[Reader-list] Ten years ago...

[SJabbar]

From:
The New York Times
A Kashmiri Mystery
By Barry Bearak
Published: December 31, 2000

When Bill Clinton went to India in March, it was the first visit by an
American president in 22 years. Among the careful preparations for the
historic occasion were a painstaking cleanup around the Taj Mahal, a
reconnoitering for wild tigers he might glimpse on a V.I.P. safari and the
murder of 35 Sikh villagers in a place called Chittisinghpora.

This massacre, occurring on the evening of March 20, preceded Clinton's
arrival by only a few hours. It was a monstrous way to transmit a message,
whatever that message was, and the scale of the killing was large even amid
the exceptional sorrows of the Kashmir Valley. The slaughter was also
remarkable in that the victims were Sikhs, a religious minority never before
targeted during a bloody decade infused with grief. In the aftermath, the
valley's 60,000 Sikhs faced the possibility that they were now someone's
strategic quarry and that a mass migration might be a sensible reaction to
the danger.

The killers came to the village at about 7:20 p.m. They shunned the openness
of the steep and twisting mountain road and hiked instead through the nearby
apple orchards and rice fields. There were perhaps a dozen of them, perhaps
twice that. They were dressed in what appeared to be the regulation issue of
the Indian Army.

Darkness had fallen across the hamlet, where 200 families, almost all Sikhs,
eked out a living in a spot of rugged Himalayan beauty. Their ancestors had
been rooted in this same windswept place -- often in the very same dwellings
-- for generations. Chittisinghpora (pronounced chitty-SING-pora) is a
palette of greens and browns and yellows. A creek runs through it like a
lifeline across the palm of a hand. Walnut and pine trees provide canopies
of shade above deeply sloping footpaths. The houses are mostly made of mud
bricks and weathered timber, many of them with A-frame roofs and open lofts
stuffed with hay.

That evening, the electricity was out, a frequent problem, and many
villagers had lit candles and were listening to news of the presidential
visit on transistor radios. The homes are spread out. There are no phones.
Most people were unaware of the armed strangers standing at opposite sides
of the village, near its two temples, known as gurudwaras, or God's portals.
The intruders gathered up men who were returning from evening prayers and
collected several more from nearby stores and houses. They worked hurriedly.
Some had their faces covered with black cloth, the patka often worn by
soldiers on search operations. Two Sikhs -- out of curiosity or helpfulness
-- approached the commotion with lanterns and were taken off with the rest
for their trouble. In all, 37 men were rounded up.

Panic had yet to set in, for the rousting of civilians was nothing unusual.
Chittisinghpora lies in an area rife with the militants who are fighting a
hit-and-run war against India. Some of these guerrillas are Kashmiris whose
purpose is a separatist insurrection; the rest are Pakistanis and other
foreigners waging a jihad to wrench the largely Muslim territory from a
largely Hindu country. Occasionally, the militants impose on a village for
food and sanctuary, and house-to-house searches by the Indian soldiers in
pursuit are not uncommon. Indeed, the arriving strangers told the Sikhs they
were on the trail of three guerrillas. But while the story was believable,
Karamjeet Singh, a high-school teacher and one of the 37, thought something
was suspiciously awry. These soldiers did not seem like the army, he
recalled later. Some were taking swigs from a bottle and staggering. They
spoke in Urdu and not the Hindi more common to soldiers. He whispered his
fears to the others. Many had become similarly scared and were now
preoccupied with the mumbling of prayers. In an impulsive instant, the
teacher darted toward a shallow ditch and crawled away through the mud.

Of the 36 who remained, only one, a 40-year-old named Nanak Singh, survived.
And only he among the villagers was an eyewitness to the actual carnage. The
Sikhs were herded into two groups and made to kneel, facing the gurudwaras.
The weather was cold, the wind brisk. The men were wearing heavy garb across
their shoulders, and their heads were covered with the turbans required by
their faith. They were killed with efficiency, shot first with a persistent
rat-tat-tat from a volley of machine-gun fire, then with single bursts by
executioners who moved from one fallen Sikh to another, stilling motion and
silencing moans. Singh was at first saved by the shield of a toppling body.
Then he was wounded in the hip during the second round of shooting. He tried
to lie perfectly still. He remembers that some of the gunmen had faces
painted in the raucous fashion of Holi, a Hindu holiday being celebrated
that day. As the killers marched off, a few called out the parting words
''Jai mata di,'' a Hindi phrase of praise for a Hindu goddess. The entire
attack lasted about half an hour.

President Clinton, acting with caution, condemned the massacre without
casting blame. In that agnosticism, he was unusual in this region of 1.1
billion people. India and Pakistan have been fighting each other since their
synchronized birth 53 years ago, usually with Kashmir, which they both
claim, as the cause. Amid all the unknowing of what took place in the remote
darkness, both Indians and Pakistanis were decidedly sure of who was
responsible for the murders. As is their habit, they clung to nearly
identical versions of reality, only with the role of villain reversed. In
India, people saw the treacherous connivance of Pakistan, up to old tricks
and once again trying to focus the world's attention on woebegone Kashmir;
in Pakistan, they saw the sinister hand of India, trying to make the Muslim
''freedom fighters'' seem detestable while American policy makers were
present to watch. This was typical of the world's two newest nuclear powers.
A half-century of enmity had done more than lead them into three all-out
wars and several smaller ones. It had distilled the murkiness of their
mutual grudges into clarified good and evil. One thinks the other capable of
most anything -- and they are just about right.

The first articles in Indian newspapers reported with confidence that
''militants'' had committed the crime. That the killers were dressed in army
fatigues was easily explained away, for guerrilla groups often donned such
clothing. The drunken behavior and Hindi slogans were seen as crude,
preposterous impersonations of Indian soldiers.

