Kashmiri Muslims have broken new ground by waging a non-violent separation struggle but the Indian authorities seem unsure how to respond
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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday August 31 2008 16:00 BST
Flowing black beard, a headband with “Allahu akbar” (God is great) and a fluttering green flag. This has been the trademark picture of the recent azadi (freedom) processions of Kashmir, where hundreds of thousands marched the streets of this disputed Himalayan region seeking a separation from India.
From a distance, it seems as if the past has returned to Kashmir. But the present contains an irrefutable truth: in place of guns, the people carry slogans. The politics of protest this time is not about the argument of power, but about the power of argument.
Kashmir is the first conflict-ridden Muslim region in the world where people have consciously made a transition from violence to non-violence, and this includes the staunch Islamists too. In fact, the wisdom behind the use of arms to fight a political struggle was being silently debated within Kashmir ever since 9/11 blurred the lines dividing terrorism and genuine political movements. The deteriorating situation inside Pakistan too had tilted the balance towards a peaceful struggle.
Thus when Kashmiris decided to come out to demand azadi recently, there were no militant attacks or suicide bombings. It was through massive unarmed processions where people shouted slogans and waved flags. And when the government tried to halt them, the anger was only manifested through stone pelting. Sensing the overwhelming public mood, the militant groups immediately declared a unilateral ceasefire, admitting the insignificance of the gun for an unarmed people’s movement.
This major shift has not been registered even as it has already formed a new discourse for Kashmir’s separatist struggle. New Delhi’s response was usual – it again used its iron fist, killing 38 unarmed protesters and injuring more than a thousand and enforcing a strict curfew with a hope that the people will be ultimately cowed down. The separatist leadership too was rounded up.
This only shows that New Delhi is misreading the script. This time the authorities are not faced with gun-wielding men but unarmed people. A heavy clampdown keeping the population indoors only puts a temporary lid on the seething anger. Instead of a military intervention, New Delhi should have immediately attempted sincere political and democratic means to engage Kashmir and calm the tempers.
New Delhi’s approach to handling Kashmir for past two decades has been simple and straight: militancy is the only problem and that can be sorted out by stringent military measures. Though there have been several rounds of negotiations with a faction of the separatist leadership too, New Delhi used the process more as a photo-op than a serious effort to address the demands of the people. There have been half a dozen occasions when separatist leadership joined a dialogue with New Delhi to resolve the Kashmir problem amicably – only to find the exercise nothing more than a surrender and thus futile.
The distrust towards New Delhi had reached such proportions that when moderate separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq decided to join talks with New Delhi, his uncle was murdered in Kashmir. Despite a serious threat to his life, he joined the talks directly with the prime minister of India. Again, the non-serious approach of New Delhi derailed the process, further eroding the credibility of talks with New Delhi in the eyes of Kashmiris. The public standing of separatist leaders who had agreed to talk to New Delhi also diminished substantially.
The recent protests by hundreds of thousands of unarmed people too don’t seem to have changed the mindset of New Delhi’s ruling elite. Instead of acknowledging the intensity of the uprising and the depth of the sentiment in Kashmir, New Delhi again refuses to face the reality and delays engaging in a sincere dialogue with the separatist leadership. The Kashmiris have overwhelmingly announced that peaceful processions and not guns are now their favoured means of protest. This needs to be encouraged and allowed to take firm roots because it could help to put an end to the bloodshed in Kashmir and make an amicable resolution of the problem easy. The phenomenon could also have a positive influence over a dozen such violent conflicts in other Muslim regions across the world. But if peaceful protests are crushed like armed movements, another wave of violence will take root, reinforcing the idea that the gun is mightier than a slogan.
Peace and Justice Post 
Ramsey Clark: ‘A Free People Will Not Permit Torture’
September 9, 2009By Ramsey Clark, Information Clearing House, September 9, 2009
Throughout history, torture has always been an instrument of tyranny. The very purpose of the Grand Inquisitor was to compel absolute obedience to authority. Torture was the weapon he used in the struggle to force freedom to submit to authority.
