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[KudosBot]

LAST September, a lawmaker in Indian-controlled Kashmir stood up in the state’s legislative assembly and spoke of a valley filled with human carcasses near his home constituency in the mountains: “In our area, there are big gorges, where there are the bones of several hundred people who were eaten by crows.”

I read about this in faraway London and was filled with a chill — I had written of a similar valley, a fictional one, in my novel about the lost boys of Kashmir. The assembly was debating a report on the uncovering of more than 2,000 unmarked and mass graves not far from the Line of Control that divides Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. The report, by India’s government-appointed State Human Rights Commission, marked the first official acknowledgment of the presence of mass graves. More significantly, the report found that civilians, potentially the victims of extrajudicial killings, may be buried at some of the sites.

Corpses were brought in by the truckload and buried on an industrial scale. The report cataloged 2,156 bullet-riddled bodies found in mountain graves and called for an inquiry to identify them. Many were men described as “unidentified militants” killed in fighting with soldiers during the armed rebellion against Indian rule during the 1990s, but according to the report, more than 500 were local residents. “There is every probability,” the report concluded, that the graves might “contain the dead bodies of enforced disappearances,” a euphemism for people who have been detained, abducted, taken away by armed forces or the police, often without charge or conviction, and never seen again.

Had the graves been found under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s compound in Libya or in the rubble of Homs in Syria, there surely would have been an uproar. But when over 2,000 skeletons appear in the conflict-ridden backyard of the world’s largest democracy, no one bats an eye. While the West proselytizes democracy and respect for human rights, sometimes going so far as to cheerlead cavalier military interventions to remove repressive regimes, how can it reconcile its humanitarianism with such brazen disregard for the right to life in Kashmir? Have we come to accept that there are different benchmarks for justice in democracies and autocracies? Are mass graves unearthed in democratic India somehow less offensive?

The Indian government has long been intransigent on the issue of Kashmir — preferring to blame Pakistan for fomenting violence rather than address Kashmiris’ legitimate aspirations for freedom or honor its own promises to resolve the issue according to the wishes of Kashmiri people and investigate the crimes of its army. And almost a year after the human rights commission issued its report on mass graves, the Indian state continues to remain indifferent to evidence of possible crimes against humanity. As a believer in a moral universe, I expected better. But it is an all too familiar pattern.

In March 2000, a day before President Bill Clinton visited India, about 35 Kashmiri Sikhs were massacred by unidentified gunmen in the village of Chattisinghpora, 50 miles from the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar. Soon after, L. K. Advani, then India’s home minister, declared that the terrorists responsible for the killings had been shot dead in an “encounter” with the Indian Army. But the truth turned out to be more sinister. Under pressure from human rights groups and relatives, the bodies of the so-called terrorists were exhumed, and after a couple of botched investigations in which DNA samples were fudged, it was revealed that the dead men were innocent Kashmiris.

It took nearly 12 years — primarily because of the Indian government’s refusal to prosecute those involved in the murders — to reach the Supreme Court of India. On May 1, in a widely criticized decision, the court left it to the army to decide how to proceed, and the army has opted for a court-martial rather than a transparent civilian trial. In the eyes of Pervez Imroz, a Kashmiri lawyer and civil rights activist, the court’s decision “further emboldens the security forces” and strengthens “a process that has appeared to never favor the victims.”

But the victims have not forgotten Kashmir’s estimated 8,000 “disappeared.” Perhaps the most telling reminder is the women who stage a symbolic protest every month in a Srinagar park like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, who protested weekly after their children became “desaparecidos” under the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-83. Each woman wears a headband bearing a blank photo — steadfastly refusing to forget in the face of the Indian government’s callous and immoral indifference.

IN the long and bloody narrative of India’s injustices in Kashmir, there come seasons that are etched in the public consciousness as collective epitaphs of mourning and loss. In the summer of 2010, there was a mass uprising against Indian rule in Kashmir — an Arab Spring before the Arab Spring.

It came after police killed a teenager; thousands of people came out into the streets across Kashmir. The Indian paramilitary forces and police yet again reacted with brute force, keeping the region under virtual siege for over two months and killing 120 people, many of them teenagers. The youngest, Sameer Rah, not even 10, was beaten to death by irate paramilitaries. The provincial government promised “speedy justice.” But once again, no one has been charged with these killings, let alone convicted of them.

