Kashmiris Caught in Cross-Fire

Like most of Kashmir’s victims, Halima Doie lost her life in a fight she didn’t want and was powerless to stop.

An illiterate Muslim woman born into the once nomadic Gujjar tribe, she and her family lived, or died, at the mercy of the men with guns.

It didn’t matter what side the men were on: Separatist Muslim rebels who roam the rugged canyon in this disputed land were as much a danger to the Doies as their Hindu neighbors.

The Hindus who live nearby, farmers mostly, didn’t always have guns. Then police armed them with bolt-action rifles to give them a fighting chance against the rebels’ Kalashnikovs, and they formed civilian militias.

All Halima Doie had to defend her honor, and her children, was a small ax.

When the Hindu militia members turned their sights on her, she tried to hide behind a rough-hewn wooden door, but it wasn’t strong enough to stop drunken men bent on rape. Resisting only made them more angry, and their punishment was ruthless.

They opened fire with the rifles issued for self-defense, pausing to pull back the bolt and reload each new round into the chamber, until they had killed Doie, her sister-in-law and three of their children.

Fears that a war between India and Pakistan could go nuclear have brought a new sense of urgency to diplomatic efforts to resolve competing claims over divided Kashmir. But after 13 years of insurgency by the guerrillas in Kashmir, who are battling for an independent state or union with mostly Muslim Pakistan, the fight over the Himalayan territory has become one of the world’s most entrenched disputes.

By arming thousands of Hindu civilians in village militias, Indian authorities have only deepened the religious divide in a territory once known as a paradise of tolerance.

There is mounting evidence that some of the militias are using their power to intimidate unarmed Muslim civilians, drive them from their homes and, in at least three reported cases, kill those who resist, said Tapan Bose, secretary-general of the South Asia Forum for Human Rights.

In some villages, the militias, known as village defense committees, are commanded by outsiders who belong to the Hindu extremist movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, Bose said. He suspects that they are using the defense committees to push a radical political agenda, just as Muslim extremists are using the Kashmir issue to advance their jihad, or holy war.

Police have been giving guns to the civilian militias, usually .303 rifles that are throwbacks to British colonial rule, since 1996. Almost all of the weapons have gone to Hindus. Muslims very rarely join the civilian militias, primarily because they don’t want to be seen supporting state authority, Bose said.

“What do we need guns for?” asked Hajra Paswal Doie, the matriarch of the ruined family. “If we take their weapons, we are not secure. The village defense committee members can kill us and then say we were killed ‘by our own people.’ ”

By that, she meant the Muslim guerrillas, who were the first to harm her family, in May 2001.

At least four rebels armed with assault rifles came to the Doies’ village of Teeno, a scattering of mud-brick homes built on a steep canyon wall, in search of a suspected informant.

Only they knew what, if any, evidence there was against Ibrahim Doie, Hajra’s son.

He was working in the fields, tiny plots with just enough soil amid the mountain rocks and boulders for a few rows of corn, she said. The flash of a memory brought tears streaming down her weathered cheeks.

She paused to dry them with the edge of her head scarf.

“They locked all the women and children in the house and then tied his hands behind his back,” she said, and then the words were too hard to say. That was the last she saw of her eldest son, the only defender the family had.

After the rebels targeted Ibrahim Doie, the local Hindu village defense committee went after his widow, Beeran. A group of about 10 armed men, led by two commanders, visited the house almost daily, Hajra Doie said.

“These people used to come to our village, take food and milk--anything we had and then leave,” she said. “It was all by force.”

Sometimes the militia members tried to justify the visits as a search for the enemy, she said.

“They asked us where the militants are,” Hajra Doie said. “We told them: ‘How do we know? For us, you are the militants.’ ”

After constant harassment, her daughter-in-law Beeran consented to an affair with one of the men. On the night of May 8, about a year after the rebels led Beeran Doie’s husband away, the Hindu men turned their sights on her sister-in-law, Halima.

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The only surviving witnesses to what happened that night are Hajra Doie’s grandchildren, who are too young and traumatized to recall many details. But one thing is clear, Hajra Doie said: When the men demanded sex, Halima kept refusing and tried to fend them off by bolting the door.