Officialdom backed these early assumptions. Within a day, the country's
powerful national security adviser, Brajesh Mishra, said there was absolute
proof that two of the bigger militant groups in Kashmir- Lashkar-e-Taiba and
Hizbul Mujahideen -- were guilty of the bloodshed. ''These outfits are
supported by the government of Pakistan,'' he declared in an explanation
most likely aimed at the press corps in the Clinton entourage. In India,
there is no such need to connect the dots. Most journalists assume that the
militants receive their guns and take their orders from Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Subsequent articles were enlivened by scoops. Leaks from anonymous
government sources told of intercepted communications that contained the
actual orders to kill the Sikhs. And on March 25, any doubts about
culpability were seemingly put to rest with the announcement that a
collaborator had been apprehended. After interrogation, he had guided
security forces to a mountain redoubt in the village of Panchalthan, where
five of those who had massacred the Sikhs were hiding. In an ensuing
shootout, the guerrillas were killed. Indian authorities predicted that they
would soon catch the rest.

In Pakistan, the Chittisinghpora massacre was first reported as the work of
''unidentified gunmen,'' but then the state television station swiftly
cobbled together the evidence and concluded that ''the Indian Army was
involved in this gory incident.'' Follow-up stories in newspapers and on TV
made an easy tiptoe from facts alleged to facts presumed to facts that could
be taken as history -- and the accepted version came to be that Indian
commandos were guilty of the atrocity. Indeed, any other possibility was
deemed implausible by editorialists and commentators. After all, they said,
freedom fighters in Kashmir attack military targets, not innocent civilians.
And besides, they never move in such large numbers. If they had, they would
have been detected and eliminated beneath the bare trees of early spring.

During the week of the Clinton visit, I spent time in both countries and was
struck then -- as so often before -- by the parallel and yet opposing
realities. In the following months, I kept repeated company with the
Chittisinghpora massacre, pondering it as a metaphor, which has been easy
enough, and puzzling over it as a whodunit, which has been a general
bafflement.

I might have expected as much. The Kashmir conflict has a way of boiling
truth into vapor. Every fact is contested, every confession suspect, every
alliance a prelude to some sort of betrayal. People ambushed, caught in
cross-fires, snatched away, hideously tortured, buried and forgotten in
clandestine graves: all this has become commonplace ever since the rebellion
against India began in late 1989. Atrocities -- real and concocted -- are
employed as necessary skullduggery. The death toll has been tabulated at
more than 34,000 by the Indian government. Others insist the count is double
that.

In both nations, my questions about blame often provoked impatience, as if
the answers ought to be obvious to anyone but an idiot or a child.
Indignation sometimes substituted for any response at all. I would be asked
in return: How can you think we would be evil enough to kill all those
people? How can you think we would be so dumb?

Stubborn animosity between nations is nothing uncommon, of course. But for
India and Pakistan, the long years of ill will have been especially
regrettable, diverting each from its most pressing woe, the lingering
catastrophe of pervasive poverty. In Pakistan, the loser in all three wars,
the discord has added the burden of chronic political instability. Democracy
has failed to take root.

In May 1998, the costs of continuing the hostility rose appreciably. India
-- with a new government led by Hindu nationalists -- tested several nuclear
devices. Soon after, and predictably enough, Pakistan responded in kind. The
minute hand lurched forward on the doomsday clock, and world leaders began
taking a closer look at belligerence in the subcontinent. What they saw was
alarming: two archenemies eyeball to eyeball across a disputed cease-fire
line. Daily barrages of artillery fire. A guerrilla war engineered by one,
whittling away the patience of the other. Hatred, vengefulness, obstinacy.

Bill Clinton had apparently done some risk analysis of his own. Not long
before his India trip, he called the region ''the most dangerous place in
the world.''

Chittisinghpora is a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Srinagar, the summer
capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. To make the journey is to
observe something akin to the military occupation of paradise. Moghul
emperors in the 17th century thought these clear streams and lush mountains
the closest thing to a heaven on earth, and 20th-century tourists once
agreed. But now the highways are booby-trapped with I.E.D.'s, improvised
explosive devices. Drivers are regularly pulled over, civilians routinely
frisked. Army caravans move slowly in a continuous serpentine, skirting
roadblocks and barricades, their passengers pointing rifles out of
canvas-topped vehicles. Soldiers in olive flak jackets stand at regular
intervals, their attention shuttling from the busy growl of the traffic to
the ominous quiet of surrounding fields of saffron and mustard seed.

My visit to the village did not come until nearly six months after the
massacre, and by then many there had told their stories again and again to
confusing effect -- to the police, to the military, to politicians, to
reporters, to human rights groups, to Sikh leaders from India and abroad.
Quoted versions varied not only from person to person but also from day to
day. Villagers themselves quarreled about what -- and whom -- they had seen
and heard.

In hopes of penetrating the contradictions, I recruited a friend, Surinder
Oberoi, a Sikh journalist based in Srinagar and one of the best reporters I
have met in India. He in turn enlisted a Sikh businessman who had advised
many of the families in Chittisinghpora since the killings. We would make
the drive together. But before leaving, the businessman wanted to look me
over. He was not immediately friendly.

''So you want to know the truth?'' he said in an accusatory voice loud
enough for oratory. ''Don't you know the truth can get these people
killed?''

I inquired then as to why he was assisting us. ''I think it is time for the
truth to come out,'' he answered in lower decibels. ''Yes, I think now it's
time.''

His presence certainly opened doors. In Chittisinghpora, we were greeted
warmly, taken into a brightly painted house and seated solicitously on the
floor, as is the custom, with thick cushions for our backs. Several bearded
men rushed in and out of the room and introduced themselves. I tried to keep
track of who was who by the color of their turbans.

