Keran still inaccessible

People stage protest, march towards LoC

SHAHID RAFIQ

Kupwara, Aug 8: Hundreds of people of Keran today staged protests and tried to march towards the Long of Control accusing the government of failing to restore the road connectivity of the area.
“Keran was ravaged by floods triggered by Kishenganga river and is still inaccessible due to the lackadaisical approach of the government,” the protestors said adding the road was completely washed away due to floods.Pertinently the flood situation in Keran continues to remain grim on 12th day on Sunday as Kishenganga is flowing above the danger mark. Due to this, residents of several low lying areas have shifted to the safer places. 
“Several acres of agriculture land have been inundated, hundreds of cattle perished and many low lying hamlets are still submerged,” residents of Keran told Greater Kashmir.
Flood has swept away most of the bridges including Mandyan, Dut, Frashi, Keran Bridge and interior culverts and completely washed away road stretch from Pathra to Kean. From Farkayan pass road has been closed due to land slides. Over 50 structures including 20 houses in proper Keran, Mandyan, Naga, Kundyan besides buildings of boys’ higher secondary school has suffered damage, sources said.
Most educational institutions in Keran including FCI’s Food go down has been damaged and thousands of quintals of ration was washed away by flash floods, said the residents.
“There is shortage of ration. The collapse of bridges means that food grains, medicines and other basic amenities can’t reach Keran as a result of which people will face hardships,” the residents added.“If the indifferent approach of the government continues, we will be forced to jump into the river to cross to other side of the Line of Control to get the relief,” the residents said.
MLA Karnah, Kafil-ul-Rehman told Greater Kashmir “I am stranded in Tangdhar and could not visit Keran as there is no road connectivity. I am waiting for the helicopter. I have taken up the matter with CM.”(GK)

AJK President meet APHC Mir Waiz Representatives

KASHMIR: World

KASHMIR: World: "14 protesters shot dead in escalating Kashmir violence



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Agra to Islamabad....Failures

Why didn’t Pillai speak up when his boss was in Pak?

By Jawed Naqvi

Monday, 19 Jul, 2010


Pakistan’s former foreign minister Gauhar Ayub rightly admitted to an Indian TV channel that his current successor Shah Mehmood Qureshi was out of line in making less than diplomatic comments about India’s Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna in Islamabad last week. Mr Qureshi’s comment to the effect that the visitor did not have the mandate from Delhi to hold serious discussions with him was childish and inappropriate. Moreover, whether Mr Krishna was consulting New Delhi or not on the phone in between his engagements was really not anyone’s business but his own.


Mr Qureshi was of course within his rights to express disapproval of an unnecessary and harmful comment made by Indian Home Secretary G. K. Pillai on the eve of Mr Krishna’s departure for Islamabad. Now I know many Pakistani friends and colleagues, not to speak of Indians, who would agree with Mr Pillai’s contention that the ISI was hand in glove with the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attacks. Be that as it may, it still doesn’t justify the comment on the eve of the foreign minister’s globally-watched crucial visit and let me tell you why.

Mr Pillai had all the details about the case when his boss, India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram visited Islamabad on June 26, a visit which was preceded by Mr Pillai’s own useful trip there. Had he made his ISI-was-involved-in-Mumbai comment then, it could have been seen as a bold and even meaningful observation. But he didn’t. Why did he choose to muddy the water for Mr Krishna? Who had authorised him to make that comment at that particular moment? Could he not have left the details of the controversial issue, since that is what it is, to the Indian foreign minister to handle? Surely Mr Krishna could have dealt with it privately or at the press conference he later addressed with his Pakistani counterpart?

And yet Mr Qureshi was wrong to compare Mr Pillai’s role with that of Hafiz Saeed, the fanatical anti-India rabble-rouser. Saeed goes about spewing hatred of Indians and yet remains unchecked by Pakistan’s law-keepers not unlike certain powerful hate-mongers in Mumbai and Gujarat who remain outside the grasp of the state’s corrective institutions for all the untold harm they cause to peace at home and with the neighbourhood. Mr Pillai’s role in queering the pitch for an India-Pakistan dialogue last week was more akin to the part played by the former Indian information minister Sushma Swaraj whose comments to the press contributed directly to the dismal end to the Musharraf-Vajpayee Agra summit on July 16, 2001.