The Indian government must do what may seem inconceivable to the hawks in the military establishment but is long overdue. Before it can even begin to contemplate negotiating a lasting political solution in consultation with Kashmiris it must act to deliver justice — for the parents of the disappeared; for the young lives brutally extinguished in 2010; for the innocent dead stealthily buried in unmarked graves in the mountains; for the Kashmiris languishing in Indian prisons without any legal recourse; for the exiled Kashmiri Hindu Pandits who fled in 1990 after some were targeted and killed by militants; and for the mother of Sameer Rah, who still doesn’t know why her young son was bludgeoned to death and his body left by a curb.

A journalist and the author of the novel “The Collaborator.”


http://www.nytimes.c...cracy.html?_r=1

[blueazure]

Inshallah the day isnt far when Kashmir will be reunited with Pakistan and RAT land shattered into little insignificant pieces

[KudosBot]

General lot of Indian Muslims facing dismal situation: scholar


Well-known Indian scholar Professor Dr Ram Puniyami described the general lot of Indian Muslims 'dismal' in secular India as the situation of minorities' rights have worsened over the last three decades. Ghettoised and alienated for long from the mainstream, Indian Muslims were now awakening and realising that the way out for them is acquisition of modern knowledge.

Still the dream of equity for Muslims was a far thing and their security had been made precarious by the infiltration of communal elements in the state organs, Dr Puniyami said while speaking at the regional conference on "Rights of Religious Minorities in South Asia: Learning from Mutual Experiences" organised by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI) and Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSF) of Germany in Islamabad.

The Indian scholar elaborated that the growth of communalism was not something new as it was the existence of two communal streams of religious nationalism, which had caused the division of British India. However, India's secular constitution, which exhorts affirmative action to safeguard the minorities had all along struggled against the forces of Hindutva led by the RSS.

He said the Sangh Parivar builds on Muslims' type casting as terrorists and emphasises their otherness to persecute them. The other religious minority that was being oppressed was the Christians who were accused of converting low caste Hindus. He said the communalism in South Asia was of a competitive nature as persecution of Muslims in India aroused negative sentiments in Pakistan and vice versa. He said violation of human rights anywhere should be treated as a violation everywhere. He said there were many men and women in India who had devoted their lives to fight the menace of communalism and evolving a polity that was truly secular. They were trying for the passage of a communal violence bill that would hold the state apparatus responsible if violence against a minority persisted for more than 24 hours. He also advocated reservation in jobs for Muslims to bring them up to a threshold of economic and social survival. But it was going to be a long and hard fight.

Former federal minister and minority rights activist J Salik called upon the United Nations to devote a day for the rights of the minorities and create body in its organisation to monitor violations of minority rights in different countries. He said that minorities were not represented at the UN and in Pakistan they did not enjoy equal rights as no member of the minority community could become the head of the state or the chief executive. He said that minorities should be safer in Pakistan than elsewhere as this was the only country which was created by a minority.

Professor Imtiaz Ahmad of Bangladesh said that the polity in Bengal was more tolerant as public reasoning there was enriched by the Sufi tradition and the influence of the Hanafi school of thought which tend to separate religion from politics. Ambassador Nihal Rodrigo, who spoke on the Sri Lankan civil war, said the Muslims had also suffered a lot during the conflict and faced large scale dislocation. The country was now engaged in the task of resettlement and rehabilitation.

Pandit Channa Lal, senior representative of the Hindu community in Pakistan, said the community faced no problem in the observance and celebration of religious rites and festivals but society was being so radicalised that children of his community did not feel they were part of the mainstream. Hindus could not climb to the top in service careers. There were no foreign office jobs for them and the doors of the presidency and the PM House were closed on them. He said the PPP was no more a liberal party as it used to be in the time of Z.A. Bhutto and Benazir.

Dr Maqsudul Hassan Nuri, acting president of IPRI, in his welcome address said that it was an 'age of rage' and that there had been marked rise in religiosity in South Asia over the years. "We need to understand the causes behind this phenomenon and devise pragmatic solutions," he added.

[platinum786]

The only way to free Kashmir is via the Mujahideen. India has always been willing to talk about the issue when it's hand has been forced by losing soldiers to freedom fighters. Without that pressure India will never want to negotiate on the issue.