''Tell this man the truth,'' the businessman urged.

And one of the older Sikhs seemed pleased to take this as his cue. ''We have
told many stories to many people, but today we will tell only the whole
truth,'' he promised in preamble to a declaration: ''It is a fact that our
people have been killed by a conspiracy of the intelligence agencies of
Pakistan. One month before the massacre, there were militants who spent time
in our village. They were from Pakistan, and they made friends with us. And
this is how we were thanked, with a barbaric act.''

Actually, there was nothing new in this synopsis. Immediately after the
massacre, during a time that teemed with rage, a few villagers had blamed a
handful of Pakistani militants who had visited Chittisinghpora in the weeks
before. While such stopovers were hardly uncommon, these guerrillas were
exceptional in the casualness of their mingling. They were said to have once
strung their rifles to trees and watched a sandlot game of cricket. Now,
reflecting back, it was thought that they had actually been scouting the
village with a murderous plot in mind. A few Sikh widows said they had
recognized the voices of these men at their doors leading their husbands
away to die. They said the marauders seemed to know where people lived --
and had even called out some names. In a few retellings, Mohammad Yaqoob
Wagay, a young Muslim milkman who lived nearby, had accompanied the killers.
He was an imam who often led prayers at the mosque. He loved cricket. He was
friendly with these and other guerrillas, and the police had since taken him
into custody.

But within days of the massacre, there had been a retreat from much of this
finger-pointing. Doubt was now emphasized. Maybe the killers had been
militants, maybe the army, maybe neither. This newly avowed uncertainty was
a result of counsel from some of India's leading Sikhs. They believed that
if their people were to stay in the Kashmir Valley, good relations had to be
maintained with the surrounding Muslim majority, which -- while exhausted by
the endless violence -- was largely sympathetic to the militants. To these
leaders, unwavering neutrality was clearly preferable to what New Delhi was
then proposing. The government wanted to give weapons to the Sikhs, as it
had to Hindus, to form ''village defense committees.''

In Chittisinghpora, I received a lesson in this tactical ambivalence. The
older Sikh who had been talking was interrupted. A long argument began, with
stunted English set aside for gusts of Punjabi, not a word of which I
understood. Oberoi was amused. He leaned over to me and whispered, ''They're
debating whether it is for the greater good of the village to lie to you,
and if so, what are the right lies to tell.''

Some of my hosts eventually grew embarrassed at their neglect of a guest. By
way of apology, they told me that villagers had done a lot of fibbing since
the massacre and that I should not be offended. It was a matter of survival;
there were fears of a second raid. Besides, outsiders with less right to lie
had also been doing it. It upset them how often their statements -- and
misstatements -- had been misquoted by people with private agendas.

What followed was a very odd interview, with several men trying to agree on
-- and then dictate -- appropriate words for my notebook, politely alerting
me as to which ones were true and which were not, though everything was
expected to be published. In either case, they demanded that their names be
spared except when the topic turned to money, which it often did, and then
they wanted to stand personally behind their deep umbrage. Donors, public
and private, had given more than $20,000 to each family that lost men in the
massacre. But the villagers said everyone had suffered and so everyone
deserved cash. They reminded me that if Bill Clinton hadn't come to India,
the killings would never have occurred -- and that Americans had some
obligation to mitigate their suffering.

We spoke for well over an hour, stopping for a lunch of eggplant, rice and
red beans. Then I took a stroll through the village to talk to others. Some
were reticent, some not. Some made me wonder if their recollections were
merely inventions to help them make sense of their grief. Always, I kept
trying to bring them back to the matter of blame. If they thought the
militants did it, how sure were they? The answer was: Not very. Could anyone
identify a single one of the attackers? The answer was: No. If this fellow
Wagay had been involved, what exactly was his role? The answer was: God only
knows.

On March 25, when Indian officials announced their reprisal against five of
the guilty militants, they said that it was Wagay whose confession had led
them to the hideaway in Panchalthan, about 11 miles from Chittisinghpora.

But speaking of lies, that one seems to have been a big one.

In the district of Anantnag, most people I met had long overcome any doubt
about the massacre. To them, it seemed an open-and-shut case, with the
Indian authorities -- and not the militants -- to blame. They were unsure of
the particulars, or how high up the conspiracy went, but they supposed that
the actual killing had been done by iqwanis, or renegades, former guerrillas
who were now nothing more than shiftless mercenaries. In the past, the
authorities had used these men for some of the nastier misdeeds of effective
''counterinsurgency.''

The clincher for these suspicions was the incident at Panchalthan. The
army's Rashtriya Rifles and the state police's elite Special Operations
Group had supposedly cornered the five guerrillas in a herdsman's shack.
Mortar fire then carried the day. Though the bodies were hideously burned
and mutilated, the dead were all said to be Pakistanis who took orders from
a well-known commander named Abu Muhaz. Nimble and timely sleuthing solved
the crime on President Clinton's last full day in India.

But this was yet another truth that seemed destined for the ethers.
Gravediggers said they had discovered a local man's identity card with the
charred bodies. One even thought he recognized the remains of his cousin.
Muhaz himself appeared at a village mosque near Chittisinghpora and told
people that none of his cadre had been killed; he suggested that they find
out who had. As it happened, several men from the area were mysteriously
missing. Speculation took off at a gallop: had Indian forces kidnapped them,
murdered them, burned them and then tried to pass off their unrecognizable
bodies as foreign militants? In the moral vacuum that has become Kashmir,
such things are possible. Relatives of the missing men demanded an
exhumation of the bodies. They organized protests.

