The Half Widows of Kashmir

Kashmir has no oil, so whatever violence and genocide may occur in this most northern Indian state, one that borders Pakistan, is often overlooked in the headlines. But despite the tourist literature showing the famed houseboats on Dal Lake in heart of picturesque Kashmir (above), make no mistake, this is a violent arena where Muslim separatists battle Indian troops over the future of this territory. In the great 1947 post-British-rule-partition that created a primarily Muslim country in the north (Pakistan and ultimately Bangladesh) and a primarily Hindu nation in the south (India), Kashmir – also a primarily Muslim state – wound up on the Indian side of the equation. Both Pakistan and a group of extreme indigenous Kashmiri Muslims have been trying either to force Kashmir into Pakistan or, alternatively, at least into an autonomous country.

India and Pakistan have fought wars in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999, and despite recent talks, this remains a particularly tense border. The nuclear arms race in the region is directly related to this hostility, and there have been massacres on both side of the conflict. Muslim separatists attacked the coastal Indian city of Mumbai in 2008, and between bombs and guns, killed over 100 people; the terrorists were linked to Pakistan, where purportedly training and financings for such activities were generated. Bombings that occurred in July of this year, where 17 people were killed, have been allegedly traced to Pakistan as well.

But there are still thousands of people in Kashmir who have disappeared, so many that a human rights inquiry has attempted to chart their dubious path to obliteration. “Thousands of bullet-riddled bodies are buried in dozens of unmarked graves across Kashmir, a state human rights commission inquiry has concluded, many of them likely to be those of civilians who disappeared more than a decade ago in the brutal insurgency in the troubled region… The inquiry, the result of three years of investigative work by senior police officers working for the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission, brings the first official acknowledgment that civilians might have been buried in mass graves in Kashmir, a region claimed by both India and Pakistan where insurgents waged a bloody battle for independence in the early 1990s.

“The report catalogs 2,156 bodies found in graves in four districts of Kashmir that had been at the heart of the insurgency. It called for a thorough inquiry and collection of DNA evidence to identify the dead, and urged that anyone killed by security forces in Kashmir in the future be properly identified to avoid abuse of special laws shielding the military from prosecution there… Thousands of people, mostly young men, have gone missing in Kashmir. Some went to be trained as militants in the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir and were killed in fighting. Many others were detained by Indian security forces. The wives they left behind are known as half widows, because the fate of their husbands is unknown. Parents keep vigil for sons who were arrested two decades ago.” New York Times, August 22^nd. For those of us concerned about injustice in the world, we should be equally concerned with the unheralded deaths, unexplained disappearances and unmarked graves of injustice, anguish and pain… even where we might not covet natural resources.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I believe that where we let mass killings slide without demanding accountability, we are all diminished by this injustice.