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Posted on 03 February 2012 |
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| CURRENT AFFAIRS |
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JAMMU AND KASHMIR |
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Courting hope again
The families of the five civilians who were killed at Pathribal now see a hint of justice at the end of a dark tunnel
Riyaz Wani
Srinagar/Anantnag
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Searing wound A man offers his prayers to the deceased Pathribal and Brakpora victims near a graveyard in Brarangan
Photos: Sajad Muniwari |
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Raja Begum is listless, alone in her palatial bungalow. Twelve years ago, she lived here with her only son Zahoor Ahmad Dalal who was one of the five men killed allegedly in a fake encounter by the Army at Pathribal. The dead men were then passed off as the terrorists responsible for the massacre of 36 Sikhs at Chittisinghpora.
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Qasmi Jan, daughter of Juma Khan, with a photo of her father |
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Begum now spends time at her brother’s house next door. She is in a constant struggle to forget and thus rebuffs any effort to remind her of the dreaded evening when Dalal went missing. Her face reddens and eyes go moist at the mere mention of the incident. “Why does everybody always come asking me what happened to my son? The world knows what happened to him,” she says. “Please go away. I don’t want to talk”.
The story, common knowledge in the town, is poignantly short. On a fateful March evening, Dalal, a businessman, left his home to go for a walk within minutes of returning from his shop, never to come back again. A red security vehicle, eyewitnesses recalled, had picked him up from the road. His mutilated body, along with four others, was recovered from a forest grave a week later. Ever since, the case has been dragging on in the courts, with the Army saying its personnel are protected from prosecution under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.
With the Supreme Court pulling up the Army for stonewalling the trial, the spotlight is once again on the urgent need for justice in Kashmir ’s most infamous case of human rights violation. There is a new sense of hope among the families of the victims in South Kashmir and for Begum’s extended family too—while she remains stoic in her agony.
The families of the five victims are scattered across a wide area in district Anantnag, showing the meticulous thought that had gone into the planning of the encounter and to make it look genuine. While Dalal was picked up from Anantnag town, two others were lifted 20 km from village Brari-Angan and the other two from the inaccessible Halan in Kokernag.
Two elderly Gujjar men, coincidentally both named Juma Khan, were taken from their homes in the dead of night. “We were sleeping when there was a knock on the door,” recalls Rashid Khan, son of one of the men. “We were scared and couldn’t muster the courage to open it. Soon we found uniformed men breaking through the window. They were not aggressive. They told us they wanted my father to guide them through the hilly track. So we happily let him go”.
His mother Roshan Jan said the family thought her elderly husband won’t be touched. “He had a grey beard and bent posture, so we thought he would be back in a while,” Jan said. “They killed him too.”
Her tragedy doesn’t stop here. A week after the villagers of Brari-Angan took out a protest against what they then suspected to be the killings of their men in a fake encounter, CRPF opened fire on them near Barrackpora, killing nine. Among them was one of Juma Khan’s sons. “In a span of one week, I lost both my husband and my son,” Jan says.
In the same village, the other Juma Khan’s family has a twist in their tale. This Juma Khan had returned from Samba in Jammu province where he had travelled through the hills to graze his livestock in winter. “My father was tired from the travel. He offered to go with the uniformed men to save me,” said Shakoor Khan, the only son among Juma’s six children.
There are two more families who live high up in the hills of Kokernag with similar tragedies. Unlike the Juma Khans of Brari-Angan, Muhammad Yousuf Malik and Bashir Ahmed Bhat were rounded up from their villages.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe found that the encounter was fake and the persons killed were innocent civilians. The investigating agency has identified and charged five senior Army officials, including a brigadier for abduction, murder, criminal conspiracy and the destruction of evidence in the fake encounter. The accused are Brig Ajay Saxena, Lt Col Brajendra Pratap Singh, Major Sourabh Sharma, Major Amit Saxena and Subedar Idrees Khan.
Pathribal was not an isolated incident. It was a part of three successive and related killings that occurred 20 March to 3 April 2000 which took 50 lives. On 20 March, unidentified gunmen—their identity is still shrouded in controversy—killed 36 Sikhs at Chittisinghpora followed by the Pathribal killings on 25 March and the killing of nine civilians who were part of the protest at Brackpora on 3 April.
Their families don’t believe that the Apex Court’s rap on the Army’s knuckles will push the lingering trial of the case to its logical conclusion. For them, the case and its location is far removed from their lives and its outcome, therefore, has an abstract ring to it. Still, any talk of the justice in the case nevertheless strikes a chord. “We have suffered for so many years for no fault of ours. So, it really feels good when somebody stands up for us,” Shakoor said.
People like him are surviving on such a hope – and a prayer.
Riyaz Wani is a Special Correspondent with Tehelka.
riyaz@tehelka.com
Editing by Karuna John
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