The War That Never Ends

The signs of killing disappear quickly in Kashmir. In the Muslim tradition, the dead are buried within hours. When suspected militants are shot by Indian security forces, the process is even hastier: the bodies are buried before their numbers are verified and recorded. The Himalayan isolation, the shifting political crosshairs, the chill breeze of oppression: all conspire against tracing what happened or where the victims lie. Nobody knows exactly how many people have died in the fighting between Indian forces and Kashmiri separatists—not to mention Pakistani and Afghan mercenaries—since the valley erupted in violence 11 1/2 years ago. (India says 35,000 while Pakistan claims the number of victims is double that.)

In the three days it took for talks between Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to collapse in Agra last week, between 70 and 80 people lost their lives—around one death for every hour Musharraf was on Indian soil, twice the normal rate. No one in Kashmir thinks that's a coincidence. New Delhi was expected to step up its maneuvers to back its demand in Agra that Pakistan stop supporting the Kashmiri insurgents. The rebels themselves wanted to signal that their struggle against India continued. Both messages were bound to be written in blood. The following is what is known of the last moments of some of the men, women and children who died as, 600 km to the south, hope of peace evaporated in Agra's withering heat.

JULY 14 9:50 A.M.
As the ceremonial welcome for Musharraf ends in New Delhi, gunshots ring out over the mud-house village of Thajivara in southern Kashmir. Nadiya, 11, is walking the main road to school, 15 minutes away. Born in the second year of fighting, the sound is as familiar to her as the bleat of a goat. Like everyone else, she runs for cover in the roadside stalls where her mother usually buys the family's daily bread. She finds herself crouching next to laborer Mohammed Yusuf Gania and two other men, including Gul Mohammed Gania, a mason. Gul picks up Nadiya and the group runs inside a shop. They swing the shutters down and huddle in a corner. But then Nadiya begins crying. Outside, soldiers hear her. "They're in there," the soldiers shout, demanding the occupants open the store's shutters. Gul and Yusuf shout back that they aren't militants. Yusuf says he is going to do as the soldiers ask so they can see the innocent group. Nadiya, frightened, hides behind his legs. Yusuf flings open the shutters. As the light hits his face, bullets rip into his chest and stomach. He falls onto Gul. Nadiya doubles over, gasping. "I saw blood on her face," Gul recalls later. He moves out from under Yusuf; Nadiya is on the floor—some of the shots have passed clean through Yusuf. "The bullets had made a sieve of her belly," he says. Nadiya dies a few minutes later, still clutching the 50 rupee note she had been carrying as a deposit for a school picnic. While her relatives make funeral arrangements, Vajpayee hosts Musharraf at a glittering banquet lunch in New Delhi surrounded by 165 of India's best and brightest, including Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan, cricket legend Sunil Gavaskar and novelist Vikram Seth.

At the burial, Gul says the authorities are claiming that Nadiya and Yusuf were caught in cross fire between security forces and separatist rebels. But he and other villagers are adamant there was no firefight. They say a policeman protecting the homes of minority Sikhs discharged his rifle by accident and the soldiers, on patrol nearby, thought they were under fire. "Even if there was a militant attack, who did they kill?" asks Nadiya's father, Nazir. His wife, Misra, looks at a picture of her dead daughter and begins to cry again.

JULY 15 3 A.M.
In Agra the first talks between India and Pakistan for two years are just hours away. But in Kashmir, Indian troops surprise a guerrilla company at Sajawalli in Surankot, close to the Line of Control, the de facto border. According to the official Indian report, the rebels, whom it accuses of crossing from Pakistan, open fire immediately when challenged. The shooting rages through dawn and beyond, eight hours in all. The army later proudly displays the bodies of 18 "foreign mercenaries," whom it says were members of the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Muhammad groups, while claiming its side suffered no casualties. After press photographers take the dead fighters' pictures, the corpses are left for nearby villagers to bury.

