A Murder in Kashmir

...Not that this dims their ardor: When JKLF chairman Yasin Malik warns that "either Kashmir will be free or Kashmir will be a graveyard," he appears to mean it...

...Jalil Andrabi was the fourth human rights activist killed in Kashmir since 1992...

...ethnicity, religion, language, even alphabet, continue to separate the two sides...

...Indeed, justice will probably never be done...

...They tell me that one year later nobody has been charged with his murder...

...Are they heard...

...The movement remained largely nonviolent until the late 1980s...

...Tourists no longer laze on the verandahs of the wooden boathouses, and the long graceful boats bob sadly empty along the lakeside boulevard...

...It was near one such bunker on March 8 of last year that Jalil Andrabi was apprehended by soldiers on his way home from the Bar Association, of which he was president...

...Moreover, it sparked a virtual civil war that has claimed some 20,000 lives so far...

...Arshed Andrabi, Jalil's brother, recalled the euphoria surrounding the boycott: "We thought, back in 1989, if Lithuania can secede from the Soviet Union, why cannot Kashmir secede from India...

...Rifat's girlish features notwithstanding, she is a grown-up woman who understands that the world needs to know about the violence in Kashmir, and that her late husband could have been the messenger...

...I had been looking forward to meeting Jalil Andrabi, the Kashmiri human rights lawyer...

...She was sure that if I sent the papers out, "the world will react...

...The conflict over Kashmir goes back half a century...

...It is marked only by a bare slate, with a glued-on piece of paper bearing his name in Arabic script...

...In the most recent kidnapping, over a year ago, six foreign tourists were seized...

...I sent them out...

...He was never seen alive again...

...When she handed me the suitcase Jalil had intended to take to Europe, her eyes grew misty: Jalil was abducted and killed a week before a planned trip to Geneva, where he was due to address the UN Human Rights Commission and testify about rights abuses in Kashmir...

...Once over lunch she tried teaching me to eat with my fingers by pushing the food from my palm with my thumb...

...and the girls, Zenab (age four) and Enika (age three), who still believe Daddy will return...

...If not for the pheran and the Himalayas, I'd think we were in 1970s Poland...

...I have kept in touch with Andrabi's family (his brother studies law at Columbia University...

...I kept making a clumsy fool of myself, which brought a smile to her sad, beautiful face...

...After the 1987 state legislative elections were rigged to prevent a Muslim United Front victory, militant separatists stepped up their activity...

...The meeting concluded with vague promises of follow-up talks between the Prime Ministers of the two countries...

...Andrabi's widow, Rifat, suspects it was these troops who dragged her husband off and killed him a few days later...

...He is, however, much more practical with regard to the Andrabi case...

...One escaped, one was decapitated, and the fate of the other four is unknown...

...The 58-year-old Persian language scholar, wrapped in a woolen cape called upheran, puffed on a cigarette as he told me why he had been jailed for two-and-a-half years...

...the war for freedom is yet to be won...

...Plan ? also fell through...

...I met the couple's three children: the seven-year-old son, Jehanzib, who knows his father was killed for what he stood for...

...Last month the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan met for exploratory talks on Kashmir—the first high-level discussions between the neighboring nations in three years...

...In central Srinagar the bunkers are ubiquitous...

...Over there, too fresh to have the proper green-painted stone, is the grave of Jalil Andrabi...

...It is in Indian Kashmir that the Muslim-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) came into being in 1964...

...Although New Delhi gave in by releasing five detained JKLF members, many Kashmiris believe that the action cost them the sympathy of the international community...

...The snowcapped Himalayas provide a gorgeous backdrop for the ugly bunkers set up by the Army in Srinagar, the capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir...

...then, says Abdul Ghani Bat, spokesman for the All Parties Freedom Conference (an umbrella organization for opposition groups), "the roar of the guns was provoked by the Indians, because civilized talks with them did not bring any results...

...Pakistan and India may have begun talking about talking about Kashmir, but until some agreement is reached, the death of this dedicated human rights lawyer will remain futile...

...But the discovery on March 27, 1996, of Jalil's corpse floating in a burlap bag in the Jhelum River, a bullet in his head and his eyes gouged out, provoked a major uproar...

