t given anything to eat, but his own flesh. They cut the flesh from his body and served it to him. This was all he was given to eat for a month. Recounting the torture Parvaiz said, “This was something that shook me. We have hundreds of Guantanamo Bays here. Why is nobody talking about it?”

The torture and death can be buried no longer. In July 2011, the State Human Rights Commission of Jammu and Kashmir (SHRC) released a report documenting 2,156 unidentified bodies in 38 graveyards. The state report verified the findings of Buried Evidence, released in 2009 by Parvaiz’s group. Parvaiz explained how the findings were initially swept under the rug, “The government said that these unmarked graves are all of foreign militants and people need not worry about it.” There have been limited DNA tests on the remains. Parvaiz cited that DNA tests of 53 bodies identified that 49 were Kashmiri civilians, one was a Kashmiri combatant and three were unidentified.

Parvaiz said, “It is the right of the family to have the body. The government does not want to give these bodies to the families because there is something to hide. They are hiding the marks of torture.”

Kashmiri children grow up watching graveyards populate their villages. As people are buried, the community holds their story, the memory. Oral history is their biggest weapon against India’s brutal occupation. Even under occupation, the stories of the dead cannot be silenced.

The families of the disappeared continue to fight for the truth. Bilkeez Manzoor became a member of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons after her father disappeared in 2002. The army took him from their house in the middle of the night. They have not seen him since. Manzoor continues to fight for justice for her father and brought the case all the way to India’s supreme court. Manzoor recounted that she received threatening calls telling her not to continue with her case, “But I am not afraid. I thought I am strong; I should file this. I have never stopped.”

Manzoor explained her hopes for Kashmir. “I want independence. The armed forces, they destroy everyone’s lives through torture, through fake murders like disappearances. It is very horrible for us. When we have independence we’ll be free of this. With the independence of Kashmir, maybe the women will feel free.”

While the people of Kashmir resist occupation and struggle for freedom every day, their struggle is largely ignored by the international community. Khurram Parviz asked, “Why is the international community silent? The war which has been declared on the people of Jammu and Kashmir by the Indian state has been violent, has been brutal has matched all records of brutality around the world. What we have suffered in the last 20 years is no less than a war crime, yet there is silence by the international community.”

Looking at the high alpine lakes and valley surrounded by mountains, one cannot help, but think of Switzerland. With a population of 7.6 million people, Switzerland’s population is nearly half the size of Kashmir’s. Despite its small size, Switzerland spends about 1% of their GDP on military. If Switzerland can be independent, why not Kashmir?

Could the future independence of Kashmir be a headwaters in creating a new type of democracy? Perhaps if the nonviolent, popular movement of Kashmir is allowed self-determination a new brand of democracy will be born: a democracy that is not founded on control through military domination—one that does not wave the flag of democracy to cover up genocide.

Earlier Published on (C) Project Censored  

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