The end of February is here, which means it's time for the UN Security Council to renew the mandate of the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste. Based on the Secretary-General's latest report, released on 18 February, it seems very much like business as usual. The report clings to the fiction that the UN is in charge of policing the half-island state. The reality is a lot murkier. A formal handover of 'executive policing responsibilities' is progressing on a district-by-district basis, but response to recent events resembles a collective abdication of responsibility.
In December, shots fired into the air by the Timorese police (PNTL) outside a late-night party led to the death of a popular musician. The PNTL General Commander soon ordered his officers in Dili to 'step back' and give the UN police the lead.
As Dili residents began to complain about the sudden invisibility of their own police, the Timorese district commander then unilaterally ordered his officers to cease operations altogether. He said the UN police were ineffective, using their guns 'just for show', citing the injury of his officers in a confused joint response to fighting in one of the city's markets.
He also said the PNTL wasn't learning anything from its UN counterparts. After all, the commander asked, isn't the UN technically responsible for security? It was a daring rebuke to the logic of the UN's district-by-district handover. Newspapers quickly filled with calls for the return of the PNTL, seen as faster to respond and less hesitant to bring out its guns. PNTL has since returned to the streets, but the incident hurt the image of the UN police and further weakened the 'democratic policing principles' they are here to promote.
Neither the PNTL senior command nor the Government publicly spoke out against the district commander's move. The General Commander was busy leading a dubious 'mega-operation' against rumoured 'ninja' activity in the border districts — without any UN involvement, even though the international force retains executive authority in the area. (One leading NGO has also raised concerns over possible human rights violations.)
The Secretary-General's report is short on prescriptions to cure the ills of the Timorese police, but provides incisive diagnosis of its problems. Dili is back to 'apparent normalcy' since the 2006 crisis, but it argues the PNTL is not ready to give up UN support. The service remains weak in operational, administrative and management capacity, and lacks basic equipment. There are few clear, enforced policies on fundamentals such as the use of force. There is ample evidence of misconduct with no effective disciplinary mechanism. Police frequently have little understanding of the country's evolving criminal legislation.
Much work thus remains to be done, but the report also acknowledges the 'limited capacity of UNMIT police to contribute to the development of the PNTL', noting consistent difficulties in attracting staff with the right skills. The Secretary-General recommends a limited reduction in police presence by mid-2011. But the question is not how many police will be here but what they will be doing. Much remains to be defined regarding a 'reconfiguration' of roles as the handover proceeds.
Given this inability of UN police to influence outcomes, Crisis Group recommended in December that the UN hand over formal control sooner rather than later. This would bring the mission's mandate into line with the reality of policing in the country and hopefully prompt the Government, and the police, to take further steps toward solving problems only they can fix.
Future support from either the UN, Australia, Portugal, or even Indonesia will only work if the Government can be clear about its needs. It requires a comprehensive plan for the force's future development — a full independent assessment could be a first step. In the meantime, the Government, PNTL and UNMIT need to put aside public rancour and find common ground on 'reconfiguring' the role of the UN police if they are to remain an active player rather than a mere spectator in building the police in Timor-Leste.
The United Nations should hand over formal control of the Timor-Lestepolice as soon as possible. A protracted process that began in May has taken a bureaucratic approach to assessing whether they are ready to take charge, but the reality on the ground is that the Timorese police have long operated under their own command. Without an agreed plan for reforming the country’s police after the 2006 crisis, the UN and the government have made a poor team for institutional development. A longer handover may further damage relations between the UN’s third-largest policing mission and the Timor-Leste government, which has refused to act as a full partner in implementing reforms. The UN has a continued role to play in providing an advisory presence in support of police operations. For this to work, the government must engage with the UN mission and agree upon the shape of this partnership. To make any new mandate a success, they need to use the remaining months before the current one expires in February 2010 to hammer out a detailed framework for future cooperation with the police under local command.
Timor-Leste still needs the UN and stepping back is not the same as leaving too early. There is domestic political support for a continuing albeit reduced police contingent, at least until the planned 2012 national elections. A sizeable international deployment can no longer be left to operate without a clear consensus on the task at hand. Any new mandate should be limited, specific and agreed. The UN can provide units to underwrite security and support the Timorese police in technical areas such as investigations, prosecutions and training. These would best be identified by a comprehensive independent review of police capacity, and matched with key bilateral contributions, including from Australia and Portugal. In return, the Timorese should acknowledge the need to improve oversight and accountability mechanisms. The UN and its agencies must continue to help build up these structures and in the interim monitor human rights.
