INDIA-RIGHTS: Mothers Fight For Human Rights in Kashmir

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Rita Manchanda

SRINAGAR, Sep 29 1998 (IPS) - Alone, Parveen Ahangar, 36, was a poor, helpless, illiterate woman who,like thousands of others in embattled Kashmir, was reduced to searching desperately a missing son, brother or husband.

United these women have become a force to reckon with. “We can do anything once we are united as women,” Ahangar who leads the two-year-old Association of Mothers of the Missing (AMM) said.

The AMM formed spontaneously because these women were constantly meeting each other at the police stations and courts but achieving little. “The police and other authorities would see us and say ‘poor women’ and then they would simply ignore us,” she said.

Just how powerful the AMM has now become was demonstrated earlier this month when it organised a sit-in outisde the High Cort at Srinagar. For one, the organisation has grown to include 300 women many of them from remote districts such as URI.

Seeing strength in unity, the mothers now move as a group even if they have to go to far away Delhi where the Supreme Court high officialdom and influential politicians are situated.

But in the shadowy world of separatism and counter-insurgency operations no one is safe – not even the mothers who form the AMM. Recently, one of them, Haleema Begum, an active member, was shot dead by “unidentified gunmen.”

The shooting followed a press conference organised by the AMM to highlight pleas for justice to some 2,000 missing men, picked up by the security forces since the beginning of a violent phase of the separatist movement in 1989.

Parveen is certain that there is a link between Haleema’s killing and her persistent search for missing young men including her eldest son Bilal Ahmed Bhatt, 30, picked up in 1992 by the para-military Border Security Forces (BSF).

According to residents here, Haleema had been warned by the security forces to give up her search for her son. But she stopped only when she was killed in an attack on her home which left another son dead.

Haleema’s two daughters who were also wounded in the attack recounted how two masked gunmen intruded into their house and ordered their mother and brother into one of the rooms and then sprayed them with bullets.

For two days after the killings, Ahangar avoided staying the night in her own house. But she said she would not give up the struggle. “Every morning when I set out from home I know how vulnerable I am. What is my life worth if I give up.”

Sitting a little way off was Gulshan Ahmed Dar, another mother and member of the AMM who had come for support as she went to court to gain custody of her son Manjoor Ahmed Dar missing in custody since last year. ” No one will give up,” she said.

These were brave words in Kashmir where over the past year, the spreading terror of reprisals from security agencies, militants, and ‘surrendered militants’ has effectively silenced the people.

Here where fathers have held back from registering complaints about a son’s custodial death, where brothers have put a cover over the gang rape of a sister, these women struggle for justice not only for their own but also others missing in custody.

Besides, women are now being targeted by ‘unidentified gunmen,’ an euphemism for members of the many armed groups in the valley – security agencies, counter insurgents and militants who have together destroyed the social fabric of in this once peaceful valley.

Ahangar’s lone struggle began in August 1990 when her son Javed, then a high school student went missing in custody. Javed had gone to study at his uncel’s when the BSF supported byt the army launched a ‘crack down’ on the Batmallo area of Srinagar.

“They were were looking for another Javed but Captain Dharar Gupta took my son into custody and he never returned,”Ahangar said. In the Batmallo locality alone there have been 17 such disappearances.

Practically, every day for the past eight years, Ahangar, the uneducated wife of a small shopkeeper who never ventured beyond Lal Chowk, the city square, has been doing the rounds of para-military and army camps, or chasing rumours that he had been spotted in jails in far away Delhi or Agra.

“In court, they brought an officer from Assam with the entire army behind him but I was all alone. But I was not scared.

If my son had joined the miliatns I could accept that he had done worng but he had not. I demand justice. But the courts have given us no relief,” Ahangar said.

For the mothers there is not even a body over which they can grieve, a grave over which can cry and strive on. It is a constant search even if grouped under the AMM.

But it is far worse for the widows. Sara, 30, of Nowgam village, whose husband has been missing since 1990 has been thrown out by her in-laws along with her two young children.

According to Pervez Imroze, a human rights activist and lawyer working with the AMM, 300 cases have been documented so far of which 70 cases are before the High Court including the custodial disappearance of Haleema Begum’s son Bilal.

Ahangar and the others have completely lost confidence in the ability of the state-level High Court to deliver justice and are now looking up to the Supreme Court in Delhi.

There is also much disenchantment with political groups like the Hurriyat a conglomeration of separatist politicians who have not been particularly sympathetic to the plight of the women.

Parveen is determined that the association remains free from political manipulation and greed and has for that reason resisted the setting up of a formal office.

So far, they have been financing themselves and the odd meetings and sit-ins. But letters of support have been coming in from sister organisations like the Mother’s Front in the Philippines.

Ahangar is illiterate but she is aware of other initiatives around the world like the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina. She more than makes up for illiteracy by her indomitable spirit – on which hinges the ability of the AMM to successfully challenge systematic injustice and oppression.