[blueazure]

^^all thanks to that traitor musharaf who backed off from kashmir , we lost a major pressure point over india ..

[KudosBot]

The mass graves of Kashmir

For 22 years this contested region has endured a regime of torture and disappeared civilians. Now a local laywer is discovering their unmarked graves and challenging India's abuses

One sodden evening in April 2010, an Indian army major from the 4 Rajputana Rifles arrived at a remote police post where the mountains gather in a half-hitch around Kashmir, India's northernmost state. Major Opinder Singh "seemed in a hurry", a duty policeman recalled. Up in the heights of the Pir Panjal range, down through which the major had descended, it was snowing and his boots let in water. "The officer reported that the previous night his men had killed three Pakistani terrorists who had crossed over into our Machil sector," the policeman recalled. "Where are the bodies?" the policeman had asked, filling in a First Information Report that started a criminal enquiry. "They were buried where they were shot," the major retorted, before taking off in his jeep.

"It was not unusual," the policeman later told investigators, when questioned as to why he had not insisted on viewing the corpses or checking the identities. Kashmir had been in turmoil since Partition in 1947 and on a virtual war footing for the past two decades, with some estimates placing the dead at 70,000. Strung with razor wire and anti-missile netting, the state had been transformed into one of the most militarised places on earth, with one Indian paramilitary or soldier stationed for every 17 residents. The Pakistani intelligence services and military trained and funded a legion of irregulars, who infiltrated over the mountains to kick-start a full-blown insurgency in 1989, keeping the Indian-ruled portion of the Muslim-majority state permanently alight.

Once picture-perfect, a place of pilgrimage for backpackers and mystics of all religions, Kashmir had become one of the most beautiful and dangerous frontlines in the world. Machil, the sector in which Singh had sprung his operation, was especially treacherous, consisting of a clutch of isolated villages strung along the Line of Control (LoC), a high-altitude ceasefire line that had split Kashmir in 1972. Up here in the thin air, India had created a fearsome barrier, made lethal with the help of Israeli technology, a partially electrified series of fences connected to motion detectors, surrounded by a heavily mined no-man's land.

On 30 April, 2010, an armed forces spokesman in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, confirmed Singh's story. "Three militants have been killed in a shootout," said Lieutenant Colonel JS Brar, detailing how three AK-47s, one Pakistani pistol, ammunition, cigarettes, chocolates, dates, two water bottles, a Kenwood radio and 1,000 Pakistani rupees had been recovered. The standard-issue infiltration kit. The corpseless triple-death inquiry was an open and shut case.

However, a few days later, at Panzalla police station, 30 miles from Machil, a simple missing case was causing everyone problems. Three Kashmiri families from nearby Nadihal village had turned up to report the disappearance of their sons: Mohammad, 19, Riyaz, 20, and Shahzad, 27, an apple farmer, a herder and a labourer. They had not seen them since 28 April and would not be calmed by detectives. Soon, their appeals drew the attention of Kashmir's most dogged human rights lawyer, Parvez Imroz, whose response to what would become known as the "Machil Encounter" was about to create a watershed in Kashmir.

Dressed in the uniform of the Kashmiri bar, a crisp white shirt and sombre morning suit, over the past two decades Imroz had become a fixture at the high court in Srinagar, filing thousands of habeas corpus actions (which literally translates as "produce the bodies") on behalf of families who claimed their relatives had vanished while in the custody of the Indian security forces.

These actions rarely succeeded, the Indian army insisting that the missing had flitted over the LoC to Pakistan, recalling historic scenes at the start of the insurgency that terrified New Delhi, when tens of thousands of young Kashmiris jumped aboard buses manned by youthful conductors shouting: "Pakistan, Pakistan here we come." But what the writs did achieve was to create a paper trail from which Imroz was able to estimate that 8,000 Kashmiri non-combatants had vanished from army custody in a state the size of Ireland – four times more than disappeared under Pinochet in Chile. "The military grip has been suffocating," he told the Guardian, "and making someone vanish sows far more fear than spilling their blood".