On April 3 -- nine days after the Panchalthan shootout and two weeks after
the massacre -- a raggedy procession came down from the mountain pastures
and onto the main road, toward the city of Anantnag, the district capital.
There were hundreds of people at the start, then more all the time,
chanting, ''We want justice.'' They passed uneventfully through several
military checkpoints, but when they reached a small traffic circle in the
town of Brakpora, they were fired upon. The spray of bullets came from
behind a bunker made from bags of cement and manned by federal and state
police officers. Eight protesters -- seven of them farmers and shepherds
from the village of Brari Angan -- were killed. Some were shot in the back
as they fled. Police officials claimed that their men were only returning
fire, but a judicial inquiry found otherwise. Unwarranted panic was the
kindest explanation.

Three days later, the marchers received their wish. The five bodies were dug
up by a forensics team from Srinagar. Hundreds of people, many of them
unruly, turned up for the morbid two-day event, though there was not much to
see. Blankets were held up to sequester the graves. Only doctors and public
officials and family members were allowed to examine the blackened and
disfigured corpses. These relatives occasionally burst into tears as burial
shrouds were removed, professing to recognize a ring on a finger or a cyst
on a scalp or a shred from a familiar sweater. One woman identified her
husband from a fragment of jaw attached to a fluff of beard. Then the next
day she changed her mind, settling on a different bag of remains, this time
pointing to a bend in the nose, a hole in an ear and the shape of the torso.

The five men killed at Panchalthan are now believed to be two farmers from
Brari Angan, both named Jumma Khan and one of them a man of 60; two
shepherds from the village of Halan, Bashir Ahmed Butt and Mohammad Yusuf
Malik; and one young cloth merchant from the city of Anantnag, Zahoor Dalal.
Or at least these are the people whose families were given the bodies. Dr.
Balbir Kaur, head of the forensics team, said it was hard to disinter the
dead properly in the midst of a mob, and she hardly considered the emotional
graveside identifications to be definitive. DNA samples were taken, but nine
months later the tests have yet to be done -- an inexplicable delay in so
important a case. Whatever the results, scientific chicanery will now be
presumed.

I later interviewed three of the families of the victims. Both of the Jumma
Khans, their relatives said, were taken from their homes by men in army
attire and led off into the night. Zahoor Dalal, the merchant, had simply
disappeared, out for an evening walk, due back in minutes to count the day's
receipts. His mother sat silently on the floor for the better part of an
hour while I spoke with his uncle. Tragedy had signed its name to her pale
oval face, and finally a moaning began from deep inside her, turning slowly
into a wail.

''I will only meet him again now in the other world!'' she cried.

Once more, I was confounded. I couldn't be sure that any of these people had
really lost their loved ones at Panchalthan, but I was nearly sure that they
were sure. In any case, the story was drifting elsewhere. By then, many of
the authorities -- in the government, in the intelligence services, in the
police -- had quietly abandoned the merchandising of their once airtight
case. In a revised analysis, Wagay, the milkman, was now thought to be
innocent. Poor soul, he had been gruesomely tortured during questioning, a
police official told me. He now remained locked up on the minor charge of
breaching the peace. This was for his own safety. Someday, he would be a
crucial witness in that ugly, regrettable business, the Panchalthan
incident. That shootout was now considered a murderous fiction contrived by
ambitious men in the Indian security forces. Pending further investigation,
there were promises to punish those responsible.

I had developed some sources in high places. A few were familiar with the
accumulating evidence and willing to share it, though their trustworthiness
was also nothing I took for granted. One source told me: ''After
Chittisinghpora, there was tremendous pressure to catch the militants. Name,
fame, money, career: those were the reasons to fake an encounter. They
couldn't catch the militants, so they picked up locals. Unfortunately,
locals have families that ask questions. It didn't work.''

Important people were chagrined. To their relief, however, another militant
had recently been captured, someone, they said, who truly had partaken in
the massacre -- someone who had even fired shots. His name was Mohammad
Suhail Malik.

''Would you like to talk to him?'' I was asked.

Oddly enough, i had already interviewed the new prisoner. This had happened
unexpectedly. On the return drive from Chittisinghpora, the Sikh businessman
spotted a friend, another prominent Sikh, in a car going the other way. The
vehicles stopped, and the two men went off for a private chat. This friend,
using his influence, had just met Suhail Malik, who, so far as he could
tell, was rendering an authentic confession. He agreed to help us get into
the small compound that served as the Indian interrogation center.

Malik is an 18-year-old with an upstart beard and hair that falls down into
his eyes. He appeared somber and tired, a suitable look for someone in his
predicament. I twice offered him a chair, but he refused, preferring the
floor. A heavy chain sagged between the tight manacles on his wrists. He
barely moved.

Conditions for the interview were far from ideal. There were six of us in a
small, dark room, including a nervous guard who felt the liaison lacked
adequate approval. A display on one wall carried horrid snapshots of dead
militants. Malik responded to every question, but his answers were spare,
repeating details I had already read in a police dossier in Srinagar: he was
from the city of Sialkot, in Pakistan. He belonged to the militant group
Lashkar-e-Taiba, which had tutored him in marksmanship and mountain
climbing. He sneaked into India in October 1999, carrying the rupee
equivalent of $200 in expense money. He took part in only two missions
before Chittisinghpora, one an attack on an army outpost, the other an
assault on a bus carrying soldiers. He knew nothing about the plot to kill
the Sikhs until immediately beforehand, as he stood in an orchard. He used
his weapon when commanded. ''I fired, but I don't know if I killed anyone,''
he said laconically. ''I suppose I did. I don't know.''

The conversation was mostly in Urdu, once again a language I did not speak.
I could study his eyes but not his phrasing or inflections, the little clues
as to what was being held back in the privacy of his head. When we left, I
asked Surinder Oberoi, my journalist friend, if he thought Malik was telling
the truth.

