Click to play videoSrinagar: 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.
At least 4000 people have officially gone missing in Kashmir since 1989. And the APDP says nearly a thousand of them could lie buried in the unmarked graves that it has discovered in just three tehsils in Baramulla.
“There are no records present for those buried. If someone is buried, there has to be a photograph, FIR should be registered, but there is nothing,” Parvez says.
One of Kashmir's most infamous encounter killings took place here near the Soura police station in Srinagar. In June 1999, policemen at this station intercepted three men returning from a wedding party. Days later, the bodies of two of them were found buried at Kichama near Baramulla. Among them was Nazir Ahmed's brother Javid.
“The government evaded us for 8 days so we took the body and buried it at our graveyard. We want the culprits punished. If the government wants, it can solve the case in minutes,” Nazir says.
Nazir removed all the pictures of Javid from his walls because they want to avoid the shadow of the past and start life anew.
In April, the APDP released a report which identified over a dozen villages around the town of Uri which had unmarked graves. Since then, international rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have called for an investigation into the graves. But the police say they have looked into all reported disappearances, and they will not try to identify the bodies.
“During the early period of terrorism, lots of cross-border movement did take place and large numbers of terrorists were killed on the border and subsequently buried there. Now after so many years, to take them out and identify them is going to be a virtually impossible task. We have to go on specifics. We can't go on general things,” IGP Kashmir S M Sahai reasons.
The parents of the disappeared people say they will continue to build pressure for an international probe into the mass graves. And key to future action, is public anger. But in Baramulla, six years after he first buried a stranger, an old man is still coming to terms with what he's done.
“Those people were killed mercilessly. I can still see that scene; there was blood everywhere. I can't sleep at night, thinking of their faces,” Atta Mohammed Khan adds.
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