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The missing: Fury over Kashmir's disappeared men and boys grows amid security clampdown
Relatives of Kashmiri disappeared persons protest in Srinagar CREDIT: EPA/FAROOQ KHAN
On the 10th day of every month since 1994, a group of women gather in Srinagar.
Holding faded photographs and wiping away tears with their scarves, these women have doggedly protested for their missing relatives to be restored to them, but with no luck. That is, with no luck yet.
In India’s northern disputed Kashmir state "enforced disappearances" that happened after the armed Islamist insurgency erupted in the region in 1989 have not been forgotten.
Attendance at the park gathering, however, has grown in recent months as the levels of insurgency in the province have worsened and the clampdown by the security forces has tightened.
On Wednesday, as usual, more than 100 women came together to demand the return of their family members.
The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) assembled at Pratap Park in Kashmir’s summer capital demanded that the government give details of the whereabouts of 8,000-10,000 of their relatives, summarily marched off by the security forces, never to be seen again.
The protest ritual is one they have steadfastly, but vainly, followed since the Association’s establishment in 1994.
"We want the government to establish a formal commission to investigate these enforced disappearances” said Association head Praveena Ahanger, adding that they were merely seeking information not compensation.
Ahanger’s teenage son Javed Ahmad was marched off by an army patrol one night in August 1990, mistaken for someone else in the neighbourhood with a similar name.
“If our relatives are alive, tell us; if not, show us their graves” the 55-year-old argued. "At least then we can have closure."
Thousands of people, like Ahanger's son, were apprehended across Kashmir by the security forces and then simply vanished.
His distraught mother visited military camps and jails across the Kashmir Valley looking for him, even badgering barbers, cooks and others with access to incarceration camps, but to no avail.
With assistance from activist lawyers she eventually filed a case in the state High Court seeking her son's whereabouts, and 13 years later identified the two soldiers who had seized him.
But her triumph was short-lived, as her bid to prosecute these two army men was referred to the federal government for legal sanction. As with hundreds of corresponding cases, consent was denied.
This was because the Armed Forces Special Powers Act invoked across several of India’s militancy-ridden regions, grants immunity from prosecution to all military and paramilitary personnel for acts performed in the course of enforcing peace.
Other than arbitrarily apprehending anyone merely on suspicion, the security fiat even includes shooting dead unarmed protestors on specious grounds, such as for defying curfew.
“This monthly gathering serves as a kind of group therapy, even after all these years, for the families of the disappeared” said Association Project Director Sabia Dar.
She added that the phenomena of disappearances needed to be resolved by the authorities.
Back in Srinagar’s Pratap Pak, the parents mourning their missing offspring were joined by scores of Kashmiri ‘half-widows’ – a classification peculiar to the troubled state – also seeking official redemption.
These were wives of ‘disappeared’ males who, in Kashmir’s strict Islamic milieu cannot remarry, as they lacked proof of having been widowed. Dar estimates their number to be around 1,500-2,000.
And, since the majority of them were poor, their ‘twilight’ status meant they were socially relegated and lead indigent, wretched existences, she declared.
Many such wives also had the additional burden of having to support 600-700 ‘half-orphans’ or children born to them after their spouses had disappeared.
Meanwhile, senior security officials in Srinagar privately conceded that fewer than 1,000 Kashmiri youths had ‘disappeared’ and that less than 150 of them had died.
They maintained that the majority of the ‘disappeared’ had fled to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir to obtain arms training, before returning to fuel the Kashmiri insurgency.
But Pakistan, which controls a third of Kashmir and claims the rest, denies Indian allegations of arming and training insurgents, providing merely moral, diplomatic and political support to the Kashmiri independence struggle.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...irs-disappeared-men-boys-grows-amid-security/
Relatives of Kashmiri disappeared persons protest in Srinagar CREDIT: EPA/FAROOQ KHAN
- Rahul Bedi, srinagar, kashmir
On the 10th day of every month since 1994, a group of women gather in Srinagar.
Holding faded photographs and wiping away tears with their scarves, these women have doggedly protested for their missing relatives to be restored to them, but with no luck. That is, with no luck yet.
In India’s northern disputed Kashmir state "enforced disappearances" that happened after the armed Islamist insurgency erupted in the region in 1989 have not been forgotten.
Attendance at the park gathering, however, has grown in recent months as the levels of insurgency in the province have worsened and the clampdown by the security forces has tightened.
On Wednesday, as usual, more than 100 women came together to demand the return of their family members.
The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) assembled at Pratap Park in Kashmir’s summer capital demanded that the government give details of the whereabouts of 8,000-10,000 of their relatives, summarily marched off by the security forces, never to be seen again.
The protest ritual is one they have steadfastly, but vainly, followed since the Association’s establishment in 1994.
"We want the government to establish a formal commission to investigate these enforced disappearances” said Association head Praveena Ahanger, adding that they were merely seeking information not compensation.
Ahanger’s teenage son Javed Ahmad was marched off by an army patrol one night in August 1990, mistaken for someone else in the neighbourhood with a similar name.
“If our relatives are alive, tell us; if not, show us their graves” the 55-year-old argued. "At least then we can have closure."
Thousands of people, like Ahanger's son, were apprehended across Kashmir by the security forces and then simply vanished.
His distraught mother visited military camps and jails across the Kashmir Valley looking for him, even badgering barbers, cooks and others with access to incarceration camps, but to no avail.
With assistance from activist lawyers she eventually filed a case in the state High Court seeking her son's whereabouts, and 13 years later identified the two soldiers who had seized him.
But her triumph was short-lived, as her bid to prosecute these two army men was referred to the federal government for legal sanction. As with hundreds of corresponding cases, consent was denied.
This was because the Armed Forces Special Powers Act invoked across several of India’s militancy-ridden regions, grants immunity from prosecution to all military and paramilitary personnel for acts performed in the course of enforcing peace.
Other than arbitrarily apprehending anyone merely on suspicion, the security fiat even includes shooting dead unarmed protestors on specious grounds, such as for defying curfew.
“This monthly gathering serves as a kind of group therapy, even after all these years, for the families of the disappeared” said Association Project Director Sabia Dar.
She added that the phenomena of disappearances needed to be resolved by the authorities.
Back in Srinagar’s Pratap Pak, the parents mourning their missing offspring were joined by scores of Kashmiri ‘half-widows’ – a classification peculiar to the troubled state – also seeking official redemption.
These were wives of ‘disappeared’ males who, in Kashmir’s strict Islamic milieu cannot remarry, as they lacked proof of having been widowed. Dar estimates their number to be around 1,500-2,000.
And, since the majority of them were poor, their ‘twilight’ status meant they were socially relegated and lead indigent, wretched existences, she declared.
Many such wives also had the additional burden of having to support 600-700 ‘half-orphans’ or children born to them after their spouses had disappeared.
Meanwhile, senior security officials in Srinagar privately conceded that fewer than 1,000 Kashmiri youths had ‘disappeared’ and that less than 150 of them had died.
They maintained that the majority of the ‘disappeared’ had fled to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir to obtain arms training, before returning to fuel the Kashmiri insurgency.
But Pakistan, which controls a third of Kashmir and claims the rest, denies Indian allegations of arming and training insurgents, providing merely moral, diplomatic and political support to the Kashmiri independence struggle.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...irs-disappeared-men-boys-grows-amid-security/
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