The UN took a technocratic approach to the highly politicised task of police reform. Sent in to restore order after an uprising in 2006, the UN police helped shore up stability in the country but then fell short when they tried to reform the institution or improve oversight. They are not set up to foster such long-term change and were never given the tools to do so. The Timorese police were divided and mismanaged at the top; the UN misplaced its emphasis on providing hundreds of uniformed officers to local stations across the country. It neglected the role played by the civilian leadership in the 2006 crisis and the need to revamp the ministry overseeing the police as part of a lasting solution. The mismatching of people to jobs, short rotations as well as the lack of familiarity with local conditions and languages clipped the ability of international police to be good teachers and mentors. Without the power to dismiss or discipline officers, the mission could not improve accountability. The government declined to pass laws in support of the UN role, sending a defiant message of non-cooperation down through police ranks.
In the absence of a joint strategy, structural reform has been limited. The government appointed a commander from outside the police ranks, compromising efforts to professionalise the service. It has promoted a paramilitary style of policing, further blurring the lines between the military and police. The skewed attention to highly armed special units will not improve access to justice, and the ambiguity it creates risks planting the seeds of future conflict with the army. Timorese leaders are attuned more than any outsider to the deadly consequences of institutional failure. To avoid this, Prime MinisterXanana Gusmão, an independence hero, now heads a joint defence and security ministry. Political quick fixes based on personalities may keep the police and the army apart in the short term, but they add little to more lasting solutions that respect for rule of law might provide.
For the international community, this struggle over command of the police between the UN and one of its member states contains many lessons. The slow drawdown of UN police in Timor-Leste is not the prudent exit strategy it may appear. The mission has been neither a success nor failure. Unable to muster consensus on a long-term police development strategy, it leaves behind a weak national police institution. The mission’s most enduring legacy might be in the lessons it can teach the Security Council not to over-stretch its mandates. The UN should think carefully about stepping in and taking control of a local police service, particularly, as in the case of Timor-Leste, when large parts of it remain functioning. Complex reforms of state institutions cannot be done without the political consent of those directly involved.
RECOMMENDATIONS
To the Government of Timor-Leste:
1. Take steps to support the rapid resolution of as many pending police certification cases as possible, including passing any necessary legislation, and ensure that those with outstanding or future criminal convictions are removed from the Polícia Nacional de Timor-Leste (PNTL).
2. Develop a strong, independent oversight capacity for the police, either through overhauling the police’s internal disciplinary functions by making its operations fully transparent and public or, if necessary, developing a separate police ombudsman body.
3. Implement the proposed new police rank structure to improve professionalisation and decrease potential for political manipulation of the police service.
4. Avoid the militarisation of policing and clearly demarcate in law and policy the role of the police and army as well as the conditions and procedures by which soldiers can aid civilian authorities in internal security or other situations.
5. Ensure that executive policing responsibilities are handed over to the Timorese police as soon as possible, spelling out the steps to hand back formal authority to the PNTL, maintaining a limited advisory and support presence for the UN police in operational areas identified as priorities by the government.
6. Reorient future mission mandates towards maintaining a limited advisory presence for the UN police in those operational areas identified by the government and bolstering security in advance of the next elections in 2012, and clarify the conditions necessary before a future full withdrawal of the international policing contingent.
7. Focus the future mission, bilateral efforts and government programs on solving existing training needs, equipment shortfalls, and fixing administrative processes identified in the joint assessments from the national to sub-district level.
8. Commit to a fully independent review of policing capacity in Timor-Leste to be performed before the final withdrawal of the UN police contingent.
To the UN Security Council:
9. Set realistic goals for a future mandate extension for UNMIT and recognise the limited capacity of UN police to play an ongoing development role with their Timorese counterparts.
To Bilateral Donors, including Australia and Portugal:
10. Support an independent review of policing capacity commissioned by the Government of Timor-Leste and UNMIT, and commit to linking future development efforts to needs identified in the review under a common framework.
11. Insist on a long-term capacity-building strategy centred on building institutional values of rule of law, professionalism and human rights.
To the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations:
12. Conduct a thorough lessons learned exercise on UNMIT’s executive policing mandate, UN police’s development role, and the incomplete security sector review in order to inform future missions.
KILLEEN, Tex. — The policeofficer who brought down a gunman after he went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base was on the way to have her car repaired when she heard a report over a police radio that someone was shooting people in a center where soldiers are processed before they are deployed abroad, authorities said on Friday.
As she pulled up to the center, the officer, Kimberly Munley, spotted the gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, brandishing a pistol and chasing a wounded soldier outside the building, said Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the base.
