Indian police arrest Kashmiri rights protesters
10 December 2007
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Dozens of people protesting against alleged human rights abuses in revolt-hit Indian Kashmir were arrested as they marked World Human Rights Day on Monday, police said.
The protesters, shouting “Stop custodial killings” and “Halt human rights violations,” were taken into custody as they made a vain bid to reach a small UN monitoring post in Kashmir’s main city Srinagar.
“No laws, no principles, no rules operate in Kashmir,” Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, who leads the moderate wing of the region’s umbrella separatist alliance, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, said in a speech to the protesters.
“The law of jungle prevails and we are killed with impunity,” Farooq told the protesters who numbered around 500 according to police estimates.
Many of the protesters wore masks to conceal their identity from security forces accused by Kashmiri separatist leaders of killing people in custody as well as shooting dead innocent civilians and claiming they are militants.
“We arrested around three dozen” activists, police officer Pervez Ahmed told AFP in Srinagar, summer capital of Indian Kashmir where a separatist revolt has raged in the Muslim-majority region since 1989.
Police erected barricades to stop the protesters from reaching the UN office.
The office monitors any truce violations along a de facto border dividing Kashmir between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, which have fought two wars over the disputed Himalayan region.
“All structures of civilised life have come tumbling down to the earth,” Farooq wrote in a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that was released in Srinagar today.
Indian officials say they investigate all claims of human rights abuses and punish those found guilty.
The unrest that started in 1989 has left more than 42,000 people dead by official count. Human rights groups put the toll at 60,000 dead and 10,000 missing.
The scenic region is divided between India and Pakistan, but claimed by both.
The arrests took place as Yasin Malik, head of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, was on the second day of a two-day “token” hunger strike on a busy street in Srinagar to protest against alleged rights violations.
Malik wrote in a letter to the UN that custodial disappearances, arrests and torture were events Kashmiris “experience on a regular basis.”
Leading Kashmiri civil rights group the Coalition of Civil Society has reported 10 cases of “custodial disappearances” this year but has said the number is fewer than in previous years.