...Shakel Bakshi, the JKLF's 35-year-old secretary general (short hair, long beard —your muj ahedin archetype) condemned taking tourists as hostages...

...Upon partition of British India in 1947, India and Pakistan each claimed the territory, and they have fought two wars and countless skirmishes over it since...

...During subsequent visits she grew more spirited, preparing packages of Jalil's unfinished legal cases for me to deliver to the UN, Amnesty International, Asia Watch, and the Human Rights Office in Delhi...

...There have been no arrests...

...Judge Baha-ud-din-Farooqi, author of several books on the legal case for Kashmiri independence, is twice as old as Bakshi, but equally credulous when it comes to the prospects for international help: "They gave us their word of honor, so I appeal to the morality of the world...

...Later she told me that her marriage had been prearranged according to local tradition, but that she had known Jalil for five years prior to their wedding because they were colleagues at the law faculty...

...Instead I met his widow...

...But when I asked about the '89 kidnapping, he gave a broad, innocent smile: "We need to be heard, you see...

...And tell me, the pygmy judges who owe their positions to the state, what can they do...

...They are our guests," he said...

...Rifat was probably a very good wife to Jalil—she is certainly an exemplary widow, sparing no effort to honor her husband's memory...

...Khakipants and underwear festoon the balconies of barricaded hotels boasting views of picturesque Dal Lake...

...The first act of militancy that put Kashmir in the world's headlines was the JKLF's December 1989 kidnapping of the Indian Home Minister's daughter...

...Sandbagged fortresses covered with nets (for grenades to bounce off) stand at every crossroads, sometimes taking up the entire width of the street...

...A general strike completely shut down commercial activity...

...The young militants of the JKLF are thus fighting for the fulfillment of a promise made before they were born...

...They said I was an intellectual, and therefore a dangerous person able to convince others...

...Rifat told me all this when I stopped in to see her in the neighborhood that now unofficially bears the name of her late husband...

...Like so many other UN resolutions, it has remained a dead letter...

...In 1993, a division known as the Rashtriya Rifles was set up to quell the Kashmiri unrest, and they remain the main enforcers of the catchand-kill campaign against Muslim insurgents...

...The fact that both parties now have access to nuclear weapons raises the stakes dangerously...

...In the "Martyrs' Graveyard," located at the base of the 16th-century Haru Parbal fortress, a notice reads, "Do not shun the gun my dear younger ones...

...After a few days in Srinagar, I learned to distinguish the various (and omnipresent) security forces by their uniforms and insignia—the Border Security Force, the Special Task Force, the Central Reserve Police Force...

...In November of 1989—a year when everything seemed possible from Tiananmen to Timisoara —the whole state boycotted India's national parliamentary elections...

...Now President Clinton knows about our cause and he will act, because America is the champion of freedom and will surely not abandon us...

...Today, the opposition does not demand secession outright, but calls instead for the long-overdue UN referendum...

...A 1948 United Nations resolution called for a referendum to determine whether the territory would come under Pakistani, Indian or independent sovereignty...

...Today there are de facto two states: Pakistani-controlled Azad (Free) Kashmir and the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir...

...Anna Husarska, a longtime NL contributor, is apolitical analyst for the London-based International Crisis Group...

...Meanwhile, the turmoil that claimed Andrabi's life remains far from settled...

...When I first came to see her, she seemed a little surprised and timid...

...His funeral turned into a huge demonstration in spite of a law forbidding crowds of five or more from assembling...

...How many times did I hear the same sentence repeated in the Bosnian language...

...Nothing will come of the inquiry," he insisted...

...They don't care about legality...

...Yes, Kashmir is in the headlines...

...Little did I know that beautiful Kashmir would turn out to be the most repressive place I'd ever seen, where even gathering testimony on this brutal crime was asking for trouble...

...I had read, of course, about the Indian Army's virtual occupation of Kashmir, but before arriving last year I had imagined I would at least be able to investigate Andrabi's murder...

...Desperate to solve the problem of housing its troops stationed in the Kashmir Valley (a few hundred thousand by unofficial estimates), the Army has turned all tourist and recreational facilities—cinemas, stadiums, even water-skiing resorts—into barracks and centers for interrogation and torture...