Identifying the dead
October 3, 2011
For the last 21 years Parveena Ahangar has been campaigning fiercely to find out how her only son, Javed Ahmad, went missing in the early hours of an August morning in 1990 from their home in Srinagar. Despite moving the courts and seeking redress from the government, she never got a response.
Recently, a painstaking investigation by the Indian State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) officially acknowledged that civilians might have been buried in mass graves in Kashmir.It brought a glimmer of hope to Ahangar and thousands of other parents like her who seek answers to troubling questions about the "mysterious disappearance" of their loved ones.
A grave issue
But Ahangar is not celebrating. Not just yet.
"The Army, the police and the paramilitary forces know what happened to our sons and husbands because it is they who picked them up in the name of interrogation," she says.
"Responsibility has to be fixed and the police held culpable."
Like Ahangar, Tahira Begum has also been looking for a loved one. Nine years ago her husband went missing. He had left their village in search of work and never returned. "I want to know what happened to him. It is very important for me, my children and relatives to bring a closure to this. I have to know," she explains.
The tragedy of women like Begum has added a new term to the lexicon of the Kashmiri conflict: "half widow."
Civilian bodies
Since the SHRC investigation, many people fear the unmarked graves contain bodies of the thousands of civilians who vanished and were possibly killed by government forces over suspicions they were collaborating with armed rebels.But there is a dispute over the number of people who have gone missing in the conflict. Human rights activists claim over 8,000 people have disappeared in Kashmir during the rebellion, which has lasted over two decades. Officials, on the other hand, put the number of missing at between 1,000 and 3,000. The government denies that security forces killed the civilians and claims instead that the missing people crossed over into Pakistan for arms training.
The human rights report catalogs 2,156 bodies that were found in 38 graves in four districts of Kashmir. Of them, 574 have been identified as local residents.
Welcome first step
Kashmir’s Inspector General of Police Shiv Sahai believes the report is a welcome first step, as there have been such a large number of missing persons reports in the region. Sahai says the affected families need closure: "They cannot afford to wait endlessly to find out what happened to their family members."Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir State Omar Abdullah has called on relatives of missing people to provide DNA samples to forensic experts for testing. "The DNA tests will take time but authorities will not hide the truth," Abdullah told the state assembly.
Though results are expected to take time, many "half widows" and other people whose loved ones have met with a tragic end will surely welcome the closure the DNA tests will bring.
Author: Murali Krishnan
Editor: Sarah Berning