JULY 15 12:20 P.M.
Militants hurl a grenade at an army patrol outside the northwestern town of Baramulla. One soldier is injured. His comrades quickly bring him to a hospital, where he later dies. Reinforcements arrive and the soldiers begin a sweep for the attackers. As Musharraf takes a break from his meetings to tour the Taj Mahal, men from the 8 JAK Rifles enter an orchard and force four laborers to leave with them. At dusk, villagers hear short bursts of gunfire. The next morning, a policeman reports that soldiers killed six "hard-core" militants during the search and a subsequent skirmish; three soldiers were injured. Four of the dead are later identified as Shawkat Ahmed, Mohammed Ashraf, Mohammed Sultan and Altaf Ahmed, all from the neighboring area of Rafiaabad. (The two others are not named.) District magistrate Sheikh Mohammed Hussain later admits the four were unarmed civilians, and promises $2,123 to each of their families as compensation and a job to a relative of one of the dead men. But he refuses to investigate the incident officially. The townspeople stage an angry protest and police beat the demonstrators with batons to disperse them.

JULY 16 2 A.M.
At the talks, the first sign of trouble erupts as Pakistan issues an angry denial of India's claim that Kashmir was not discussed. In Bhatato Ramsoo, a hamlet in the lap of the Peerpanjal hills overlooking the main Srinagar-Jammu highway, gunmen burst into a mud-walled house and, without a word, open fire. Herdsman Mohammed Shaffi, his wife Fatima, daughter Janoo and another relative are shot dead. The killers then enter a neighbor's house and kidnap the owner, Nizamuddin. (He remains missing.) Soon after the first shootings, rebels attack army camps at Waripora Magam and Zachaldar in Kupwara. Five soldiers, members of the 21 and 24 Rashtriya Rifles, are killed and 13 more wounded. The Lashkar-i-Tayyaba admits carrying out the assaults, which it says were the work of a lone militiaman. Their man, it adds, although intending to die, was unscathed in both. By the end of the day, the death toll across Kashmir is up to a reported 42. A spokesman for the Indian Border Security Force says it would have been a lot higher but for the arrest of two militants armed with grenades in Srinagar late Sunday. He says the pair had rigged a motorbike with explosives that they planned to set off on Boulevard Road, next to queues of Hindus waiting to board buses to take them to a cave shrine at Amarnath.

JULY 18 NOON
Two days after the summit, commentators concur Musharraf has emerged as the best spin master. But the meeting ended without tangible accomplishments. From the start, there was no formal agenda; the two sides weren't even able to decide how to describe the 54-year-old Kashmir imbroglio. (Pakistan wanted to call it a "dispute"; India insisted on the more watery "issue.") As television commentators haggle over semantic scraps and militants vow to step up their jihad, mourning continues in Kashmir—and not only for the recent dead. A few hundred people gather to lay a foundation stone for a memorial to the 4,000-5,000 people who have "disappeared" since 1989—those arrested by Indian security forces and never seen again. The site is at Idgah, outside Srinagar, next to the Mazar-e-Shohda Muslim cemetery, where thousands of the conflict's dead, including guerrilla commanders, lie buried. The crowd is full of relatives of the vanished—the elderly, parents, widows, children—who live in a state of suspended bereavement. Gentle weeping builds to a crescendo of wailing that sweeps the crowd, enveloping veteran reporters on its sidelines. Roomie Khan, 5, Aadil Badyarie, 6, and Aashiq Hussain Bhat, 8, step forward and put the first stone in place. Each of the children lost their fathers before they were born. The plan for the memorial is to feature a simple list of names, and organizers intend to leave plenty of space for future additions. Parvez Imroz of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons says the memorial will allow relatives a focal point for their grief. "They can offer fateha (prayers)," he says. "The memorial will become an emotional sanction for them."

POSTSCRIPT JULY 19
A few hours after the ceremony, the foundation stone vanishes. Nearby townspeople report seeing police remove it along with the brick base in the night. The next day Inspector General Ashok Kumar Bhan confirms his men's involvement, claiming the mourners were trespassing on state-owned land under Section 447 of the Kashmir penal code. "Obviously they cannot erect such a thing on government land," he says. The summit is over and forgotten; the mourning in Kashmir—whatever sort is allowed—continues.