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| India-Pakistan |
| Kashmiri activist barred from leaving India to attend UN summit |
| 2016-09-17 |
| Police in Indian-controlled Kashmir have detained a prominent activist hours after he was blocked from boarding a flight to Geneva to attend a UN human rights council summit. Associates of Khurram Parvez said his arrest on Friday morning was unprecedented and underscored the desperation of Indian authorities over Kashmir, after more than two months of violent clashes between police and anti-government protesters. Parvez, 39, was taken into custody from his home in Srinagar about 12.30am on Friday. Zahir-ud-Din, a fellow activist and journalist, said a magistrate ordered administrative detention for at least five days over allegations of breaching the peace. A senior member of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), Parvez said he was turned away from Delhi airport on Wednesday evening after trying to board a flight to Switzerland, where he planned to submit a “civil society stakeholder’s report” to the UN human rights council. He said he was given no official reason for the travel ban but was told it was at the instruction of India’s intelligence bureau. Two colleagues, including the lawyer Parvez Imroz, were permitted to board the flight to Geneva. Imroz said in a statement that Parvez’s arrest represented “a real and imminent security threat” and was an attempt to intimidate the activist. Senior police officials in Kashmir could not be reached for comment. Parvez, who has not previously been arrested for his work, is a prominent critic of alleged abuses by Indian security forces in Kashmir, but was regularly invited to lead workshops on the conflict at public institutions, said Gul Mohammad, a professor of political science at Kashmir University. “He was never stopped [at the airport] before, nor stopped in doing his human rights work in Kashmir,” he said. “It is quite surprising [but] part of a larger clampdown on human rights activists.” The JKCCS was the first to draw attention to thousands of mass graves in remote parts of Kashmir and to demand that the government investigate them to make clear who the dead were and how they died. The group has also written scathing reports about brutality involving some of the hundreds of thousands of Indian troops in the region and highlighted widespread powers granted to troops that it alleges have led to a culture of impunity and widespread rights abuses. Internet and mobile phone use have been heavily restricted across Kashmir this week as the summer’s protests continued throughout Eid al-Adha, one of the two holiest events in the Islamic calendar. Two civilians were killed on the first day of the festival, and mosques across the region were shut. The latest wave of unrest was triggered by the death of Burhan Wani, a separatist militant who was cornered by Indian security officials in the remote area of Kokernang and shot in early July. Wani, thought to be have been aged 21, had garnered a strong following on social media, but analysts say the 68 days of protests that followed his funeral also reflect deeper frustration with stalled efforts to extend the region’s autonomy from Delhi. JKCCS estimates more than 1,000 protesters have been detained over the past nine weeks. A Kashmiri engineer working in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh was charged with sedition in August for allegedly sharing or liking a Facebook post calling for the Indian government to withdraw from the former princely state. |
| Posted by:Steve White |