Before coming to Ms Swaraj’s subversive role in Agra, let me put a question about the approach of Mr Pillai and others who may think like him towards India-Pakistan ties. The question is: Between the Kargil conflict and the Mumbai attack, which of the two was more catastrophic for India? In case some find that an unfair question let’s ask an even more blunt one that takes into account Mr Pillai’s concerns about the ISI; which of the two incidents has a clearer imprint of the ISI – Kargil, which everyone now knows was a botched up operation by the Pakistani army – or Mumbai, in which the ISI’s role still remains in the realm of allegation? Certainly Kargil. It was by far the more destructive for India-Pakistan ties because of the clear involvement of Pakistan’s state institutions.

And yet on March 23, 2001, without any apparent overture or apology from Pakistan, then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee shot off an invitation to President Pervez Musharraf. “For the welfare of our peoples, there is no other recourse but a pursuit of the path of reconciliation, of engaging in productive dialogue and by building trust and confidence…” Vajpayee’s invitation letter ended with a call to “put in place a stable structure of cooperation and address all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir”.

The Agra summit was torpedoed – not by Mumbai-like terrorists, but by Pillai-like officials and Swaraj-like politicians. A. G. Noorani has painstakingly chronicled the timeline of how it was subverted and why. As Noorani said, let us begin with Sushma Swaraj. On July 15, 2001, the day the talks began in earnest at Agra, she briefed the press listing the issues discussed but omitted Kashmir to the dismay of Pakistanis. She gave contradictory explanations even for this. “I didn’t mention Kashmir because it was obvious. That is why Gen Musharraf has come here.” (The Times of India, July 17). On the same day she said “it was not a deliberate omission” (The Telegraph, July 17).

But, on August 6, in the Lok Sabha, then foreign minister Jaswant Singh suggested it was deliberate. “When she told the press what she did, she told the press what she was authorised to tell and she had the authority of the Vajpayee Cabinet to do so.” He was right. A detailed report from Agra in The Telegraph (July 17) revealed: “It can be said now (after the debacle) that some people had an inkling that the Indian side would come out with a deliberate statement to suggest that Kashmir was not being discussed at all and that the summit was going very badly.”

Noorani notes that three causes were cited for the failure – Musharraf’s talk to seniors in the Indian media on the morning of July 16; his insistence that Kashmir was a “core issue”; and his refusal “to address cross-border terrorism”.

Sushma Swaraj told Pakistan daily The News (July 20): “Things were derailed the moment the video recording of General Saheb’s tough talk to a group of senior editors was instantly made available to all TV channels of the world who took no time in airing them.” She knew, of course, that this was simply not true. NDTV’s Prannoy Roy asked for the video, acquired it and telecast it. The so-called substantive bit was equally false. One of the editors who was present, Shekhar Gupta, asked Advani on his Walk the Talk programme on NDTV on March 12, 2005, whether the cause was “the breakfast with us, editors, which was televised”. Advani replied: “I don’t think so. No. Not at all”.
Shekhar recalled in Indian Express on January 31, 2004, that in fact Musharraf made many concessions: “If you go over the tapes of that Agra breakfast, you would underline things Musharraf said that no Pakistani leader had said until then.” Couldn’t Gupta have said the same thing on the day the breakfast was touted as the reason for the inconclusive summit?

If not the breakfast meeting, what was the true cause of the failure at Agra? Jaswant Singh mentioned “three broad areas” at his press conference in Agra on July 17. One was Musharraf’s stand that “unless the issue of Jammu and Kashmir is made central there will be no progress on any other aspect” whereas India’s approach “addresses all issues”. This had been denied by Pakistan’s foreign secretary Inamul Haque at the outset, on July 14. Even so, the Indian foreign minister’s charge was that Pakistan sought discussion of Kashmir exclusively; not settlement of the dispute at Agra, let alone an accord on its own terms.

The second area related to “cross-border terrorism” (CBT). The third was omission of previous accords – Simla and Lahore – the very charge he had publicly made in Delhi on July 14, and which Pakistan’s then foreign secretary Inamul Haque denied instantly (The Hindu of July 15 carried the charge and the denial side by side). In parliament on August 6, Jaswant Singh himself rubbished the Simla and the Tashkent accords but had his remarks deleted from the record (Indian Express, August 9).

No doubt the next venue for the India-Pakistan conundrum is Kabul where both sides will be present at an international conference on Afghanistan. The BJP will be praying that the two sides don’t talk so that it can do all the pretend fence mending and not the Congress or anyone else. Mr Pillai will probably be mining the situation for post-retirement political benefits. Us journalists will grow old reporting these on-again off-again talks.

