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HARDLINE MINISTER'S PROPOSAL FOR KASHMIR, PUNJAB ATROCITIES SPARK OUTCRY FROM JUSTICE GROUPS ANGER AT PARDON PLAN FOR ABUSES
South China Morning Post
21 August 2001
By Maseeh Rahman
A suggestion by India's hardline Home Minister, Lal Krishna
Advani,
that the Government might soon grant a general amnesty to
army and
police personnel accused of crimes in Kashmir and other
troubled
provinces has provoked a backlash from human rights
organisations.
"The Government has already hobbled the prosecution of
a large number
of cases pending before courts in Kashmir, Punjab and the
northeast,"
Ravi Nair, of the South Asia Human Rights Documentation
Centre in New
Delhi, said yesterday.
"Does Mr Advani now want to completely undermine the
rule of law?"
Mr Advani dropped his bombshell while addressing a meeting
on Sunday
in a town in Punjab, a north Indian state bordering
Pakistan where in
the 1980s police and paramilitary forces crushed an armed
insurgency by
Sikhs demanding independence.
About 700 Punjab policemen were later charged in cases
relating to
torture, extortion, extra-judicial killings and the
disappearance of
hundreds of Sikhs.
The cases are still being heard in Punjab courts.
Mr Advani's offer to "provide relief to personnel of
the forces
facing trial in various courts for their fight against
terrorism" was
made at a function organised by a newspaper group to honour
those who
died during the decade-long violence in Punjab.
Mr Advani's statement has been interpreted as an indication
that the
Government has caved in to pressure from security forces
not to
prosecute officers and men charged with human rights
violations.
Several suspended or retired police officers organised
meetings
across Punjab on August 15, India's Independence Day.
At the gatherings, they declared that if they were not
protected from
prosecution they would demonstrate outside the Presidential
Palace in
New Delhi, just across the street from Mr Advani's office.
"The Punjab police have been demanding this kind of
let-off since
1996," Mr Nair said. "The Home Ministry now
realises that if it doesn't
give a general amnesty, the lower-level policemen will
eventually
implicate officials at the very top in all the ghastly
crimes."
The hawkish Mr Advani's backtracking on New Delhi's earlier
commitment to bring to justice security personnel charged
with human
rights violations also is viewed as evidence of the
Government's resolve
to crush insurgencies in two areas - Muslim-dominated
Kashmir and in the
ethnic tribal states such as Assam, Nagaland and Manipur in
the
northeast bordering Myanmar.
"During just three months beginning this May, there
have been more
than 100 instances of torture, summary execution and
indiscriminate
shootings at public places by security forces in the
northeast," said
Roy Laifungbam, of the Centre for Organising Research and
Education, a
Manipur-based rights group.
Mr Nair said that after showing signs of improvement, the
human
rights situation in Kashmir had been reversed in mid-1999
when the army
and paramilitary forces went on the offensive after the
invasion by
Pakistan forces of Indian-held territory in Kargil.
"There has been little progress even in cases filed
earlier in
Kashmir courts," Mr Nair said.
He said that after a case was filed against an army major
in relation
to the killing of prominent civil rights lawyer Jalil
Andrabi, the
authorities failed to reveal the officer's whereabouts.
The body of Andrabi, who had documented instances of
custodial
killings, arbitrary detentions and disappearances in
Kashmir, was found
in a river in March 1996, just before he was to appear
before the United
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