Saturday May 12, 2007
Indian-controlled Kashmir is under virtual martial law
SRINAGAR, India (AP): The military runs Indian-controlled Kashmir as if it were under martial law, denying basic freedoms and repeatedly targeting civilians, according to a report by Indian human rights activists.
The report, issued Friday after a weeklong fact-finding mission to the Himalayan region, accuses the military of having a vice-like grip on the civilian population.
"The rural areas continue to be completely captive to the armed forces, and the people can do nothing which does not meet the approval of the army,'' said the report, signed by 11 prominent Indian rights activists.
"The army, which is supposed to merely aid the civil administration under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, has completely supplanted the civil administration. The only name for this is martial law,'' said the report, authored by K. Balagopal of the Human Rights Forum, a group based in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
The mission also included activists from the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee, the People's Democratic Forum of Karnataka and the Center for the Study of Developing Societies.
The activists also accused the military of using civilians as human shields while trying to detain militants, arresting minors, and employing criminal gangs to help subjugate the population.
The military denied the charges, saying any civilian suffering was caused by militants operating within the civilian population.
"Civilians suffer because of the presence of militants in civilian clothes in the civil areas,'' said Lt. Col. A.K. Mathur, an army spokesman in Srinagar, the summer capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state.
Jammu-Kashmir is India's only Muslim-majority state, and most of its people favor independence from mainly Hindu India, or a merger with predominantly Muslim Pakistan.
India has an estimated 700,000 soldiers in Kashmir, fighting nearly a dozen rebel groups since a separatist insurgency erupted in 1989. In many areas, the region has the feel of an occupied country, with soldiers in full combat gear patrolling streets and frisking civilians.
More than 68,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the conflict.
The rebels have also been frequently accused of rights violations, particularly against civilians suspected of working with the army.
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp...27&sec=apworld