Imroz had spent much of his career facing down security forces protected by specially drafted laws. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, soldiers and paramilitaries enjoy total immunity from prosecution, unless the ministry of defence sanction their trial. Using new Right to Information (RTI) laws, Imroz obtained confirmation that despite the fact that hundreds of soldiers stood accused of murder, rape and torture, not a single case had proceeded. In contrast, Kashmiri citizens are dealt with using the Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act, under which they can be jailed, preventively, for two years, if deemed likely to commit subversive acts in the future, with an estimated 20,000 detained, according to Human Rights Watch.

Imroz's campaigning achieved other things. He caught the attention of the UN, and this year Christof Heyns, a special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, warned India that all of these draconian laws had no place in a functioning democracy and should be scrapped. The price for confronting the security forces and the militants they faced down was severe. In 1992, Imroz mourned the loss of his Hindu mentor, an activist who was gunned down by Muslim insurgents. Three years later, Imroz was driving home from court when he felt a cold draught grip his chest. "I slumped over the wheel, inexplicably," he recalled. Bystanders who came to his rescue told him he had been shot. A militant group later claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. In 1996, the Indian army abducted Imroz's friend and fellow lawyer, Jalil Andrabi, whose mutilated body was found after three weeks. Imroz shut himself off. For years he refused to marry or have children, worried they would be targeted. In 2002, his accomplished protégé, Khurram Parvez, a young Kashmiri graduate, was badly injured in an IED attack that killed his driver and a female colleague, Asiya Jeelani. Two years after that, a gunman posing as a client, shot dead another of Imroz's legal allies. In 2005, when Imroz was awarded the Ludovic-Trarieux International Human Rights Prize, first given to Nelson Mandela, he was unable to accept it in person as India declined to issue him a passport.

But Imroz's reputation began to build in the countryside, from where terrified villagers travelled to besiege his rickety chambers on the Bund, in central Srinagar, carrying with them stories. In 2008, these accounts enabled the lawyer to make his greatest discovery. While surveying disappearance cases in villages across two of Kashmir's 23 districts, including Baramulla, from where the three Nadihal men would vanish in 2010, villagers showed him a hitherto unknown network of unmarked and mass graves: muddy pits and mossy mounds, pock-marking pine forests and orchards. According to eyewitnesses, all had been dug under the gaze of the Indian security forces and all contained the bodies of local men. Some were fresh, others decayed, hinting at a covert slaughter that went back many years.

Imroz widened his search, mapping almost 1,000 locations. He was shocked by the implications. Indian law requires that the police probe every violent death and that corpses be identified. But in the village of Bimyar, white-haired Atta Muhammad Khan came forward to describe how he had been forced to inter 203 unidentified bodies under cover of the night – men whose identities and crimes were unstated. "Some corpses were disfigured. Others were burnt. We did not ask questions." It was a similar story in Kichama village, where the lawyer mapped 235 unmarked graves and in Bijhama, where 200 more unidentified corpses had been interred. In Srinagar, Imroz's team alerted the government's State Human Rights Commission (SHRC). "We suspected the missing of Kashmir were buried at these secret sites," he said, publishing a report, Facts Under Ground.

An official response came two months later, just after 10pm on 30 June, 2008. Imroz had at last married Rukhsana, a business woman, and they now had two children, his daughter Zeenish, 12, and a boy, Tauqir, aged seven. The family lived in Kralpora, a tree-lined suburb eight miles from Srinagar city centre. No one called round on the offchance. Rukhsana heard a rap at the door and glanced outside to see that their security lights had been smashed. "I knew what this meant," she said, the door knock immediately conjuring memories of murdered friends. Imroz ran to the back of the house and shouted for his brother, Sheikh Mushtaq Ahmad, who lived next door.

As Ahmad emerged with a torch, a shot was fired, narrowly missing his son. A stranger screamed: "Put that light out." Then, a grenade exploded, shrapnel pitting the front door. Tear gas shells followed, waking neighbours who unlocked the village mosque. The imam mobilised residents to surround Imroz's house, as an armoured vehicle and two jeeps from the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force and police Special Task Force, took off. "They had come to kill us," Rukhsana recalled. "We need protection," she said. Who do you need protection from, we asked her. "From our own government of course. It's jungle law."

After the attack, Human Rights Watch called on India to "protect Parvez Imroz, an award-winning human rights lawyer" and his case was raised in the European parliament. His family pleaded for him to quit. "I was terrified," the lawyer conceded. "I was starting to have horrible dreams. But being silent is a crime."

