Grave concern: Finding Kashmir's missing generation

LAST WRONGS: At least 4000 people have officially gone missing in Kashmir since 1989.

    

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Srinagar: For 18 years, Kashmir has been like a war zone. Civilians have faced harassment and violence from both terrorists and the Indian Army. Thousands of young men and women have just disappeared — picked up by security forces and never seen again.

What happened to them? How are their families coping? What is the government doing about it? Could it be possible that Kashmir's missing generation is lying buried in dozens of nameless graves?

Kashmir is a land with many secrets. And for the last six years, Atta Mohammed Khan has kept a very difficult one. One night in 2002, a local policeman summoned this maize farmer from his home in a tiny village in Baramulla. Khan was shown the bodies of two men who'd been shot dead. He was told they were terrorists, and he would have to bury them.

“It was around 10 pm. I cleaned his body, his face, nose and ears. There was blood everywhere. I said a prayer for him and buried him. From 2002, they started coming almost every day, at all hours,” Khan recalls.

Since that day, Khan says, he's laid to rest over 200 people in the makeshift graveyard in Chehal Bimyar. Mounds of earth, and a few stones, are all that indicate that people lie buried there. Nothing identifies the dead. Some are barely graves; just holes in the ground, now lying exposed by rain and snow. Khan says he's even been forced, at times, to bury two people in the same grave.

“Some days I didn't have enough time. I would be burying one person, and four more bodies would arrive. They were killed ruthlessly. When I asked who they were, they'd say terrorists, Afghanis. How should I know what a terrorist looks like?” Khan says.

In 2003, Khan's 16-year-old nephew went missing while on a trip to Baramulla. Khan joined his relatives in a desperate hunt. But while he was gone, he says, the Army brought six bodies in a truck, which were buried by some villagers.

“Some people said your nephew might also be buried here. I didn't want to dig up his grave. Maybe he is here,” he mournfully wonders.

Only six of the graves in the graveyard bear tombstones. They've all been put up by families who came looking for their dead. They dug up the graves to identify them.

Two years back, Khan told the Army and the police that the graveyard was full, and nobody else could be buried. The bodies stopped coming. The families didn't.

“Many people come and say prayers. Nobody knows who's buried where,” he adds.

Across Baramulla district in north Kashmir, many villages like Chehal Bimyar are out-of-bounds for civilian visitors, because of their proximity to the Line of Control. Human rights activists say it's in villages like these that the police and the Army hide their kills.

“Police and Army try to give the impression that the people who are buried are foreign terrorists. But you have to relate this to the phenomenon of disappearance of people in the valley,” Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) patron Parvez Imroz insinuates.