Missing in the Valley

We were told that a CRPF vehicle picked him up. We looked everywhere, says Suraya. Her father,Abdul Aziz Bhat,made it his lifes mission to trace his grandson. Bhat died eight years ago. Ghulam too stopped working to look for his son.

Once the years started passing by and my father died,I started feeling numb with this separation and uncertainty, says Suraya.

Last year marked 20 years of Javaids disappearance and his parents had started to accept the verdict of fate when there was a knock at their door. I was home alone. I have two daughters and a son who were born after Javaid. They were out so was their father, remembers Suraya. It was March 2,2010. A lot of people had gathered outside our house. And there was this man who told me he was my son Javaid. He was brought to our house by a driver, she says. I couldnt believe my eyes. I took him in but something inside me told me he was not my missing son.

He wasnt. The man was an imposter whose real name was Abdul Majid. He was from a village in Pattan and his parents had asked him to leave home because of his wayward ways. Married with children,Majid had been wandering in a bus stand in Srinagar where he met a driver from Ladoora who ostensibly took him to be Surayas missing son and brought him home.

We dont believe the drivers story either. We have no doubt it was a conspiracy, says Surayas daughter Shazia. I didnt believe his imposters story. But there was such public pressurepeople were celebrating outside our home.

Majid stayed at their house for the night. I looked at him again and again. He wouldnt call me mother. He would only say I am your son. He didnt know that you cant fool a mother for long, says Suraya.

Shazia recalls her mother would insist they do a test DNA profiling of him before accepting him as Javaid. My maternal uncle too believed he was genuine but when we asked him how and where he had spent all these years,he had no convincing answer. We had also informed the police who asked us to bring him to the police station every day for investigation.

After a few days,Majid broke down and admitted his real identity. The police arrested him for cheating but he had opened the familys old wounds once again. He turned our world upside down, says Suraya.

While her health doesnt allow Suraya to follow the case,her husband has lost hope. But 23-year-old Shazia,who takes tailoring classes for girls,has joined the campaign initiated by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons to find her brother. I dont want to give up hope. My mother is unwell,she cant go to Srinagar to join the protests. But I will. I will search for him till I am alive.

Mohammad Ashraf amp; Shawkat Ahmad
Missing since 2003

Their only bond was a question: where is my son? On June 28,2003,two fathers who were waiting for their turn to meet a senior police officer in Srinagar,struck up a conversation and found out how similar their stories were.

Abdul Rehman Paul and Noor Mohammad Bhat were searching for their sons who had disappeared after being picked up by security forces. Paul and Bhat became friends in grief and soon got together to search for their sons.

In June 2003,a police party accompanied by a surrendered militant had come looking for Bhats son Mohammad Ashraf,a stringer for a Srinagar daily,to their home in Pattan north Kashmir. Ashraf was not home and they asked the family to bring him to Srinagar. When he returned home,his mother took him to the police in Srinagar. The police assured her they would let Ashraf off in a few hours. That was on June 21,2003. He never returned.

Meanwhile in Srinagar city,a tragedy was unfolding in Pauls family as well. His son,Shawkat Ahmad,had left for college and was picked up near Tulsibagh neighbourhood and never returned.

In their search for their sons over the last few years,the paths of Paul and Bhat crossed frequently. They became friends and started making their rounds of police and security force camps together.

In 2004,Bhats son Sharief got married to Pauls daughter Maryam. The friends in grief were now relatives. Though their struggle to find their sons continues,now they have another bond: their five-year-old granddaughter Tayyaba.

Fayaz Ahmad
Missing since 1997

In a 45-page booklet,Custodial Disappearance and an Unconcerned Government,Abdul Rasheed Beig,a retired excise inspector,has chronicled his search for his missing son.

On September 9,1997,Beigs 28-year-old son Fayaz Ahmad was picked up by Senior Superintendent of Police Hansraj Parihar while he was SP,Awantipora from Kashmir University where he worked as a photographer in the Central Asian Studies department.

Parihar accepted that he had picked up my son. I kept visiting his office8230;He kept our hope alive saying Fayaz will be released soon. After two years,Beig says,he approached the State Human Rights Commission.

In April 2000,they issued an order asking the government to file a case of abduction and murder against Parihar and his team. Nothing happened. Then I approached the High Court. It upheld the panels order on October,9,2003. Still nothing happened.

Parihar was arrested in 2007 along with his deputy and 11 other policemen after a police probe indicted him in a series of fake encounters in Ganderbal. Since the police investigators limited their probe to the Ganderbal fake encounters,Fayazs whereabouts remain a mystery.

Maqsood Ahmad Bader
Missing since 2007

When 24-year-old Maqsood Ahmad Bader went missing,his parents didnt rely only on the police to look for him. They turned to saints for a clue about their missing son.

Maqsood,who is deaf and partially blind,left his rented house in Rajbagh in Srinagar on May 9,2007 for his village Zalangam in Kokernag. But he didnt board the bus to Kokernag,instead he took the bus to Kulgam to meet his aunt and left for his village the next morning. He never reached home.

The first hurdle the family faced in the search for their son came early. The police in Srinagar asked them to file an FIR at Kokernag but the Kokernag police asked them to file it in Kulgam. The police in Kulgam too refused to file the FIR. It took the family six days before the Rajbagh police station in Srinagar agreed to file an FIR. Maqsoods father Bader has now lost all hope and has turned to saints instead,seeking divine help to trace his missing son. His prayers are yet to be answered.