''Yes, I think so,'' he answered after a pause. Then he added a cautionary
shrug and a sentence that stopped after the words ''But you know. . . . ''

Malik showed no signs of physical abuse, but, as with Wagay, the torture of
someone in his situation would not be unusual. Once, over a casual lunch, an
Indian intelligence official told me that Malik had been ''intensively
interrogated.'' I asked him what that usually meant. ''You start with
beatings, and from there it can go almost anywhere,'' he said. Certainly, I
knew what most Pakistanis would say of the confession -- that the teenager
would admit to anything after persistent electrical prodding by the Indians.
And it left me to surmise that if his interrogators had made productive use
of pain, was it to get him to reveal the truth or to repeat their lies?

My second talk with Malik came the next day, courtesy of the more formal
invitation. This session was less hurried but still unsatisfactory. Three of
us were asking questions, including someone from the authorities. The
prisoner, chains in tow, still refused a chair. I told him again that I was
an American journalist trying to get at the facts. I could only imagine how
far-fetched that sounded to an 18-year-old Pakistani in an Indian jail.

I asked about his family. His mother was dead, and his father ran a small
general store. Malik had attended a government school through the fifth
grade, but like many boys in Pakistan, he had switched over to a madrassah,
a religious academy, where the books and courses were free. He knew parts of
the Koran by heart. ''If I could, I would spend my entire life learning
about the holy prophet,'' he said.

We again went over the details of the massacre. I tried to test him, asking
for descriptions of the village. But he said he had not seen much in the
darkness. He had been ordered to shoot -- and so he shot. He did not have
much more to add. ''We were told what to do and not why,'' he said.
''Afterward, we were told not to talk about it.''

He allowed that he was likely to spend the rest of his life in an Indian
prison -- and yes, he said, this was a dreary prospect. He would have
preferred the glory of martyrdom.

His eyes, usually downcast, had occasionally drifted about, and with this
talk of a purposeful death, all of us in the room grew aware of a loaded
Kalashnikov leaning against a wall in the corner. With a flicker of a smile,
the gun's careless owner slowly rolled the wheels of his chair to the right,
blocking the manacled prisoner's path to the weapon. Malik never looked that
way again.

I was curious to know how he had linked up with Lashkar-e-Taiba. It was one
of the largest -- and perhaps the most unflinching -- of the dozen or so
militant groups. Malik said he had heard their speeches while he studied in
the city of Lahore. He trusted their vision of the world -- and said he
trusted it still. Penance did not accompany his confession. As for the 35
dead Sikhs, he said they may have been civilians, but they could not have
been innocents. ''The Koran teaches us not to kill innocents,'' he said.
''If Lashkar told us to kill those people, then it was right to do it. I
have no regrets.''

This one time, he seemed to think his answer too abbreviated. His lips
pursed, his eyebrows narrowed. He said: ''When I was sent here from
Pakistan, I was told the Indian Army kills Muslims. It treats them badly and
burns their mosques and refuses to let them pray. They must be freed from
these clutches.''

Then he looked at me curiously, seeming to ask, Isn't that so?

Civics lessons about Kashmir are necessarily complicated. The term itself is
confusing. In common coinage, it refers to the Indian state of Jammu and
Kashmir, home to an estimated 9.5 million people. But the state has several
distinct regions, of which the fabled Vale of Kashmir -- with about half the
population -- is but one. Only there do people speak Kashmiri -- and only
there do they have a strong sense of being a separate nation. Roughly
two-thirds of the Jammu region is Hindu, a population far more comfortable
under Indian aegis. Buddhists make up about half of sparsely populated
Ladakh. They speak Tibetan and worry more about domination by Srinagar than
by New Delhi. The happiest solutions for one chunk of the state are unlikely
to be very pleasing to another.

Jammu and Kashmir was once an even larger domain, an unnatural amalgam of
fiefs brought together for expedience by the subcontinent's British colonial
masters. In 1947, when India and Pakistan were being born, it nominally
belonged to the Hindu maharajah, Hari Singh. Before departing, the British
asked the region's 562 landed potentates to choose one nation or the other.
These decisions by and large followed a certain logic of geography or
religion. But Singh, preferring independence, dawdled past the deadline.
This unrealistic conceit ended when tribesmen from Pakistan's northern
frontier came to the aid of a local rebellion. The maharajah then anxiously
reconsidered, casting the lot of his predominantly Muslim realm with
predominantly Hindu India. To many Muslims, it seemed that Kashmir had
fallen under the thumb of the infidel. War broke out between the two infant
nations, and an ensuing cease-fire left about one-third of the most populous
part of Kashmir with Pakistan and two-thirds with India. The United Nations,
itself a newborn, pushed for a long-term solution. Agreements reached in
1948 and 1949 called for the Pakistanis to withdraw all their troops and for
the Indians to pull back the bulk of theirs. This was to be followed by a 
plebiscite, allowing the people to pick the nation they wanted to join. But 
none of these actions ever took place, with both sides blaming the other for 
reneging. The wisdom of Solomon did not prevail; the baby was split.

Indian-controlled Kashmir, while never happily a part of the nation, was a 
relatively peaceful place until the rebellion's start in 1989. This uprising 
gathered fuel from various combustibles, among them Kashmiri nationalism and 
rigged elections that favored New Delhi's preferences. Pakistan eagerly 
supplied the tinder of combat training and guns.

At first, the foot soldiers were entirely home-grown. Kashmiri youth, lit 
with the fever of azadi, or freedom, thought they could unbind the ties to 
India with some well-placed explosives and high-profile kidnappings. They 
misjudged New Delhi, which considered the insurrection a threat to the very 
idea of nationhood -- and was willing to fight back without persnickety 
regard for gentlemanly tactics or human rights. They also misjudged 
Islamabad, which came to favor only those rebels it could bend to its will. 
Many militants themselves strayed from unselfish purposes. They became no 
more than criminal gangs, and Kashmiris began to dread both sides. Some 
250,000 Kashmiri Hindus, known as Pandits, fled the valley, fearing for 
their lives.

