Kunan-Poshpora gang rape

Kashmir Human Rights asks Govt to reinvestigate Kunan-Poshpora gang rape case

Srinagar, Nov 6: : The JK Human Rights Commission (JKHRC) Wednesday asked the State government to start a fresh probe into the case relating to the alleged mass gang rape of women by army personnel in Kunan and Poshpora villages of Kupwara district 20 ago.

Announcing its recommendations on the case, a division bench of JKHRC asked the state government to constitute a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to reinvestigate the alleged mass gang rape of at least 31 women by army personnel in 1991.

Dozens of women from Kunan and Poshpora villages, around 110 km from here, had claimed that they were gang raped by army troopers during the intervening night of February 23 and 24 in 1991, leading to outrage across Kashmir.

"The SIT should be headed by an officer not below the rank of Superintendent of Police," the bench comprising JKHRC Chairman Justice (retd) Syed Bashiruddin Ahmad and Javaid Kawoos said.

It also asked the state government to prosecute the the then Director Prosecution who had sought closure of the case as the perpetrators were "untraceable".

"The then Director Prosecution had overstepped his brief...prosecution proceedings should be initiated against him and those officers who had approved his report," the JKHRC bench recommended.

Reading out from the report of the then district magistrate, Kawoos said 31 women, who claimed to have been victims of gangrape, had been sent for medical examination, which confirmed that they were subjected to atrocities.

"In the course of hearing the case, statements of 18 women were recorded and during which they testified that they were subjected to the atrocity," he said.

The Commission asked the state government to pay compensation of Rs two lakh each to the victims of the incident.

The then Divisional Commissioner, Kashmir, Wajahat Habibullah, who visited the villages following the allegations, had filed a confidential report in the same year about the incident.

"While the veracity of the complaint is highly doubtful, it still needs to be determined why such complaint was made at all. The people of the village are simple folk and by the army's own admission have been generally helpful and even careful of security of the army's officers," a part of Habibullah's report, released later, read.

"Unlike Brig Sharma, I found many of the village women genuinely angry... It is recommended that the level of investigation be upgraded to that of a gazetted police officer," it said.

In response to the criticism of the government's handling of the investigation, the army had requested the Press Council of India to investigate the incident.

The Press Council team, which visited Kashmir in June that year, claimed that "such a delayed medical examination proves nothing" and that the medical findings were typical among villagers.

The team concluded that the charges against the army were "well-concocted bundle of fabricated lies" and "a massive hoax orchestrated by militant groups and their sympathisers and mentors in Kashmir and abroad".

UAE issues stapled visa to Kashmir residents

Srinagar, 05 May:The United Arab Emirates has begun issuing "stapled visas" to Kashmir  residents, including its "Prime Minister" Sardar Attique Ahmed, a media report said on Thursday.

The practice of issuing "stapled visas" is new and previously visas were stamped as usual on the passports, the Pakistan Observer newspaper reported on Thursday.

PaK "Prime Minister" Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan, who holds a Pakistani diplomatic passport, was issued a stapled visit visa by the UAE Embassy in Islamabad on Tuesday, the report said.

China had sparked a diplomatic row with India last year by issuing stapled visas to residents of Jammu and Kashmir.