Imroz and his team redoubled their efforts, spreading their net across 55 villages in three districts, Bandipora, Baramulla and Kupwara. An ad-hoc inquiry run by volunteers and funded by donations saw the number of unmarked and mass graves mapped rise to 2,700. Inside them were 2,943 bodies; 80% of them unidentified. "These were hellish images from a war that no one has ever reported," said Imroz. "We suspected this to be prima-facie evidence of war crimes," he added. "Who are the dead, how did they die, in whose hands and who interred them?"

The SHRC finally agreed to an inquiry. Soon, it had its work cut out. Using RTI laws, the police were forced to concede that they had lodged 2,683 cases for the covertly interred in just three districts. And a new deposition submitted by Imroz's field workers covering two more districts, Rajoori and Poonch, mapped 3,844 more unmarked and mass graves, taking the total number to more than 6,000. There are still another 16 districts yet to be surveyed, leaving Imroz to wonder how many violent deaths and surreptitious burials have been concealed across Kashmir. Finally, last September, the SHRC made an announcement, stating that Imroz's discovery was correct: "There is every possibility that unidentified dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves … may contain the victims of enforced disappearances." The UN weighed in this year, a report to the Human Rights Council warning India of its obligations under human rights treaties and laws. Kashmiri families had a "right to know the truth" and that "when the disappeared person is found to be dead, the right … to have the remains of their loved one returned to them, and to dispose of those remains according to their own tradition, religion or culture".

After the Nadihal men disappeared, Imroz's field worker, Parvaiz Matta, travelled to the village. He found an eyewitness, Fayaz Wani, a close friend of the missing men. Wani finally revealed the Indian army had offered the men jobs, in a deal brokered by a Special Police Officer (SPO), who had given them a sum equivalent to £7 each, "as a show of good will", before taking them to a remote army camp in Machil.

The families of the missing men filed a complaint against the SPO, Bashir Lone. "This man broke down, admitting his role, claiming that nine soldiers at a remote army camp had shot the three men, so they could claim reward money," Matta said. (The army routinely gives financial rewards to soldiers who kill militants.) On 28 May, 2010, three bodies were exhumed from unmarked graves close to the camp, some of those already mapped by Imroz, and in which the government said were foreign fighters. Their families identified Shahzad, Riyaz and Mohammad by their clothes.

The Nadihal cash-for-killing story and news of a legion of unidentified dead lying in unmarked graves, sent hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on to the streets in the summer of 2010. Sensing the building anger, the army and central government in New Delhi promised an inquiry, offering, without irony, talks to anyone in Kashmir "who renounced violence". However, when no answers came, Kashmir went into convulsions, as crowds of youths armed with stones ambushed soldiers, police and paramilitaries who returned fire with live rounds. I arrived in Kashmir shortly after. More than 100 demonstrators had been killed, many of them children. International news channels briefly took an interest, asking if Kashmir was experiencing its own Arab Spring. But the cameras left quickly, as a vicious crackdown began clearing the streets: the government's own statistics showing that more than 5,300 Kashmiri youths, many of them children, were arrested.

In 2011, Imroz went to work again, investigating how India had restored the peace, and I shadowed him. He took statements from those who had been released and the families of those still incarcerated. "The affidavits made for chilling reading," he said. The majority of youths alleged torture, with independent medical examinations confirming that many had their fingernails pulled and bones crushed. One teenage prisoner told the Guardian: "The police started on our hands and fingers, breaking them with gun butts, and by the end when tears were streaming down our faces, we were hung by our ankles and had chilli rubbed in our wounds." Others claimed to have petrol funnelled into their rectums. One group alleged in court that they were forced to sodomise each other, while a police cameraman filmed.

This year, Imroz and his field workers widened the research to commence the first state-wide inquiry into the use of torture. Their findings will go to the UN and to Human Rights Watch later this summer but a draft seen by the Guardian suggests that not only is torture endemic, it is systemic. In one cluster of 50 villages, more than 2,000 extreme cases of torture were documented, any of which would kick-start an SHRC inquiry, and all of which left victims maimed and psychologically scarred. Methods included branding, electric shocks, simulated drowning, striping flesh with razor blades and piping petrol into anuses.