Sergeant Munley bolted from her car and shot at Major Hasan. He turned toward her and began to fire. She ran toward him, continuing to fire, and both she and the gunmen went down with several bullet wounds, Mr. Medley said.
Whether Sergeant Munley was solely responsible for taking down Major Hassan or whether he was also hit by gunfire from another responder is still unclear, but she was the first to fire at him.
Sergeant Munley, who is 34, is an expert in firearms and a member of the SWAT team for the civilian police department on the base, officials said.
She received two wounds in each thigh and one to her right wrist. The base’s fire chief applied torniquets to stop her bleeding, and she was taken to a hospital that the officials did not identify, where she was reported in stable condition on Tuesday
Sergeant Munley joined the police force on the sprawling base in January 2008 after a career in the Army. Mr. Medley described her as highly trained, and said she had received specific training in a tactic called active shooter protocol, which was intended for the kind of situation she encountered on Thursday.
She lives with her husband, who is a soldier, in a tidy community of ranch homes on the south side of Killeen. Her neighbors described her as quiet and friendly. Her husband, who has not been identified, is currently assigned to Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
She was also scrupulously honest, according to friends. A year ago, she took pains to pay for the damage she caused to a neighbor’s car with her sport utility vehicle, even though no one had witnessed the fender bender.
“She seems like a sweet person, she tends to say hi when she drives by,” said one neighbor, Helen Pleas, 20 years old.
Sergeant Munley’s biography on her Twitter site reflected her sunny outlook. “I go to sleep peacefully at night knowing that I may have made a difference in someone’s life,” she wrote.
Lt. Gen. Bob Cone, commander of the base, said Friday morning that Sergeant Munley had reacted swiftly and aggressively to stop the gunman. “It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer,” he told the Associated Press.
Mr. Medley, the emergency services director, said that Sergeant Munley was an advanced firearms instructor for the civilian police force, which is employed by the Department of the Army to assist the military police on the grounds of the vast fort, where 150,000 soldiers and their families live and work.
Sergeant Munley comes from North Carolina, where her father owns a hardware store in Carolina Beach and is a former mayor. She attended Hoggard County High School.
According to the Associated Press, Sergeant Munley worked as an officer in the Wrightville Beach Police Department in North Carolina from 2000 to February 2002. She received three letters of commendation or recognition for her performance there.
By Joshua Partlow Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, November 5, 2009
KABUL -- Five Britishsoldiers were shot and killed Tuesday by an Afghan policeman while they were working together in southern Afghanistan, British officials said.
The shooting occurred in the Nad e-Ali district of Helmand province, one of the most violent areas of the country. The British soldiers were working with Afghan National Police at a checkpoint when one policeman opened fire, military officials said.
The gunfire wounded six other British soldiers and two Afghan policemen. Officials said the shooter fled the scene, but it was unclear whether he was arrested later.
Deaths among British troops, the second-largest contingent in Afghanistan after the U.S. military, have risen in recent months, mirroring the growing rate of American fatalities. At least 92 British soldiers have died this year, the deadliest of the war. Tuesday's attack follows a shooting a month ago in which an Afghan police officer killed two U.S. soldiers while they were patrolling together.
The ongoing violence comes amid the conclusion of Afghanistan's troubled presidential election. Former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, who withdrew this week from a runoff vote, said Wednesday that he had no interest in joining President Hamid Karzai's second-term cabinet, which will be chosen in coming weeks.
Abdullah called the decision by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission to award Karzai a victory without holding the runoff "illegal" but made clear he would not challenge the decision. He said he will continue his efforts to bring "change and hope" from outside the administration.
"In this sort of environment, I would rather act like a pressure group in order to bring changes and reform in the system," he said.
The deaths of the British soldiers have raised fears about the extent of insurgent infiltration in the Afghan security forces, especially as the U.S. and Afghan governments rush to increase the size of both the Afghan army and police force.
Interior Minister Hanif Atmar said in a statement that Tuesday's shooting appeared "to be an isolated incident" and would be investigated by both Afghan and international officials. "We are deeply saddened for the loss of our ISAF partners and we extend our prayers to their families and those injured in this senseless attack," Atmar said, using the abbreviation for the International Security Assistance Force.
Afghanistan's defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, said in an interview this week that the army has been "very watchful because we do have the reports that [insurgents] are really trying to infiltrate."
He said the army is trying to implement a biometric system that would collect such information as fingerprints and retinal scans to build a database of all recruits. The U.S. military set up similar systems for Iraqi security forces.