Other parts of the missing story
The lawyer
Human rights lawyer Parvez Imroz brought the parents of the missing together

In April 1994,a man with a Kalashnikov rifle tried to stop the car of Parvez Imroz,then a lawyer practising in the Jammu and Kashmir High Court. When Imroz didnt stop,the gunman fired at his car. A single bullet punctured his left lung. Seventeen years later,this Srinagar-based human rights campaigner says it is his commitment to a cause that keeps him going.

Every morning,Imroz walks into the office of the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Societieshe is one of the founding members and meets the families of missing people and leads a team to document human rights abuses in the region.

A graduate with a law degree from Aligarh Muslim University,his first brush with activism was in 1982 when he filed a PIL against trafficking of women from Bengal to Kashmir. For many years,he remained the Kashmir convener of Peoples Union for Civil Liberties. From 1990,as Kashmirs story changed,so did Imrozs. There were families in every part of Jammu and Kashmir whose members disappeared. It was a strange phenomenon thenboys and young men were picked up by the police,CRPF,BSF and the Army. No one ever heard of them, he says.

As the families of the disappeared struggled to find their relatives,Imroz guided them to form an association. He introduced the idea of a collective struggle, says Khurram Parvez,Imrozs long-time colleague and a human rights activist.

Imroz,along with others whose relatives had gone missing,formed the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons APDP in 1994. Imroz became the Patron of the Association. Imroz,whose group first reported the existence of mass and unmarked graves in Kashmir Valley,said it all began in 2005 when a massive earthquake struck the region.

When the earthquake came,north Kashmir suffered heavily. They kept the area accessible for relief and we went there with a relief convoy. It was during this time that we came to know through locals that there are lots of places in the area where the Army and police had killed boys and buried them, he says. In 2008,the APDP came up with a report called Buried Evidence.

Soon,the International Peoples Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir ordered a rigorous three-year investigation to track the mass graves in the region. Whenever there are disappearances,there are mass graves, he says.

The mother
Parveena Ahangar,whose son is missing,helped found the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons

It was in the first year of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir that a teenage boy was woken up in Srinagars Batamaloo neighbourhood. Sixteen-year-old Javaid Ahmad Ahangar,a commerce student,was staying at his uncles place for the night when he was picked up by security forces and bundled into a vehicle.

It was a case of mistaken identity, says his mother Parveena Ahangar. According to her,the security forces had come to arrest a JKLF militant who was in the neighbourhood but instead picked up her son.

Every month,Parveena sits in a park in Srinagar with others like her whose relatives are missing. Shes more than a mothershes also the first president of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons. When in 2005,Ahangar laid the foundation of the first memorial for Kashmirs missing,she made clear what the fight was all about. We shall never allow the past to be forgotten. We shall never allow this crime to happen to our future generations.

The Chronicler
Zaheer-ud-Din was the first to chronicle the tragedy of the Valleys missing

In the early 90s,when militancy was at its peak,a young man left his dream of becoming a lawyer to join Kashmir Universitys Journalism department. Zaheer-ud-Dins aim was to chronicle the tragedy that was unfolding around him. A native of Srinagars Magarmal Bagh,Zaheer came from an elite Kashmiri family.

I had heard about young men who disappeared. It was tragic for the families. There was no closure, says Zaheer. With donations from friends,he started gathering stories of the missing from across Kashmir. In 1996,I published the first edition of Did they vanish into thin air?,the story of 55 cases of enforced disappearance, he says. In 2003,he published the second edition of his book and is now working on a third edition. Zaheer is also involved with the International Peoples Tribunal on Peace and Justice in Kashmir,whose three-year long research led to the unearthing of unmarked graves in Kashmir.

The Gravedigger
The testimony of Ata Mohammad Khan,a gravedigger in Uri,is pivotal to the probe into unmarked graves

Ata Mohammad Khan has buried 236 people in rows of unmarked graves at Bimbyar,Uri,in north Kashmir. The police would get the bodies and he would dig graves for them. Beyond this,Khan knew little. There were many of them, recalls Khan. The faces of some had been disfigured beyond recognition.

For the first time in Jammu and Kashmir,an official inquiry has said that it is beyond doubt that there are scores of unidentified bodies in unmarked graves in the Valleyas many as 2,156 bodies buried at 38 sites since militancy began in 1990.

The first time Khan buried an unidentified body was years ago when a policeman in civvies approached him. I was working in the fields when he called me and said there is a body of a Muslim youth that needs to be buried, Khan says. I reluctantly agreed and this is how I began my work.

When bodies began to arrive from different parts of the Valley and the police told him they were of youths killed in anti-militancy operations,he feared he would find the body of his nephew who had joined militancy and gone underground. He was my dead sisters only child. I brought him up till he was 16. Then his father took him back. Later,he went missing and was believed to have gone across the border for arms training, Khan says.

The body never arrived. Then one day,I missed the burial and that day,eight bodies arrived. Someone told me my nephew was among them.

Khan didnt only bury the bodies. He also had to exhume some of them. I disinterred some of the bodies when their parents arrived with orders from the district magistrate, Khan says.

The work has taken its toll on Khan but he says these days he doesnt have much work. Bodies stopped coming after everybody came to know about the graveyard. Maybe some new graveyards have come up in other parts of the Valley. Who knows?