This work suggests that the statewide ratio for Kashmiris who have experienced torture is one in six. "For the 50 villages, in this small snapshot, we located 50 centres run by the army and paramilitaries in which torture had been practised," Imroz said. The methods, language and even the architecture of the torture chambers are identical. "What we are looking at is not a few errant officers." Files released under RTI laws show how these practises go back to 1989. These documents, seen by the Guardian, also reveal horrific practises, including one sizeable cluster, confidentially probed by the government itself, where men from the Border Security Force (BSF) lopped off the limbs of suspects and fed prisoners with their own flesh.

The Guardian traced one of the victims, a shepherd Qalandar Khatana, 45. Hobbling on crutches, bandages covering his ankles, both feet having been sawn off, he recalled: "I was held down, a BSF trooper produced a knife and then I passed out as the blood gushed from me." His file says a government investigator confirmed the story and produced eyewitnesses.

Another villager, Nasir Sheikh, a carpenter, who lost both legs below the knee and one hand, added: "The smell was of death – urine, ####, sweat. You knew you were about to be slowly murdered. It was like being thrown down a well where no one can hear you scream." His file confirms the story and suggests that compensation be paid. The UN special rapporteur on torture has been refused entry to Kashmir since 1993. Domestic legislation to outlaw torture has stalled. "When will the world start asking as tough questions of India as it is of Syria?" Imroz asked. "Or are we Kashmiris invisible?"

• Kashmir's Torture Trail, Tuesday 10 July at 11:10pm on Channel 4

[KudosBot]

Channel 4 Turns Spotlight on Kashmir


A trailer for a new Channel 4 documentary that will air tonight in the United Kingdom claims: “Now from Kashmir, more dark secrets are emerging.”

Channel 4 says it’s turning its attention on Kashmir, where separatists and Indian forces have battled for almost a quarter century, because the issue is in danger of becoming a “forgotten conflict,” overshadowed by Syria and the euro-zone debt crisis.

It appears the dark secrets in the documentary are the unmarked graves of thousands of Kashmiri civilians that were unearthed by local human rights activists in 2008 and acknowledged in a report last year by the official State Human Rights Commission. A story Monday in The Guardian, a U.K. newspaper, which linked to the Channel 4 documentary, also focused on the mass graves.

The graves are evidence of the brutal crackdown by India’s armed forces after thousands of young Kashmiris, backed by Pakistan’s government, launched a separatist struggle against New Delhi in the late 1980s. By some estimates, over 50,000 people died in the conflict, most of them civilians.

India continues to maintain over 500,000 security personnel in Kashmir, giving it the feel of an occupied territory.

Some inside India’s government back demilitarization and want to strip India’s armed forces of special laws which shield them, while serving in Kashmir, from prosecution for human rights abuses. The army has successfully parried these moves, claiming Pakistan-backed militants remain a threat to stability in Kashmir.

In fact, Kashmiri police officers say infiltrations from Pakistan are down significantly and only a small number of Pakistan-trained militants remain in the region.

Violence has dropped greatly in Jammu and Kashmir state, with eight civilian deaths so far this year, the lowest level in over two decades, according to these statistics from the South Asia Terrorism Portal, a New Delhi-based group.

It seems strange at this time to emphasize – as Channel 4 does – that Kashmir is becoming a “forgotten conflict.”

Abuses still continue, such as the killings of Kashmiri men from Nadihal village in 2010, allegedly by army officers. Two years ago, scores of Kashmiri protesters died in clashes with police, following anger at the Nadihal killings. The military has failed time and again to court-martial men for abuses and needs to be held to account.

One could also argue, though, that such abuses are getting an intense amount of scrutiny from people outside and inside India.

The Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s FBI, has been pushing ahead with a case against five army officers accused of killing five innocent Kashmiris in 2000 and later pretending they were foreign militants.

The army blocked the case, citing its immunity laws. But in May, India’s Supreme Court, which was hearing the CBI’s appeal, ordered the army to either allow the case to go ahead or court-martial the men.

Last month, the army said it was finally moving ahead with court-martial proceedings.

The army’s slow response is inadequate and speaks to a culture of covering up rights abuses in Kashmir. But the issues facing Kashmir are no longer being brushed under the carpet.

http://blogs.wsj.com...ht-on-kashmir/?