Beauty and The Wounds of Kashmir : Paul Barrow

One of Virginia Woolf's well-known quotes, which she wrote in 1929, is that "the beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder." Perhaps nothing could be more descriptive of Kashmir. During a visit to Kashmir many years ago, Prime Minister Nehru described what he saw: Like some supremely beautiful woman, whose beauty is almost impersonal and above human desire, such was Kashmir in all its feminine beauty of river and valley and lake and graceful trees. And then another aspect of this magic beauty would come into view, a masculine one, of hard mountains and precipices, and snow-capped peaks and glaciers, and cruel and fierce torrents rushing to the valleys below. It had a hundred faces and innumerable aspects, ever-changing, sometimes smiling, sometimes sad and full of sorrow … I watched this spectacle and sometimes the sheer loveliness of it was overpowering and I felt faint … It seemed to me dreamlike and unreal, like the hopes and desires that fill us and so seldom find fulfilment. It was like the face of the beloved that one sees in a dream and that fades away on wakening. Georges Bataille, the French novelist, has also said, "beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled, not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it." As of its beauty, of its anguish and it's befouling, in Kashmir, there isn't any shortage of evidence. There's been a little brouhaha in India recently over the release of videotape on YouTube of what appear to be Kashmiri men being paraded nude in front of women and chldren by Indian soldiers. Obviously, authorities have protested, called the tape a fraud, and said that it was released merely to embarrass the army. Copies have been removed from Facebook and YouTube. The tape, however, is still available online, The above photo is used as a profile on Facebook by several Kashmiri freedom fighters. Source unknown. and doesn't lie. Fraud, not likely. Embarrassment, yes. Amnesty International has called for an investigation into the incident. It is inconclusive as to how recent it is or exactly where the video was shot, but it has in all likelihood been videotaped by a cellphone, which dates it as fairly recent, and there is language that is used in the tape that is uniquely Kashmiri. It is also clear that it is an operation conducted by an armed force of some kind, and probably CRPF troops. This is a huge crime, not just an embarrassment. This was in fact a sharp-pointed attack upon religious beliefs and sensitivities that has been compared widely among Kashmiris to Abu Ghraib. Another video that is in wide distribution is of a man who has been beaten, is nude from the waist down, and is being carried on the back of another man while he is taunted and threatened with sodomy as another attempts to poke a stick up his anus. The tyranny of one religious culture over another is obviously different from intellectual disagreements within a culture between liberals and conservatives such as in the abortion issue where there are nitpicky debates about which trimester life begins. The question of a victim hasn't left the debate, even if liberals, for the moment, have the upper hand. People have just agreed to shut up about it. Imagine what a bunch of Qur'an-burning American fundamentalists would do. In this case, nobody's agreed to shut up about anything. The extreme quality that sets their differences apart from the usual mainstream kind of politics is as difficult for Americans to comprehend as it is for Kashmiris to understand why no one else seems to give a damn. However, it is a particularly odious basis for dispute, because it creates opportunities for abuse where differences are not merely cultural but religously based, where not only shrines to one's deepest faith get trashed, but all of the little symbols and habits as well that mark those differences. Religiously based terrorism is only one aspect of this problem. Consider this: on August 2, Greater Kashmir reported that in one hospital in Srinigar, out of 31 patients with gunshot wounds, 14 of them were shot in the head. Just a couple of weeks ago, a friend in Kashmir told me that his cousin, 18, was shot that morning along with four other friends while playing carom in the street. One was 25, the rest were younger than my friend's cousin. All of them shot, two in critical condition. They were not engaged in protest of any kind. They were simply playing in the street. A police jeep drove up, two men got out and simply started shooting. Another man ran up and tried to grab the gun of one of the policemen. He was simply pushed away and arrested. There was no curfew at the time, although that is unusual, because curfews have been almost constant since June 11 in which the people cannot leave their homes during daylight hours. Thousands of mass grave sites of unknown victims are everywhere. "BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Indian-administered Kashmir a preliminary report" by Dr. Angana Chatterji, Professor, Social and Cultural Anthropology, California Institute of Integral Studies, with others, documents this and says that "The Indian state’s governance of Indian-administered Kashmir requires the use of discipline and death as techniques of social control. The structure of governance affiliated with militarization in Kashmir necessitates dispersed and intense forms of psychosocial regulation. As an established nation-state, India’s objective has been to discipline and assimilate Kashmir into its territory. To do so has required the domestication of Kashmiri peoples through the selective use of discipline and death as regulatory mechanisms. Discipline is affected through military presence, surveillance, punishment, and fear. Death is disbursed through “extrajudicial” means and those authorized by law. Psychosocial control is exercised through the use of death and deception to discipline the living. Discipline rewards forgetting, isolation, and depoliticization." Stories of torture abound. It's been widely reported that soldiers arrest all the men in a neighborhood, and then go back and rape their wives. A very thorough Catalogue of Indian Atrocities in Kashmir documenting some of the abuses in the early 90s was done, and such acts continue without letup. In his introduction, Dr Ayyub Thakur, President of the World Kashmir Freedom Movement, states that "It is common practice for the paramilitary forces to walk into a quiet village/town and start shooting indiscriminately, killing innocent and unarmed civilians - all under the pretence of crack-down operations against the Freedom-Fighters. In most cases, innocent civilians are killed, women gang-raped and properties set on fire." In one case, called the Khanyar Incident, "a peaceful procession carrying the dead bodies of persons killed in Dachhigam incident and those killed at Saidkadal locality were being brought for burial, reciting verses of Holy Quran, [and] the armed forces deployed in the area started indiscriminate firing on the mourners and killed about twenty unarmed civilians and injured more than fifty two persons." Personal accounts reported to me indicate that attacks upon funeral processions and emergency vehicles are also quite common even today. The attack upon a peaceful protest just this past Wednesday leaving more than 80 people injured and many dead is reported to have been unprovoked. This is a war upon a people by a people. This is oppression by its very name. This is a war of dominion. This is a war against popular will. This is a war against religious sentiment. This is a war not only against democracy and against self-rule; this is a war against common decency and consideration, against the right to even be human. This is a war against every possible difference that could be imagined between people. And it is being committed by India against Kashmir. Even more incomprehensible is that its not even really about them. They are but grist in a global mill that churns pure evil. In "A Visit from the Footbinder," a story by Emily Prager, Lao Bing says, "Beauty is the still birth of suffering." I can certainly see the conception; but I'm not sure that I see the child. Paul Barrow is Director of Policy and Communications for United Progressives.