Fear is the principal element in both public acceptance of torture and individual submission to it. The frightened public is persuaded that only torture can force confessions essential to prevent catastrophic acts—terrorism in the present context. The frightened victim is persuaded torture will be unbearable, or be his death.
Franklin Roosevelt spoke truth when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Justice Black warned wisely, “We must not be afraid to be free,” dissenting in In re Anastaplo. Anastaplo was a law school classmate of mine who refused to take a non-Communist oath, a requirement for admission to the Illinois bar at the time. We have failed to follow this wisdom, a failure of faith urged by Lincoln at the then Cooper Institute: “Let us have faith that right makes might and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
At stake is our cultural insistence that America has faith in freedom, that America is, or aspires to be, the land of the free and the home of the brave. At risk is the image of America, which might become Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and rendition to torture chambers in client States.
Now we are confronted by the brutish and brazen mentality of Dick Cheney, only one of George W. Bush’s many vices. Having concealed truth by refusing to release records and after the destruction of evidence, Cheney proclaims, “I am very proud of what we did”—a war of aggression that has devastated and fragmented Iraq and Afghanistan, and created a danger to peace in Pakistan and beyond. The same wars that have left 5,000 U.S. soldiers dead and maybe 30,000 with impaired lives, spread corruption within the Bush administration, politics in prosecutors offices, the worst recession in 70 years caused by the failure to police his greedy friends and supporters, boasting of torture by any other name.
Cheney wants us to believe “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the phrase he prefers to torture, “were absolutely essential” in successfully stopping another terrorist attack on the U.S. after 9/11. This is utterly false, a matter of indifference to Cheney who may be getting desperate. These “enhanced interrogation techniques” were, however, torture as defined in Article 1 of the Convention Against Torture of 1984, an international treaty ratified by 184 nations, including the United States a decade late in 1994. The Convention, which is part of the supreme law of the land under the U.S. Constitution, recognizes “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and “that these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.”
Thus, the U.S. is treaty bound to prosecute all persons, high and low, who have authorized, condoned or committed torture if our word in the international community is to mean anything.
The Convention requires each signatory to ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law. It requires prosecution, or under specific conditions, extradition to another nation for prosecution of alleged torturers.
Former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan is only one of the key U.S. intelligence and investigative officials directly involved in the key interrogations who have publicly condemned the “enhanced interrogation techniques.” He has explained how the practice not only failed to obtain reliable or new information, but was also harmful. He concluded an op-ed article in the New York Times on Sept. 6, which stated that “the professionals in the field are relieved that an ineffective, unreliable, unnecessary and destructive program, one that may have given Al Qaeda a second wind and damaged our country’s reputation is finished.”
The struggle to prosecute torture by U.S. agents is related to the struggle over health care legislation and troop increases in Afghanistan. Real health care reform would end the theft of major national resources by the insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and the wealth seeking medical profession at the expense of the lives and health of the poor and middle class.
We should remember that a decade before he gave us “What is good for General Motors is good for the nation,” Charles E. Wilson, once President of General Motors, and later Secretary of Defense under President Eisenhower, wrote in the Army Ordinance Journal in 1944: “War has been inevitable in our human affairs as an evolutionary force … Let us make the three-way partnership (industry, government, army) permanent.” Notice what comes first for Wilson, whose credo was “Let us have faith that might makes right.”
President Obama faces all three of these challenges, torture in our name, health care and Afghanistan at once. If he fails to insist on full investigation of torture and prosecution of all persons found to have authorized, directed or committed it, including George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, he will lose all three, because his adversaries in each are the same.
We want to thank every member of the IndictBushNow movement for their work. The announcement that a Special Prosecutor has been appointed to investigate the crimes committed during the Bush administration is a critical step. It was the action taken by you and people all around the country that made this possible. Now we will build on this momentum. The voice of the people must and will be heard.
http://www.impeachbush.org
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