NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/soc/culture/pakistan/17071

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-22 | 6.0 KB

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From: [e-mail] (muhammad ahmed)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.pakistan
Subject: (2) Report from Occupied Kashmir
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Date: 23 Nov 92 04:35:46 GMT
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Organization: Boston University
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November 22nd 1992,NY Times

Since Bernier's time many have been drawn to the rugged beauty of the
valley, the languid hours spent on hand-carved cedar houseboats on Dal
Lake , the carpet and craft bazaars in old Sirinagar, the summer capital.
Through much of the 1980's, more than half a million tourists- 90 percent
of them Indians - descended on the valley each year, With 92 flights landing
each  week. The region, which India claims as its own, is very different
from the steamy Gangetic heartland. Last year,however,according to the
tourism statistics still kept with obsessive care by India's bureaucrats
there were officially, no Indian tourists, and a mere 3,946 foreign visitors
trundled in one of the 14 flights coming each week.
Today, no family in the Kashmir valley - 1,700 square miles of glistening
paddies and dense wheat fields - has not been touched by the war. In the
graveyard at the edge of the villege, a luminescent yellow carpet of mustard
flowers has grown around several recent burial mounds. One stone marker
indicates that Muzaffar Ahmad Mirza died on Nov. 11, 1991.
 A 27-year-old high school teacher, Mirza instructed children in mathematics
and Arabic in the nearby town of Tral. Shortly before he died,he told me in
labored gasps from a hospital bed in Srinagar how he came by his fearful
injuries:
 "We are all collected in a single place. We were separated into three groups
six in my group. We were taken into some house, an interrogation center. We
were interrogated like beasts. They forced me to say, 'You are a militant.' I
am not in any case. They thought, He's a kattar militant"(kattar in Urdu
term for "hard-core"). "They interrogated me. They got  through into my rectum
They gave me electric touches for one hour. I saw, one meter long. It was full
of blood when it came out. They tried a second time,but then they stopped. I
was not feeling alive".
 In Loragam, where 4,000 live in earth brown brick buildings linked by mud
pathways, Mirza's older brother, Ghulam Mohammed, remembers the day the Indian
Army took his brother away: "The Army came in the morning and ordered people
out of their houses. The old men they put in one place, the women and children
in one place, The young men in one place. Then they took 17 boys to an interr-
ogation center....They him to say where the militants were, to show them where
the guns were. He refused."
 The brother's father,Mohammed Asham Mirza, hobbles into the room, leaning
heavily on a worn wooden cane, and eases himself onto a floor mat. He has
on a wool knitted cap and a pheran, the wool cap worn by Kashmiris throughout
the valley. His voicebreaks as he talks of his son:"I could never imagine this
could happen I was quite happy he was attending to his job. He was a Scholar
in Arabic, Which is the language of the Koran. He might have talked to them,the
army,in a high tone. He might have argued with them.He was always absorbed in
his education.If it is proved he was involved in militancy,I stand for any
punishment.God should save us; otherwise they are going to finish us."
 For Indian Government , the Kashmiris are waging what is probably the most
dangerous war of independence within its borders. Rebellions of varying fury
walled up - in Assam in the northeast, in Punjabin the northwest - but in
Kashmir four million Muslims totally alinated from an overseer of nearly 800
million Hindus support a guerrilla war that some Indians say may well presage
the dismembering of the Indian state.
 Over the last three years,the war waged with breathtaking savagery by the
Indian Army and a number of insurgents - has left thousands dead. It has
shattered the valley's economy,once a profitable mix of tourism,carpet manufac-
turing and agriculture. And it has worsened tensions between India and Pakistan
two would be nuclear powers both laying claim to the territory.
 About 150 guerrilla groups have spread throughout every corner and crevice of
the valley. Every town every village has spawned guerrillas, or militants, as
they prefer to be known.
On several visits, I was welcomed, within minutes, by smiling young men with
AK-47 assault rifles slung over their pherans. Young children dart about
admiring the swagger of the guerrillas, while village women,who do much of the
hard labor in rural areas,watch the young men carefully, their eyes giving
nothing away.
As is the case with many insurgencies - the Kurd in Iraq and Turkey are an
obvious example - the Kashmiri guerrillas are not a unified group. The best
armed is the Hizb-ul-Mujahedeen, a Islamic fundamentalist group. The dozen or
so fundamentalist allies,most of whom have been armed and trained by Pakistan's
intelligence services, see salvation in ties to Islamabad. Their fundamentalism
however,has few roots in Kashmir.
 In part this is due to the secularization of Indian politics, which has left
its traces on Kashmiri life after four decades. In part it is a result of the
moderate stance of the valley's traditional religious leaders. The region's
mystical,Sufi-influenced form of Islam gently suffused the life of the valley,
and if they thought of the subject at all, the people thought of themselves as
Kashmiris. The majority of Kashmiris simply want to call their territory their
own and are loyal to the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation front, which has been
fighting for independence since 1964. The front eschews fundamentalist Islam as
inimical to Kashmiri traditions and scorns the notion of linking with Pakistan
as trading one oppressor for another.




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           Rah-e-Haq key shaheedoN Ko Salam



Islam Zindabad

Pakistan Paindabad

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