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Dont look away from Kashmirs mass graves and peoples struggle
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Wed, 08/24/2011 - 09:26
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Wed, 08/24/2011 - 09:26
Last Summer, during a massive unarmed revolt against Indian rule in Kashmir, the writer Pankaj Mishra posed the following question about the situation in the territory. It remains as valid today as a year ago especially after the recent discovery of thousands of bodies in mass graves:
Once known for its extraordinary beauty, the valley of Kashmir now hosts the biggest, bloodiest and also the most obscure military occupation in the world. With more than 80,000 people dead in an anti-India insurgency backed by Pakistan, the killings fields of Kashmir dwarf those of Palestine and Tibet. In addition to the everyday regime of arbitrary arrests, curfews, raids, and checkpoints enforced by nearly 700,000 Indian soldiers, the valleys 4 million Muslims are exposed to extra-judicial execution, rape and torture, with such barbaric variations as live electric wires inserted into penises.
Why then does the immense human suffering of Kashmir occupy such an imperceptible place in our moral imagination? After all, the Kashmiris demanding release from the degradations of military rule couldnt be louder and clearer. India has contained the insurgency provoked in 1989 by its rigged elections and massacres of protestors. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators that fill the streets of Kashmirs cities today are overwhelmingly young, many in their teens, and armed with nothing more lethal than stones. Yet the Indian state seems determined to strangle their voices as it did of the old one. Already this summer, soldiers have shot dead more than 50 protestors, most of them teenagers.
The tolls of last summers unarmed uprising, violently suppressed by Indian forces with live fire, eventually rose to more than 100. And, though Kashmir is even less in the headlines today, protests and abuses particularly the arrests and mistreatment of teenage boys continue.
For decades, until today, the two-thirds of Kashmir under Indian control has been ruled under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, emergency rule as repressive as the worst Arab dictatorship.
Mass graves uncovered
If all the suffering of the living in Kashmir has not succeeded in awakening international concern, the recent revelations of mass graves must. Amnesty International reported on 22 August:
Following a report by a police investigation team, confirming the existence of unmarked graves containing bodies of persons subject to enforced disappearances, urgent action needs to be taken including preserving the evidence and widening the investigation across Jammu and Kashmir said Amnesty International today.
Over 2700 unmarked graves have been identified by the 11-member police team of the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) in four districts of north Kashmir. Despite claims of the local police that the graves contained dead bodies of unidentified militants, the report points out that 574 bodies have been identified as disappeared locals - 17 of these have already been exhumed and shifted to family or village grave sites.
The police report concludes that there is every probability that the remaining over 2100 unidentified graves may contain the dead bodies of [persons subject to] enforced disappearances. The report further clarifies that the only way to negate such a claim is to study the DNA profiles of the unidentified dead bodies and warns that in the absence of such tests, it has to be assumed/ presumed that [the] State wants to remain silent deliberately to hide the Human Rights violations.
While Amnesty welcomed this report, it calls on Indian authorities:
to initiate thorough investigations into unmarked graves throughout the state. All unmarked grave sites must be secured and investigations carried out by impartial forensic experts in line with the UN Model Protocol on the disinterment and analysis of skeletal remains.
The fact that an investigation has reached this point at all is to Indias credit, but given its appalling record in Kashmir, there is little reason to believe that India will provide justice for victims without strong pressure and exposure.
The silence of the liberals
While almost every other week, the United States issues orders to this or that countrys leader to step down, or to (very selectively) respect human rights, the Obama administration has been totally silent about the crisis in Kashmir. During his visit to India last year, Obama did not mention it.
In US media and establishment discourse, India is often presented as a colorful, vibrant democracy with a booming economy and an emerging middle class which is eyed hungrily by American corporations looking to export consumer goods or jobs to Indias cheaper labor force.
I was reminded of the general obliviousness to the situation in Kashmir by a recent comment on Twitter from Princeton Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning in Obamas State Department, on the occasion of India assuming the chairmanship of the UN Security Council:
