A human rights group in occupied Kashmir urged authorities on Wednesday to launch a probe into 2,700 unmarked graves of people believed to have died as a result of the region's revolt against Indian rule. The International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice (IPT) has in the past three years documented the unidentified bodies buried in villages near Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
The independent occupied Srinagar-based group, which calculates about 8,000 people have gone missing in the 20-year militant insurgency, released a report entitled "Buried Evidence" detailing the "unknown, unmarked, and mass graves" that contain at least 2,900 bodies.
About 180 graves held two or more bodies, said the report, which surveyed 55 villages through interviews with gravediggers, graveyard managers and residents, and first information reports filed by the police. "These graves include bodies of extra-judicial, summary, and arbitrary executions, as well as massacres committed by the Indian military and paramilitary forces," the IPT said.
"The Government of India and the Government of Jammu and Kashmir must commit to, and enable, independent and transparent investigations into unknown, unmarked and mass graves," it urged. "There is bound to be a reasonable correlation between these graves and the people who have disappeared," said IPT convenor Angana Chatterji, an Indian professor who teaches anthropology in the United States.
"India and the international community should not ignore this report," she said as it was unveiled in the presence of dozens of relatives of those missing. A police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said most of the bodies were likely those of militants killed in fighting with Indian occupation forces. Police said it was not possible to identify every militant killed during gunbattles in Indian occupied Kashmir.
The IPT report said that most of the more than 8,000 people who have gone missing in the region disappeared after their arrest by Indian occupation security personnel. The report also examined the deaths of 50 people labelled as militants by the Indian authorities and killed during shoot-outs with security forces, and concluded 41 were civilians.