The character of the rebellion has since changed. Though hundreds of 
Kashmiris are still making war in the mountains, most have laid down their 
guns, if not their dreams of azadi. More and more, the guerrillas, like 
Malik, come from elsewhere. They know little about Kashmir and its people. 
Their interest in liberating the land is not so much for the benefit of the 
Kashmiris as for the ideal of a pan-Islamic state.

The differing passions of the different militant groups make diplomacy 
particularly hard. When the prospect of peace raises its hand, it usually 
results in a rap on the knuckles. Last summer, one militant group declared a 
brief cease-fire, but the others considered the move traitorous and stepped 
up attacks. Now India has announced a temporary pause in its initiation of 
military operations, and Pakistan has responded with a partial withdrawal of 
troops from its side of the cease-fire line. There is talk about the 
possibility of talks, though in the past, talking has yielded only the 
repetition of entrenched views. After half a century of fighting, compromise 
seems a betrayal of past sacrifices.

For its part, Pakistan finds the militancy a cut-rate way to torment India, 
which has 350,000 troops tied down in Kashmir. But however much a bargain, 
the guerrilla campaign has also become part and parcel of Pakistan's own 
precariousness. In the late spring of 1999, a more ambitious incursion into 
Indian-controlled Kashmir nearly provoked an all-out war and ended in 
humiliating retreat. Months afterward, amid the recriminations, Pakistan's 
army -- as has been its habit -- overthrew the elected government, and Gen. 
Pervez Musharraf named himself chief executive. At first, he was welcomed as 
a potential savior by the downcast nation. Pakistan stands at the brink of 
bankruptcy, spared from default only by an IV drip from international 
lenders who have grown exasperated. The possibility of a collapse into 
anarchy is the great reiterating topic of the educated elite. Though it was 
hoped that the general could stamp out corruption and balance the books, he 
has instead found himself betwixt and between, coveting approval -- and 
money -- from the West while bowing to powerful fundamentalists at home. For 
him, the struggle for Kashmir may well have become a necessity for survival 
as well as a crusade of the heart. Pakistan has thousands of armed if 
impoverished zealots who are long on righteousness and short on respect for 
the government. Pursuing the holy war against India may be all that diverts 
them from fomenting jihad at home.

Suhail Malik is such a zealot. He intrigued me. And as my interest in him 
grew, I was puzzled by why I seemed alone in my curiosity. News of his 
capture had gotten little attention in the usually aggressive Indian press. 
A TV station had run a short spot; a wire service had put out a few 
paragraphs. This seemed oddly neglectful, but an Indian friend explained to 
me that Kashmir was redundant with outrages, and people suffered from 
''massacre fatigue.'' Chittisinghpora had been papered over by fresher 
death.

In fact, it was one of these other massacres that led the police to Malik. 
Thirty Hindu pilgrims on retreat in Kashmir were gunned down on Aug. 1. Two 
militants were killed at the scene. As investigators tell the story, an 
address found on one of these men led them to Aligarh in the state of Uttar 
Pradesh. There, a month later, they happened upon Malik, taking an 
authorized break from the hard work of jihad.

I wanted to interview the teenager once more, this time without the 
authorities present. Somehow, I thought I could win his trust, offer him an 
out, persuade him that he did not have to confess to the massacre unless it 
was true. I was grasping. I wanted to study his eyes again. But I never 
secured the necessary permissions.

The closest I got was his family. Had Malik and I talked, I could have told 
him about my recent trips to Pakistan. I had seen his father and his 
favorite uncle and a man he reveres, Prof. Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the leader 
of Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Army of the Pure) and its parent organization, 
Markaz Ad-daawah Wal Irshad (the Center for Preaching). Of the three, the 
professor was the easiest to locate. His organizations are a prominent force 
in Pakistan. The jihad in Kashmir is not their only occupation. They run 
more than 130 madrassahs as well as a modern-looking university that rises 
out of the wheat fields near Lahore. Saeed, a retired professor of Islamic 
studies at an engineering college, preferred to see me in that city itself. 
We met in Lashkar's ''media center,'' a small room filled with young men 
writing at computer terminals.

The professor, a big, doughy man, is quite gracious for someone so often 
regarded as a terrorist. Cookies were served on a silver plate. We talked 
for a time before I took out Malik's photo and told him of the young man's 
confession. Saeed shook his head. ''We do not believe in killing 
innocents,'' he said, stroking his henna-tinted beard. ''I have condemned 
this very massacre.'' He glanced at the picture a second time and said he 
doubted that Malik had ever belonged to Lashkar. And, as a professor would, 
he offered me some guidance: ''It is very easy to extract statements with 
torture. Look, you can see he is handcuffed and not free to talk.'' The 
photo was then passed around the room. A dozen or so acolytes had come to 
observe the interview. One of Saeed's aides harrumphed with derision. ''This 
man's beard is not anywhere long enough,'' he said, as if I were trying to 
pawn off some charlatan as a legitimate Lashkar militant.

In Lahore, I also tried to visit Malik's uncle, an herbal doctor named Zafar 
Iqbal. He, too, is a religious scholar. I went to his home several times, 
but I was always told that the doctor had gone out and that he might not 
return for hours or days or even longer. I inferred from this that Iqbal was 
disinclined to talk about his nephew's possible involvement in a massacre. 
He may have been warned by Pakistani intelligence agents, for I was being 
followed everywhere. The men were very obvious about it. They questioned my 
driver and translator. They tailgated our car.

