Fear Stalks Villages on
Kashmir Border
By SAMEER YASIR
Courtesy of Abid NabiIndian army
soldiers patrolling on the Line of Control in Uri in June.
CHURUNDA, Jammu and Kashmir— On Tuesday morning, Abdul Rasheed Deedar, a
36-year-old laborer in Churunda village on the Line of Control, the disputed
mountainous border dividing the Indian- and Pakistan-administered portions of
Kashmir, rushed into a cave-like bunker dug into the gentle slope of the
village mountain.
Mr. Deedar’s wife, his two daughters and son followed him. They huddled
together in fear in the dark bunker with walls of rough stones. Indian and
Pakistani troops manning the Line of Control were firing at each other’s
positions with machine guns, across the village of Kamalkote, a few miles from
Churunda. The familiar, dreaded sound of bullets had pushed the family out of
their home into the bunker.
On Monday, according to Indian military officials, a group of armed
terrorists wearing Pakistani army uniforms had attacked an Indian patrol and
killed five Indian soldiers on the 460-mile Line of Control in Poonch district,
around 165 miles south of Churunda.
Courtesy of Sameer YasirA girl looking down
at the town of Uri from her village in Churunda, on the Line of Control in
Kashmir.
The killings shattered the fragile peace on the disputed border. Mr.
Deedar, a lean man with a trimmed beard, feared that the two rival armies would
start shelling and firing at each other’s positions along the border, as they
did after Pakistani troops killed two Indian soldiers, beheading one, in
January in Poonch.
“One of the mortars the Pakistanis fired in January hit our house,” said
Mr. Deedar, crouched inside the cave-bunker late Tuesday afternoon. The mortar
bored through the tin roof of his house and made a six-feet-wide hole in the
second floor ceiling. “It scared us so much that we did not sleep in the house
for two months,” he said. They preferred the bitter chill of winter in the
bunker to the possibility of sudden death in cross-border shelling, sleeping
there throughout January and February.
Mr. Deedar had dug a small hole, a few feet deep, in the bottom of the
bunker, where he had placed an improvised lamp, a cough syrup bottle full of
kerosene oil and a wick. In the evening, he would light the tiny lamp in the
hole, which allowed the Deedars to see each other’s faces but kept the modest
flame hidden from anyone outside the bunker. “If they would see a light, they
would fire at it,” said Mr. Deedar.
The village of Churunda is around 80 miles north of Srinagar, the summer
capital of Indian-administered Kashmir. Early Tuesday morning, I drove three
and a half hours from Srinagar to the border town of Uri. Olive-green Indian
Army trucks ferrying soldiers droned on the sinuous road to Uri along the
slopes of pine- and deodar-covered mountains. The Jhelum River, which runs
through the Kashmir Valley, flowed quietly on its way to Pakistan. Uri, a town
of around 400,000 people living in a mixture of modest and expansive brick
houses, spread along the banks of the Jhelum.
Courtesy of Sameer
YasirAn aerial view of the town of Uri from the Pirpanjal mountains.
I drove past Uri for another hour on a mud track till we reached an
Indian Army outpost, a few miles from the Line of Control. A friend from
Churunda, who accompanied me to visit his village, got us past the military
outpost. I followed a semicircular mud track between the pine trees of the
mountain leading to the village on the other face of the mountain. The forest
was eerily quiet, its silence punctured by the occasional mooing of a cow or
the screeching of a monkey.
I emerged on the northern, Pakistan-facing side of the mountain. Around
15 single- and double-story mud houses of Churunda stood on the clearings on
the mountain. A little ahead, a 12-foot-high and 12-foot-wide concertina wire
fence ran through Churunda, dividing the village into two enclaves. India built
the 341-mile fence along the disputed border between 2003 and 2004 to prevent
the infiltration of militants, who used mountain passes to move back and forth
between Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and Indian-controlled-Kashmir. Motion
censors and electrification in places make the fence a formidable deterrent for
the militants.
The fence has divided numerous border villages and confined thousands of
villagers to a precarious life between the actual Line of Control and the
fence. A 20-foot-high iron gate in the fence was manned by armed soldiers, who
regulated movement in the portion of the village where Mr. Deedar lived. The
residents have to deposit their identity cards at the check post before leaving
and entering the village.
Churunda is home to 252 families and 1,319 people. The majority, or 222
families, live in the part of the village beyond the fence. I followed a
downhill mud track from the gate to the cluster of houses. Around half a mile
from the fence, the mountain slope met a tiny stream, which is the Line of
Control. A rugged, higher mountain rose across the stream; a Pakistani Army
post stared down at Churunda from its peak.
“Living here is a curse,” said Lal Din Khatana, 75, the village headman
with gaunt cheeks. “We are stuck between India and Pakistan.” A cluster of
yellow-painted buildings in Pakistan-administered-Kashmir was visible from the
courtyard of Mr. Khatana’s mud house. “We were hoping the cease-fire would last
forever,” said Mr. Khatana, who was visibly frightened and worried about the
future of his village.
Courtesy of Sameer YasirWomen gathered
outside a house in Kamal Kote village in Uri on Wednesday morning.
India and Pakistan had agreed to a cease-fire on the disputed border in
November 2003. Before that, shellings and exchanges of fire between the two
rival armies had become a routine since an insurgency supported by Pakistan
began in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1990, seeking independence from Indian
rule. “Between the early 90s and the ceasefire, 71 people were killed in our
small village by mortar shells and bullets,” said Mr. Khatana.
In 1998, after a particularly difficult phase of cross-border shelling,
the state government of Indian-administered-Kashmir provided funding to residents of border
villages and helped them build 6,000 bunkers, like the one Mr. Deedar lived in,
to protect themselves. Around a 1,000 bunkers had already been built in border
villages in the Kargil area of Indian-administered-Kashmir.
Most of those bunkers were destroyed in the 2005 earthquake, which
struck northern Pakistan and the Kashmir region. The villagers remain indebted
to the Indian Army for helping them rebuild their houses after the earthquake.
A large number of the villagers work as porters for the army.
The near decade of calm that followed the cease-fire was punctured last
September after the Indian and Pakistani armies fired at each other. According
to Kashmir police officials in the Uri district, Indian troops had been
building observation posts along the Line of Control in violation of the
cease-fire agreement and did not stop the work despite protests from the
Pakistani troops.
The stalemate was followed by renewed bouts of hostilities. On Oct. 16,
2012, Shaheena Bano, a pregnant woman in her 20s, was feeding her cow in the
courtyard of her house when another battle between the two armies began. A
mortar shell fired by the Pakistani troops hit and killed Ms. Bano. “It was not
our first death, and it definitely won’t be the last,” said Rukia Bano, her
cousin.
The people of Churunda decided to migrate after her death, but were
persuaded by the Indian Army to stay. I had not seen a single person outside
their homes in Churunda. “Now we are afraid of stepping out of our homes,” said
Mr. Khatana. “Nobody wants to visit to our village.”
The echoes of its residents’ despair fill the village. In the semi-dark
cave-like bunker, Mr. Deedar made plans to leave with his family for Uri, where
he worked as a laborer. “My children can’t go to school because of the fear of
shelling and firing. Who knows for how long this will go on?” Mr. Deedar said.
“It is better to move to a safer place.”
Sameer Yasir is a freelance
journalist based in Srinagar.
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