Wednesday, August 31, 2011

**JP** India's Moral Defeat In Kashmir

Please pray on this day of Eid for all those who have been murdered in cold blood and to the families of those who have disappeared and lost their loved ones....this is a time when we should focus on seeking forgiveness and vowing to change our lives towards the ways of the prophet pbuh and the teachings of Quran..


Subject: PakNationalists - Al Jazeera: India's Moral Defeat In Kashmir


 
 India's Moral Defeat In Kashmir
On the discovery of almost 2,000 unmarked graves in Kashmir, most probably Kashmiri men and boys summarily executed by Indian army in the occupied valley.
CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT AL JAZEERA'S SPECIAL COVERAGE OF INDIAN HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN THE VALLEY.
CLICK HERE TO SEE A DETAILED TABLE OF LATEST FIGURES OF KASHMIRIS KILLED DUE TO INDIAN MILITARY OPERATIONS.
MIRZA WAHEED |Tuesday | 30 August 2011 | Al Jazeera
www.PakNationalists.com
In the early 1990s, I had a long conversation with a former Kashmiri militant. Among other things, I asked him why he had given up. He did not, or could not, go beyond inchoate answers that hovered around fear, disillusionment, uncertainty, and so on.
There was one thing, however, that struck me as significant, thought provoking and ultimately disturbing. He said he was grateful to the authorities that he had not been killed in custody. He had spent a few nights in a local prison when he was picked up by the armed forces a year or so after he had given up. His family feared for his life, so they went on a frenzied campaign to save him, and they did succeed in getting him out alive. In Kashmir many do not, as we witnessed in the recent custodial killing of 28-year-old Nazim Rashid in the town of Sopore in central Kashmir.
At the time, I did not fully register the import of what the former militant had said. Here was someone, even though a former combatant, who had come to believe that it was routine for the state, the government as he put it, to kill him while in their custody. He was grateful for not having been killed extra-judicially.
In other words, he had accepted the perversion of the idea of justice, and also of the moral and legal order, in his life - as well as in the world around him - and come to accept, and then believe, that was the normative relationship between the state and its subject.
The state, in this case the Indian state as it operates in Kashmir, does not execute this relationship only through the stated mechanism of coercion, extraordinary legal provisions such as those black laws AFSPA (the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) and PSA (the Public Safety Act), which mock the very concept of legality. It also employs deliberate legal, moral and technical obfuscations to do so.
'Acts of mass murder'
Nearly 20 years later, this kind of brutality by the state continues unabated, and a damning testament of it was on display last year in a particularly barbaric and almost ritualistic performance of state power when the men who run Kashmir decided that the most effective way to deal with unarmed protesters on the street was to shoot them dead.
There are clear statutes in international law that apply to the treatment of civilian protesters and prisoners in conflict regions – the killings of 2010 may not go to The Hague, but there were what could be seen as 'acts of mass murder' throughout the summer of that year. It is also important to remember that no one has been held accountable, let alone punished for any of those murders, which by itself is a shameful indictment of the state's behaviour. And that is one of the many consequences and expressions of the abnormal structures that the state employs to deal with dissent and enforce normalcy – no one is held accountable, and therefore no one among those who wield the reins of power feels responsible even for mass murder.
 CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING THIS REPORT ON AL JAZEERA'S WEBSITE.
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