Meanwhile, young stone-pelters on the streets of Kashmir are facing off against one of the most formidable armies in the world. They are the ones paying a real and terrible price for these diplomatic mind-games.

Pathribal encounter: Five Armymen found guilty of killing innocent Kashmiris

Apr 27, 2006
New Delhi, Apr 27
 After three years of probe, the CBI indicted five army personnel for staging a fake encounter to kill innocent civilians and gave a clean chit to the state police.

The CBI, which was handed over the case in January 2003 by the state government, alleged officials and jawans of Seven Rashtriya Rifles Brig Ajay Saxena, Lt Col Brahendra Pratap Singh, Maj Saurabh Sharma, Maj Amit Saxena and Subedar Idrees Khan had staged a fake encounter and killed five innocent civilians labelling them as terrorists responsible for carnage of Sikhs in Chittisinghpora in South Kashmir.

The case had become politically sensitive and former state Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and his party, PDP, were quick to suspend Farooq Khan, the former Senior Superintendent of Police, and also instituted a judicial probe which found the SSP gulity.

However, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court rejected the inquiry report and absolved Khan of all charges.
The CBI also did not find any wrong doing on the part of the SSP and claimed the fake encounter was staged by the army personnel.
Five people were killed on March 26, 2000 in Pathribal in South Kashmir who, the army claimed, were mercenaries responsible for the gunning down of 35 members of Sikh community on March 21 when the then US President Bill Clinton was on a visit to India.
The 18-page CBI chargesheet said that after the gunning down of Sikh community members, the army unit operating in the area was under "tremendous psychological pressure" to show results because there was allegation of inefficiency and ineffectiveness on their part.
The CBI alleged the army personnel entered into a criminal conspiracy to pick up the some innocent persons and stage manage an encounter to create the impression that the militants responsible for the Chittisinghpora killings had been neutralised.
During CBI investigation, the army had claimed that it was the police which had given them the information about the presence of militants, a statement denied by local police officers.
The CBI found that Subedar Khan had handed over five dead bodies to Station House Officer Achchabal with a Handing over Memo mentioning the names of three killed persons as Pakistani nationals and the other two as unknown.
The accused army men also showed fake recovery of arms and ammunition from the five deceased after obtaining signatures of two witnesses on blank papers.


This is not zero tolerance, Mr. Prime Minister


Siddharth Varadarajan
June 4, 2010
Hindu
The Central government's professed commitment to human rights is worth nothing so long as it won't allow the soldiers indicted for murdering innocent civilians in Kashmir to be prosecuted for their crimes.

I asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh an unfair question during his big press conference last month. How could he speak of zero tolerance for human rights violations in Kashmir when his government would not allow the prosecution of army officers and jawans charge-sheeted by the Central Bureau of Investigation for the murder of five innocent civilians at Pathribal in Kashmir in 2000? The question was unfair because there was no reason to expect India's chief executive to be aware of the status of an individual case, no matter how gruesome. Or to know why one branch of his government had made out a case for murder against a group of soldiers only to have another branch, the Ministry of Defence, do its utmost to ensure that the indicted men never stand trial.
Like many other questions that day, therefore, mine also went unanswered. I wasn't surprised or disappointed because the reason I asked it was to extract a commitment from the Prime Minister. You see, 10 years ago, I visited a woman named Raja Begum in Anantnag. She was the mother of Zahoor Dalal, one of the five men murdered in Pathribal. Throughout the time I spent in her house, she wept quietly in one corner and didn't say a word. All the talking was done by another relative. As I left, I made one last attempt, asking her whether there was anything she wanted to tell the people of the country. “Zahoor can't come back but those who did this should be punished before my eyes,” she replied. “Why did they pick up an innocent man and murder him? If there is a government, if there is justice, the people who did this must be punished.”
I wrote about Pathribal and its aftermath countless times but wanted to make another push for justice in this case. My question to Dr. Singh, then, was really Raja Begum's, the partial discharge of a debt journalists accumulate as they run from story to story. And as expected, the Prime Minister promised to look into the matter. I have no idea what enquiries or exertions he has made on the case since then but the facts themselves are quite simple. And, in the context of the recent exposé of fake encounters in Machhil in Kupwara, they reveal a pattern of impunity that ordinary Kashmiris will be condemned to endure until India gets a Prime Minister brave enough to put a stop to it.
A group of terrorists, most probably from the Lashkar-e-Taiba, arrived at the Chattisinghpora village in Anantnag district in the dead of night on March 20, 2000. They made all the Sikh men assemble and gunned them down in cold blood. Five days later, L.K. Advani, who was Union Home Minister at the time, told a nation still recovering from shock that the heinous crime had been solved with the killing of five “foreign militants.” In an FIR filed on March 25, officers from the Rashtriya Rifles and the Special Operations Group of the State police said they had managed to corner and kill the five terrorists in a fierce encounter at Pathribal-Panchalthan. The bodies of the men, which had been burned beyond recognition, were buried in a common grave.
Unfortunately for the army, the five men killed were not terrorists or foreign nationals. They were civilians who had been picked up in and around Anantnag on March 24. Apart from young Zahoor, the others named were Bashir Ahmad Bhat, Mohammed Malik, Juma Khan and Juma Khan. Such was the randomness of the operation that it had actually netted two men of the same name from different villages. As the families of the five men searched frantically for their missing relatives, suspicions grew that the “terrorists” buried in the common grave may not be whom the authorities claimed them to be. Protests were held demanding exhumation of the bodies. The demand was rejected, leading to an ugly incident in Brakpora on April 3 where the Central Reserve Police Force opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing nine.
The bodies were eventually exhumed and positively identified by the families of the five missing men. But the government baulked at the implications and insisted on DNA matching. Blood samples were collected, which all turned negative. This was because the police and local doctors, acting on whose instructions it is still not known, switched the samples. When the tampering was exposed in March 2002, fresh samples were collected which conclusively established that the five “terrorists” killed in that so-called joint operation by the Rashtriya Rifles and the police on May 25, 2000 were none other than Zahoor and the others who had been abducted by the security forces the night before.
The State government then ordered a CBI investigation into the killings. The agency took four years to come to the conclusion that the five men had indeed been murdered. It filed a charge-sheet in the court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Srinagar, against Brigadier Ajay Saxena, Lt. Col. Brijendra Pratap Singh, Major Sourabh Sharma, Major Amit Saxena and Subedar I Khan of 7th Rashtriya Rifles, accusing them of murder under Section 302 of the Ranbir Penal Code. That was in July 2006. Four years on, the trial has yet to begin.
With the full backing of the Army brass, the Ministry of Defence and the Government of India, the five soldiers challenged their indictment on the grounds that the government had not granted sanction to prosecute them. The CBI took the view that the requirement of prior sanction mentioned in Section 7 of the Armed Forces (Jammu & Kashmir) Special Powers Act 1990 was only for protection of persons acting in good faith and that abducting and murdering innocent civilians could by no stretch of imagination be considered something “done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this Act.” The Principal District and Sessions judge in Srinagar before whom the case was committed offered the Army the option of trying the soldiers in a court martial. But the Army refused, and the matter went to the High Court which ruled in favour of the CBI in July 2007 that prior sanction was not required. At this stage, the Army (represented by the General Officer Commanding, 15th Corps) moved the Supreme Court, which admitted the appeal in September 2007 and stayed further proceedings before the trial court. Since then, the matter has not moved at all. For some reason, notice to the Jammu and Kashmir government, listed as a co-respondent to the CBI in the GOC's petition, was only served in December 2009.
If the Central government was really serious about ensuring justice, it could have done one of two things at any stage after 2006. It could have granted sanction to prosecute the five army men, ending the legal wrangling over the CBI's indictment there and then. Or it could have gone along with the CBI's rational argument that the protections contained in the Armed Forces Act (and indeed in Section 197 of the Criminal Procedure Code) cannot be extended to cover blatant criminal acts like the murder of innocent civilians. But, no, none of this was done, for the promise of “zero tolerance” of human rights violations is just an empty slogan.
If the Prime Minister feels I am being unfair, let him end the sickening litigation that is preventing Raja Begum and countless other mothers and fathers and sons and daughters of people wrongly killed by the security forces from getting justice. But ending impunity is not just about righting the wrongs of the past. It is also about deterring future criminals. If the men responsible for murdering Zahoor Dalal and four others at Panchalthan had been tried, convicted and punished, I am certain the soldiers who kidnapped and murdered three young Kashmiri men in Kupwara on April 29 in order to claim cash rewards for bravely killing three “terrorists” would not have so easily done what they did. A case against the army officers has now been filed but if Pathribal is any guide, that too will not go anywhere.
The Prime Minister is going to Kashmir next week. When he is asked questions about these cases, he will have to do more than simply promise to look into them.