NC should keep pre-poll promise: Sikh leaders

NC should keep pre-poll promise: Sikh leaders  Chattisingpora Massacre

Flashback 2000 NC should keep pre-poll promise: Sikh leaders  Newspaper: Rising Kashmir  19-03-10 Rashid Paul Srinagar, March 19: The Sikh community in Kashmir is demanding reopening the case of Chattisinghpora massacre in which 35 member of the community were killed in cold blood on March 20, 2000. Sardar J J Azad, a noted intellectual among the Sikh community in Kashmir said his community was watching if the ruling National Conference would fulfill its promise of indicting engineers of Chattisinghpora as well as Pathribal killings. Mushtaq Ahmed Dar, the CBI special counsel into the case lamented the delay in justice system. He said the government prosecution is pending before the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s court over the past eight years without any progress. “The government should get the stay by the forces vacated from the Supreme Court and deliver justice to restore faith of the executive and the judiciary,” Dar said. Initiating a probe and bringing to justice the perpetrators of Pathribal is going to be a litmus test for NC, said human rights activist Khurram Parvez. He said NC which was in power at the time of killing of five unarmed locals by 7th Bn of RR had initially accepted the troopers claim that the militants behind the incident of Chattisinghpora had been eliminated. “However after public pressure they accepted the fact that the slain persons branded as foreign militants were actually unarmed civilians.” Parvez said when pro-India politicians are in opposition they cry against human rights violations but when in government they compromise over such issues. “If the new regime is really serious about incidents of human rights violation by state forces it has to speed up the probe in to the fake encounter killing of Pathribal.” The massacre On the evening of 20 March 2000, 15 to 17 unidentified gunmen dressed in Indian army fatigues entered the village of Chattisinghpora, located in Islamabad district. They ordered all of the Sikh men and boys to assemble at the village Gurdwara and systematically shot and killed 34 of them. Many others were injured in the attack, and least one man died later of his injuries. The sole survivor of the massacre was Nanak Singh Aulakh, who recounted the events to reporters. A unit of Rashtriya Rifles stationed nearby failed to intervene during the attack. The attackers wore military uniforms, and were lead by a man they addressed as 'Commanding Officer.' At they withdrew, they allegedly shouted Hindu slogans and left behind bottles of liquor. This was the first time in the Kashmir conflict that Sikhs had ever been targeted. In the aftermath of the attacks, the then Indian Home Minister L K Advani offered the state's Sikh population additional protective measures. However the local Sikh leadership reportedly rejected the plan saying that the Muslim majority had not been hostile to them before and that no protection was needed. The massacre, which took place on the eve of US President Bill Clinton's visit to the subcontinent was widely condemned by both the Indian and Pakistani governments as well as leaders of the Kashmiri separatist movement. Although the Government of India and the state government of Jammu and Kashmir did not launch an early official investigation into the massacre, they immediately accused Lashkar e Tayyiba and Hizbul Mujahideen. However the Hurriyat Conference accused the Indian government of carrying out the massacre to discredit Kashmiri independence movement while Syed Salahuddin, head of Hizbul Mujahideen said: "Mujahideen have nothing against the Sikh community which sympathizes with our struggle. We assure them that there never was and there will never be any danger to Sikhs from Kashmiri freedom fighters." Human rights activists and legal experts too are watching as to how NC will abide by its election pledge of bringing to justice the culprits behind the killing in a fake encounter at Pathribal of five innocent civilians by Army which followed the Chattisinghpora massacre. The Pathribal killings Five days after the events at Chattisinghpora, on 25 March 2000, troops killed five men in Pathribal village of Islamabad district claiming that the victims were "foreign militants" responsible for the attacks. Official reports claimed that troops had, after a gunfight, blown up the hut where the men were hiding, and had retrieved five bodies that had been charred beyond recognition. The bodies were buried separately without any postmortem examination. Local observers and political activists doubted the government's official reports however, pointing out that if there had been a gunfight, some of troops would have sustained injuries - but none were injured. Over the following days, locals began to protest, claiming that the slain men were ordinary civilians who had been killed in a fake encounter not "foreign militants." According to them, up to 17 men had been detained by the police and "disappeared" between March 21 and 24. On March 30, local authorities in Islamabad relented to growing public pressure and agreed to exhume the bodies and conduct an investigation into the deaths. The Barakpora killings With no action being taken with regard to the promised investigation into the Pathribal deaths, the local population grew increasingly restless. On 3 April 2000, an estimated 3000 to 4000 protesters marched to the city of Islamabad, where they intended to present a memorandum to the Deputy Commissioner demanding exhumation of bodies. When they reached the town of Barakpora, 3 km from Islamabad, some protesters began throwing stones at an camp of paramilitary troops. Members of the CRPF responded by opening fire on the protesters killing seven and injuring at least 15 more of whom one or two later died of injuries. Tampered DNA samples On 5 April 2000, Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah ordered exhumation of bodies from Pathribal killings, which began the next day. DNA samples were collected from the five bodies as well as 15 relatives of the missing young men, and were submitted to forensic laboratories in Kolkata and Hyderabad. However, in March 2002 it was discovered that the DNA samples allegedly taken from the bodies of the Pathribal victims (all of whom were men) had been tampered with, when, according to a report from the Times of India, lab workers found that samples had in fact been collected from females. Fresh samples were collected in April 2002, which, upon testing, conclusively proved that the victims were innocent local civilians, and not foreign militants as government had been claiming for the past two years. Bill Clinton’s India visit The Chattisingpora massacre coincided with the visit of the then United States President Bill Clinton to India. In an introduction to a book written by Madeleine Albright titled The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs, he accused "Hindu militants" of perpetrating the act. Hindu organizations protested the statement, and ultimately the publishers, Harper Collins, edited the statement out of future editions of the boon. They acknowledged the error in an email to the Times of India. Clinton's office never clarified the statement. In the hours immediately after the massacre in March 2000, the US condemned the killings but refused to accept the Indian government's contention that it was the work of Pakistani Islamist groups. Clinton explicitly condemned the massacre by "unknown groups" and reemphasized that point in his 2004 autobiography, My Life. Similarly, in his 2004 book Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb, Clinton aide Strobe Talbott confirms Clinton's misgivings about the massacre, pointing out that “he (Clinton) did not endorse the accusation that Pakistan was behind the violence since the US had no independent confirmation." The movie The massacre was also depicted in a commercial Bollywood film Adharm (unholy) directed by Adeep Singh