Eventually, someone at Iqbal's home slipped up and mentioned that the doctor 
had gone to the annual convention of the Jamaat-i-Islami political party. I 
found him in a huge field outside Islamabad amid a crowd of 350,000 people. 
This was not so hard to do. Pakistan's leading fundamentalist party is well 
organized. Every city had its own cluster of tents off to the side, and 
every tent had a roster of names. Malik's uncle had apparently withered 
under the sun and left the open air, where powerful speeches were firing the 
masses with talk of the Kashmir jihad. Repeatedly, America and India were 
condemned. Pakistan's government -- regarded as insufficiently pious -- was 
also taking a grandiloquent beating.

When I approached the doctor, he was resting on a blanket, talking with 
friends and wearing a name tag. He is a white-haired man with piercing eyes. 
He did not want to say much. In fact, he denied that he knew any Suhail 
Malik. This of course was a lie, and he did not care that I was aware of it. 
He told my translator: ''You, being a Pakistani, should not help these 
foreign agents. They come in the guise of journalists when they are really 
agents of the Christians and the Jews.''

I had gotten a more hospitable reception from Anwar Malik, Suhail's father. 
He owns a tiny general store in Sialkot, a city not far from the border with 
Kashmir. The elder Malik had been hard to find with the grudging information 
I was given by his son. Sialkot had the air of newfound prosperity. 
Sporting-goods companies have made it a manufacturing center for soccer 
balls, which are exported the world over. Modern office buildings have been 
constructed with ornate windows and facades. Drivers in new four-wheel-drive 
vehicles blast their horns to get past sluggish donkey carts that block 
their way.

The family's house is across a lane from the store, beside a stagnant pond 
laden with blooms of garbage. The home is large as such places go, and much 
of the furniture is made of polished wood and looks relatively new. Anwar 
Malik led the way into a room with a double bed, an armoire and a chest of 
drawers. Drapes covered the windows. One wall had a bright painting done on 
a felt background. Another held the glossy decals of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

I didn't know if the father was aware of the fate of his son, so I tried to 
approach the subject gently. A short, stout man of 53, he replied quietly 
that yes, he had heard something about it. Pakistan and India are neighbors. 
Urdu is similar to Hindi. People in one country sometimes watch the TV shows 
of the other. A friend had seen Suhail's face on a news show. Anwar was 
unsure what it was all about. He wanted to know more. ''This is painful for 
me,'' he said. ''Nothing like this has ever happened in our family.''

Anwar has two sons. The older has gone to work in Saudi Arabia and is 
earning good money. Suhail, on the other hand, had been adrift for a while, 
sometimes living in Lahore, sometimes Sialkot. The father was vague about 
his son's decision to go fight in Kashmir. Despite the decals, he insisted 
that he did not know which, if any, group Suhail had joined. He began to 
wring his hands and his words meandered. ''If you look at things from an 
Islamic perspective, going to Kashmir was the right thing to do,'' he said. 
''But we are poor people. If you look at things from the family perspective, 
considering our circumstances, you would have to think otherwise.''

I took out the photo. Anwar studied it. His lips quivered slightly. By then, 
one of Suhail's boyhood friends had entered the room. He seemed tickled with 
the snapshot. To him, the manacles were like jewelry. ''It's a great 
picture!'' he declared.

Anwar left the room and returned with a bottle of mineral water. He waited 
to open the seal, so as to assure me that the contents were untainted. He 
said the obvious, that he had never had an American in his home before. I 
told him that I travel quite a bit. I had even been to this sorrowful place 
Chittisinghpora and had been living with a great mystery. I had yet to solve 
it to my satisfaction, but it had become my wise tutor in Kashmir's 
misshapen history.

''An awful thing happened in that village,'' I said, pushing the 
conversation into the discomforting place it had to go. I told him about the 
grief of the Sikh families and described what had gone on that night: the 
lining up of the men before the gurudwaras, the bursts of the machine guns, 
the bloody heap. And I told him Suhail had confessed to this terrible thing 
in front of me.

Until then, I had merely been someone with news of his son. But now I was 
also a man with an accusation that required some sort of response. I was 
asking him to consider the opposing reality from across the border -- and I 
wanted him to imagine it with his son in the role of villain. He considered 
all this for a time. And finally, with a father's sincerity, he said: ''I 
don't think so. It can't be. My son is confessing, you can say, because the 
Indians have beaten him. My son is just like me, and I would not do anything 
like this.''

As we talked a bit longer, a memory suddenly fell into place. It brightened 
him with relief, and he sat up straight. Chittisinghpora: the name had not 
meant much before, but he recalled it now. This was the massacre committed 
the night Clinton arrived.

The relief then converted into actual cheer and a delicate smile. He spoke 
to me with the kindness of someone assisting a stranger in an unfamiliar 
town. ''Everyone knows about this crime,'' he said patiently. ''The Indian 
Army did it.''

Photos: Nanak Singh survived the Chittisinghpora massacre; his son and 
brother did not. (Raghu Rai/Magnum, for The New York Times); The 35 Sikhs 
were machine-gunned here, then finished off with single shots by 
executioners. (Robert Nickelsberg/Liaison); Relatives of the massacred, like 
the other villagers, remain unsure about where blame lies. (Raghu 
Rai/Magnum, for The New York Times)
Barry Bearak is co-chief of the New Delhi bureau of The New York Times.


On 20/08/10 3:00 PM, "Aditya Raj Baul" <adityarajbaul at gmail.com> wrote:

> Terrible truth of a massacre laid on for a president
The day Bill Clinton 
> arrived in India, 35 Sikhs were murdered. India
blamed militants, but the 
> villagers tell a different story

By Peter Popham in 
> Chatti-Singhpura
Saturday, 1 April 
> 2000
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/terrible-truth-of-a-massacre
> -laid-on-for-a-president-719252.html

The world came to the village of 
> Chatti-Singhpura yesterday, nearly
two weeks after 35 men of the village were 
> lined up against walls and
shot dead.

