Kashmir
militants rebuild their lives as hopes of a lasting peace grow
Veterans of the insurgency come back from Pakistan as India's once
violent state embraces policy of rehabilitation
·
The Observer, Sunday
21 July 2013
Shabir Ahmed Dar
with one of his children and his father in Degoom village, Shopian, Kashmir.
Photograph: Jason Burke for the Observer
Shabir Ahmed Dar has come home. His children play under the walnut trees
where he once played. His father, white-bearded and thin now, watches them. The
village of Degoom, the cluster of traditional brick-and-wood houses in Kashmir where Dar
grew up, is still reached by a dirt road and hay is still hung from the
branches of the soaring chinar trees to dry.
But Dar has changed, even if Degoom has not. It is 22 years since he left
the village to steal over the "line of control" (LoC), the de
facto border separating the Indian and Pakistani parts of this
long-disputed former princely state high in the Himalayan foothills. Along with
a dozen or so other teenagers, he hoped to take part in the insurgency which
pitted groups of young Muslim Kashmiris enrolled in Islamist militant groups,
and later extremists from Pakistan too, against
Indian security forces.
"I went because everyone else was going. The situation was bad
here. I had my beliefs, my dream for my homeland. I was very young," he
said, sitting in the room where he had slept as a child.
The conflict had only just begun when he left. Over the next two
decades, an estimated 50,000 soldiers, policemen, militants and, above all,
ordinary people were to die. Dar's aim had been to "create a true Islamic
society" in Kashmir. This could only be achieved by accession to Pakistan
or independence, he believed.
But once across the LoC, even though he spent only a few months with the
militant group he had set out to join and never took part in any fighting, he
was unable to return. "I was stuck there. I made a new life. I married and
found work. I didn't think I would ever come back here," Dar said.
But now the 36-year-old has finally come home, with his Pakistani-born
wife and three children. He is one of 400 former militants who have taken
advantage of a new "rehabilitation" policy launched by the youthful
chief minister of the state, Omar Abdullah.
Dar's father heard of the scheme and convinced his son to return last
year. "I am an old man. I wanted to see my son and grandchildren before I
die. I wanted him to have his share of our land," said Dar senior, who is
70.
The scheme is an indication of the changes in this beautiful, battered
land. In recent years, economic growth in India has begun to
benefit Kashmir, the country's only Muslim-majority state. At the same time,
despite a series of spectacular attacks on security forces by militants in
recent months, violence has fallen to its lowest levels since the insurgency
broke out in the late 1980s. The two phenomena are connected, many observers
say.
It is this relative calm that has allowed Dar and the others to return –
and allows even some hardened veterans who have renounced violence to live
unmolested. "A few years ago the [Indian intelligence] agencies would have
shot this down because they would have seen it as another move to infiltrate
[militants from Pakistan]," Abdullah, the chief minister, said.
The scheme is not, however, an amnesty. "If there are cases against
them they will still be arrested [and] prosecuted … Largely this scheme has
been taken up by those who have not carried out any acts of terrorism. Either
they never came [across the LoC], or if they came we never knew about it,"
Abdullah said.
So far there have been only two cases – one unproved – of people
becoming active again in the insurgency on returning to the Indian side. Police
officials confirm that the "returnees" live quietly. One reason for
this is that most of them, like Dar, left during the first wave of early
enthusiasm for "the cause" which swept Kashmir amid repression in the
late 1980s, but were swiftly disillusioned. Ehsan ul-Haq, who now runs a shoe
shop in central Srinagar after spending 21 years in Pakistan, remembered how he
crossed the LoC with 300 others one night in 1990. A political campaigner, the
53-year-old remembered how he "wanted to make Kashmir into
Switzerland" but "through the years saw only destruction".
"Once money entered into it, the cause was lost; all purpose, all
direction, was gone," said ul-Haq, who left his political party soon after
arriving on the Pakistani side of the LoC. He married a local girl, had five
children and ran a stationery business. Of the original 300 who had crossed
with him, he said, 100 were killed fighting in the insurgency, a dozen had
returned to the homes they had left as "returnees" under the new
scheme, and the rest had remained across the LoC. In all about 4,000 men were
still "over there", he said.
Some former militants did not wait for the returnee scheme. Abdul
Ghaffar Bhatt, 55, joined the Hizbul Mujahideen group, which is still active,
in 1989. Bhatt had long been involved in a political Islamist organisation, but
the transition to violent militancy came after authorities in Srinagar
bulldozed the car workshop he had recently set up. "They had attacked my
identity and my culture. They had detained me and my friends. But this was a
direct attack on my income, my life. One day I was a king; the next a beggar. I
had a family, three children. I made my decision and left them," Bhatt
remembered.
For three years, Bhatt was a senior commander of Hizbul Mujahideen,
running operations against Indian troops and local security forces in and
around Srinagar and sheltering in the militant camps across the LoC when necessary.
These were years of intense violence in Kashmir as security forces struggled to
contain an insurgency with significant local support. Human rights abuses were
committed systematically by all involved.
"We fought for an independent Kashmir. Religion was important for
me, of course, but we were all together – secularists, nationalists,
Islamists," he remembered.
However, infighting and the growing influence of Pakistani intelligence
services – still officially denied by Islamabad – led Bhatt to lay down his
arms. "We had been united. Now we had all different groups. We were no
longer a Kashmiri movement. Now I look back and I think we were used by
Pakistan against India, like the US used the Afghans against the Soviets,"
Bhatt said.
The veteran militant returned to Kashmir secretly seven years ago,
slipping through India's almost unguarded border with Nepal. Recognised and
detained, he spent months in prison being interrogated before being released.
Now he spends his days in Srinagar with the children he did not see for
decades. His 26-year-old son, Bilal, earns 7,000 rupees (£85) a month selling
newspapers. He does not want to follow his father's path. "We have to
struggle for our freedoms but peacefully, with no blood, no violence. This is
what humanity demands. It is what most of my friends feel," he said.
However, those who have returned under the official scheme do not find
life easy. Places in schools are hard to come by and government promises of
vocational training are unfulfilled. Life is toughest for the wives of
returnees who, with relations between India and Pakistan still poor, are unable
to go back to see families and friends in Pakistan.
"It is a kind of hell I am living now," said Farhat, 33, who
married a former militant codenamed "Asgar" 15 years ago and came
back with him to his native village in the hills of north Kashmir earlier this
year.
The stunning view from their new home across orchards to the shimmering
expanse of Wular lake is no compensation for her previous life. "We had a
house, land, work, schools, everything over there. Here we have nothing. We
made a terrible mistake. We have tried to go back, but cannot," Farhat
said. Her 13-year-old son, Hamza, is now angry, moody and sometimes violent.
In Degoom village, Dar, too, says he regrets his decision. "My wife
is so unhappy," he says. "No one should come back until there is
freedom here."
Abdullah, the chief minister, has suggested some kind of peace and
reconciliation commission for Kashmir. "Ultimately we want to heal wounds.
We want to be able to answer questions," he said. "A lot of people
have said that [a commission] is a post-conflict measure. My question is: what
sort of benchmarks for violence do you want to set?
"I think Kashmir would be ready. I am not sure that India and
Pakistan are ready."
No comments:
Post a Comment