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ADDRESS AT GENEVA HR COMMISSION

Indian forces disfigure

Kashmir Valley, says

Dr Hamida

ISLAMABAD: The entire Valley of occupied Kashmir and large parts of the state are today disfigured by Indian army interrogation centres, chambers of torture and detention camps.

There are more than 600,000 Indian soldiers in an area 85 miles long and 40 miles across and there is one Indian soldier to every six Kashmiris.

This was stated by Dr. Hamida Bano, a leader of All Parties Hurriat Conference Leader and an English professor of Srinagar University while addressing 52nd session of Human Rights Commission on (Thursday), April-4 at Geneva According to a fax message received here on Saturday. she said only the other day, another distingu ished son of Kashmir, the human rights crusader, Jalil Andrabi, was murdered by agents of the Indian government.

As many as 22 peaceful members of the Kashmiris Resistance were burnt alive by the Indian army while in custody. Who will atone for their blood? Who will answer for this crime, as for others, on the bar of history? I come here to speak of those who have died as martyrs to the cause of the freedom of their people, she added.

Dr Hamida said the world may remain silent, as it has, but it is our duty nevertheless to let it know what is happening in Kashmir. Surely, the time for justice has come. The day of reckoning is here.

More women have been raped by Indian soldiers in Kashmir than in all the wars of this century. Our women are raped to inflict the ultimate humiliation upon us and to break our will, adding she said but with each new atrocity, our will to resist the oppressor is further steeled.

I want you to know about the women of the tiny village of Dadsara where the "brave" soldiers of the Indian army raped 20 of them, some of them barely in their teens. With each day, the Indian state and government sink even deeper into the pit of infamy and criminality, she said.

While reading a brief extract from a report prepared by a women's team led by Ritu Diwan on a fact-finding mission to the Valley, she said that life itself is not secure... the young man walk in fear of being named a suspected militant, picked up, interrogated, tortured, killed.

The women live in fear of humiliation, harassment, molestation, rape. Families live in fear of crackdowns, raids, searches, adding she said the looting of household goods is common and the forces can enter homes, shops, schools, hospitals at any time, without warning or restriction. The invasion of privacy is almost total.

She said "I have travelled thousands of miles, all the way from Kashmir to Geneva, to draw the attention of this august assembly of states sitting in the Commission on Human Rights, to the tragic plight of the people of Kashmir. I have sought this opportunity to address this distinguished gathering under agenda item-9".

"I come from a land which has been converted into a towering inferno with the unprecedented ruthless violations and repression of all human rights through naked use of force by the Indian military and its civilian agents" She further said "I come from a land where ghastly terror reigns supreme, where human beings are treated worse than animals and dragged to slaughter houses, torture cells and custodial wards at any time, where there are no lows operating as the civilized world knows them, nor any redress or respite for those who suffer persecution at the hands of the Indians state and its machinery of oppression".

We live in constant fear of humiliation, dishonor and disappearances. When families meet, they talk about their losses. A son, a husband, a father, a brother, a mother, a sister, a grandfather. The women of Kashmir have suffered the most. Their chilling story is documented in report after report by internationally respected human rights agencies and groups.

Anyone who stands up and speaks for the rights of the Kashmiris either disappears, or is jailed or murdered, sometimes openly, at other times while in custody. The murderers are left free to continue their macabre dance of death.

She said "I would like to conclude with a short poem written by the Kashmiri poet Parwaiz Naqash to describe the misery and desolation that have become synonymous with his homeland:

See the dance of death and destruction

Smell the stench of charred human flesh

Come to Kashmir Where the mangled bodies of newly-born babies bear

testimony

To man's cruelty to man

Where young girls are raped, and

Their bosoms ripped apart

Where it is a crime to be young

Because if you are young

You are fit to be slain".-APP