National politicians and Sikh religious 
> leaders dropped in by
helicopter, and thousands of Sikhs from other parts of 
> India came by
road to this pretty village in the Kashmir valley, where the 
> cherry
trees are blooming and the willows putting out fresh shoots against 
> a
background of snowy mountains.

They came to offer their condolences. They 
> broughtsolace and
solidarity - but noanswers. For the Indian authorities, no 
> further
answers are required. Of all the brutal events witnessed by the 
> valley
in the past 10 years, few, by their lights, were more clear cut.

The 
> massacre occurred at 7.50pm on Monday 20 March, just a few hours
before Bill 
> Clinton flew to Delhi to begin his state visit to India.
All the killers 
> escaped without being identified.

The following morning, India's National 
> Security Adviser, Brajesh
Mishra, told journalists that the massacre was a 
> case of "cross-border
terrorism", carried out by the two most prominent 
> Islamic militias in
the valley, Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Toiba. Both, 
> India claims,
are heavily supported by Pakistan.

Two days later, on 24 March, 
> the government claimed to have arrested
what one newspaper called "the Butcher 
> of Anantnag" (Anantnag is the
closest town), the "Hizbul Mujahideen kingpin 
> responsible for planning
and executing the brutal massacre", one Mohammad 
> Yaqoob Wagay. The
next day, during "sustained interrogation", Mr Wagay was 
> said to have
yielded the names of his colleagues.

More astonishing success 
> followed. On 25 March, five of those named by
Mr Wagay were reportedly killed 
> by Indian paramilitaries, 20km from
the massacre site, during a fire-fight 
> that went on for four hours.
This triumph punctuated the end of Mr Clinton's 
> Indian trip, just as
the massacre had overshadowed its beginning.

When 
> informed about the massacre, Mr Clinton had commented: "First
let's see who 
> did it." The Indians, it seemed, had done exactly that -
just in time to 
> temper the mood of his meeting over the border with
Pakistan's generalissimo, 
> Pervez Musharraf.

Yet there was something not quite right about the killings 
> on 25 March
of those blamed for the massacre. No weapons were recovered 
> and,
instead of passing the bodies to the police, the army told 
> local
villagers to bury them. Identification was impossible because the
bodies 
> were burnt beyond recognition.

It so happened - and these things happen a lot 
> in Kashmir - that a
number of apparently ordinary, harmless Kashmiri civilians 
> had been
lifted from the streets of Anantnag in the days after the 
> massacre.

Among those who disappeared was a 24-year-old local shopkeeper 
> named
Zahoor Ahmad Dalal. According to his mother, Zahoor came home from 
> his
textile shop in Anantnag's main street on Friday 24 March at 6pm,
parked 
> his van, changed his clothes, drank two cups of tea and,
leaving it rather 
> late, set off for evening prayers at the local
mosque. They have not seen him 
> since. His family did the rounds of
army, police and paramilitaries to find 
> out if he had been taken in
for questioning. All denied it.

The mystery of 
> what happened to Zahoor may never have been solved, had
not relatives of two 
> other men who vanished on the same day visited
the site where the bodies had 
> been burnt after the 25 March
"encounter" to look for evidence of who exactly 
> had died. They found
scraps of clothing, as well as the identity card of their 
> own missing
kinsman, Juma Khan.

When they brought a fragment of a pullover to 
> the home of Zahoor Ahmad
Dalal - maroon in colour, ribbed, man-made fibre - 
> his mother, Raja,
recognised it as the one her son had been wearing. From that 
> moment
the family went into mourning.

Normal life came to a halt in Anantnag 
> this week as thousands of local
men protested against "the killing of innocent 
> civilians", passed off
as the killing of militants in encounters. After two 
> days of turmoil,
the deputy commissioner agreed on Thursday to send a 
> magistrate to
supervise the exhumation of the bodies ofthe five men for 
> proper
identification.

One pillar in the solid looking structure the 
> government had built
around the Sikh massacre had crumbled. Did this put the 
> whole building
in jeopardy?

That begs the question of how solid a structure 
> it was to begin with.
The National Security Adviser's speedy explanation of 
> who was to blame
for the massacre has not been reinforced by any evidence. 
> Both the
organisations he named have denied involvement, blaming India for 
> the
massacre. The man in custody has not been charged with anything.

In 
> Chatti-Singhpura, meanwhile, the bereaved women sit in the houses
from which 
> their menfolk were summoned for "crackdown" - valley
shorthand for army search 
> operations - then minutes later murdered,
while their friends and relatives do 
> what they can to comfort them.

"One of my sons had come back from the shop 
> with vegetables and eggs,"
remembers Jeet Kaur, an elderly woman, "when a man 
> dressed like
asoldier came to the door and said it was a crackdown and ordered 
> him
to come out. He told us to turn out the lights. He said it would only
take 
> a couple of minutes."

He was right: within minutes the air was torn by 
> machine-gun fire.
Jeet Kaur lost five men: her husband, two sons and two 
> grandsons.

Contrary to the quick, clear assertions of the National 
> Security
Adviser, nothing is straightforward about the 
> Chatti-Singhpura
massacre. As a wise old newspaper editor in Srinagar put it 
> to me: "It
is not clear who did it. It is a mystery. It will remain a 
> mystery."

Better that way. Can a nation believe that its own guardians took 
> the
lives of Jeet Kaur's menfolk and 30 others forthe sake of jogging 
> a
President's elbow - and retain its sanity? Better, surely, to bury it
in 
> mystery.
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