Hajra Doie was away from the small house that night and didn’t return until hours after the militia commanders had gone berserk, and then gone home.

“I went into the house and saw the bodies in a pool of blood,” she said. “Everybody was lying on a single bed, including the wounded children.

“When I saw Arshan, she started crying and said: ‘My mother was killed by the security forces. My brother was killed by the security forces. Everybody was killed by the security forces.’ ”

The five victims were Halima Doie and her sons Salim, 5, and Shabir, 3, as well as Beeran, and her son Jaffar Hussain, 12. The women left three orphans: Jameela, 8 months, Gulsham, 2, and Arshan, 5, who has a thick scar where a bullet grazed her left forehead.

Police in Doda, the district’s administrative center, confirmed that two men, Rajinder Singh, 20, and Subash Chander, 22, have been charged with the murders and said they are in jail awaiting trial. Both men are commanders.

The men confessed to the murders but said they only started shooting after Halima Doie refused to the open the door and then swung an ax at them when they broke through, said a senior police officer in Doda.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not get approval from superiors to talk to a reporter. He also insisted that the killings were an isolated incident, not evidence that civilian militias might be out of control.

“It was not a police atrocity because it was not an organized crime,” he said. “The only organized crimes here are carried out by the militants.”

In the six years since Indian authorities have been arming civilians in the village defense committees, most have been set up in Jammu province, where slightly more than half the population is Hindu, according to India’s government.

The main concentration of defense committees is in the region around Doda, one of Jammu’s six districts and a key battleground between the Indian security forces and at least eight separatist armies.

India’s government has deployed several hundred thousand troops and paramilitary police to fight an estimated 3,500 guerrillas throughout Jammu and Kashmir state. New Delhi claims that they are still being reinforced by infiltrators from the roughly one-third of the Himalayan territory under Pakistan’s control.

About 10,000 civilian defense committee members have been armed in Doda district alone, the overwhelming majority of whom are Hindus, the police official said. He said that Hindus have received most of the guns distributed to civilian militias because Muslims were too slow to volunteer.

“The only reason is that when we constituted the VDCs, they didn’t come forward,” he said of Muslims. “Now that we have exhausted the weapons, they are coming to us, and we simply don’t have any more to give them.”

Each village defense committee has up to a dozen members, including as many as three commanders, low-ranking deputies who receive little training or pay. Each commander receives an honorarium of just $31 a month, which he is supposed to share with the civilian volunteers.

To discourage any trigger-happy villagers, police ration their bullets, giving out 50 each. The militias are supposed to file a report any time they fire, and requisitions for new ammunition must be approved by the district police commander. In Doda, village defense committees ask for more bullets almost every day, the police official said.

Kahn Chand Sharma, a retired Hindu government worker, belongs to the defense committee in the village of Barshalla. Sharma, 65, lost a brother, a grandson and three nephews in a massacre by guerrillas in 1996, and said he will fight with whatever he has if terrorists strike again.

Sharma complained that his ration of bullets is running low.

“Even the [militia] members who have exhausted their ammunition aren’t getting more from the police,” he complained.

“The government is not helping the village defense committees at all. If we fire a single bullet, we’re interrogated.”

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After the slayings of the Doies, the eight surviving members of the family moved up the mountainside, to the village of Soldha, where they live in a cowshed with two rooms that are always dark.

The family’s survival now depends on Hajra Doie, a weak, barefoot woman who doesn’t know her own age. Her necklace provides a hint. One of the medallions is a silver coin, an inheritance from her father: “George V King Emperor,” it says on the front. “One rupee India 1916,” read the words on the back.

Guessing at her age again, Hajra Doie said she remembered her father bringing her to this once peaceful place as a little girl, just before what she called “the Big War.”

That was in 1947, when the British agreed to Muslim demands for a separate state and carved Pakistan out of India, granted both independence and left them to sort out the status of the princely Himalayan kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir.

The two countries immediately went to war over the territory, and the conflict continues, with families like the Doies caught in the cross-fire.