Many consider the Afghan police more susceptible to insurgent infiltration than the army. Wardak said there have been "very few cases" in which insurgents have been caught within the army.
"As far as the army's concerned, we have been relatively successful. It has not been a major problem up to now," he said.
Community policing offered in slums as an alternative to tough security forces
By Juan Forero Tuesday, October 27, 2009
RIO DE JANEIRO -- The residents of Santa Marta, one of this violent city's many hillside slums, had never seen someone quite like the new police captain, a woman who strolled its maze of passageways to shake hands and ask residents what services the government might deliver.
They had also not seen officers quite like the ones she commanded. Instead of wearing riot gear, they had on soft blue berets, and instead of storming Santa Marta with guns blazing, a scene common to Rio's shantytowns, they came to generate goodwill with residents normally fearful of police.
The recent arrival of Capt. Pricilla de Oliveira Azevedo and her officers was part of a new community policing strategy that officials in Rio hope will curtail the kind of violence that erupted this month. Street gangsshot down a police helicopter, killing three officers, and gunfights in the streets left more than 30 dead.
The mayhem shook the city and raised concerns about whether the government is prepared to tame bustling shantytowns ahead of the 2016 Olympics, which Rio recently won after defeating Chicago and two other cities. Though capturing the Olympics was a personal victory for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, authorities here were mortified when the violence in this picturesque seaside city was televised worldwide.
The tough police tactics that Rio's security forces have long used -- complete with assault rifles, armored personnel carriers and helicopters -- have by no means ended in the city's favelas, as the slums are known.
But Azevedo said that in Santa Marta and in a handful of other once-violent districts, the strategy is to replace the militarized police with patrol officers. She said officers permanently deployed in the favelas would be better positioned to develop intelligence from residents about drug trafficking and to help government authorities determine where new state funds are needed to build homes and provide social programs.
"For a long time this community was abandoned," said Azevedo, 31, who has served in some of the city's toughest districts. "It is difficult to be able to change a 50-year situation in one year, but our intention is to change the minds of people and their impression of the police."
The task will not be easy. Favelas have multiplied from a few hundred a decade ago to more than 1,000. Many spread across steep hillsides, their narrow, concrete passageways leading to tiny cinder-block homes built haphazardly, one above the other. Two million to 3 million of Rio de Janeiro state's 14 million people live in the slums, and most of the country's 5,717 homicides last year took place there.
Life in the favelas has always been hard, but as the slums have grown, and the gangs have grown more violent, the police over the years began to slowly withdraw. Gangs such as the Pure Third Command and the Red Command were left in control, with the Brazilian state virtually absent.
The police would still go into the favelas, residents said, but only to engage traffickers in gun battles like the one that proceeded the helicopter's downing. The police say the gangs are heavily armed, not just with assault rifles but also with rocket launchers and grenades.
"They always arrives at the time when kids are going to school and people are going to work," Daniela Barreto, 27, who lives in a favela called Rocinha. "It's horrible. People start running and panicking."
An Italian-born director of a school in Rocinha said children play-act what they see in the streets, favoring the gangsters who live in their midst. "They play policeman and narcotics dealer, but no one wants to be the policeman," said Barbara Olivi.
Teams of off-duty police officers and firefighters have formed their own militias, which extort local businesses and also fight the drug dealers for preeminence. The United Nations found last year that the police in Rio killed an average of four people a day, prompting the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, to call the hard-line police operations "murderous and self-defeating."
In recent days, Rio's newspapers have been filled with accounts of how a pair of police officers robbed two men who just moments before had mugged and shot a well-known community leader, Evandro João Silva. When the officers came upon Silva, the authorities said, they did nothing to help him, a sequence captured on a surveillance camera and replayed on local television news programs.
Police officers said they were ashamed by that episode. But it is not hard to find officers in the favelas who favor a hard-line approach to policing. Sgt. Gilson, who asked that his last name not be used because he is not authorized to speak to reporters, said he considers himself a "war veteran" after 17 years on the force.
Toting an assault rifle as he spoke, Gilson said casualties are a necessary byproduct of operations to take back the favelas. "If it weren't like that, the Americans would have left Iraq," he said. "If we show weakness, we will lose."
Jose Mariano Beltrame, Rio's secretary of public security, said authorities are trying to curtail brutality and corruption in the favelas by deploying police officers recently graduated from the academy. Those in the toughest districts are also receiving a bonus that increases their salary by 50 percent.
"These newly trained officers come to the job without the inherent vices that they would pick up on the streets," Beltrame said. The objective, he added, is to return control of the favelas to the state.
Pastor Dione Dos Santos, a former gang member who leads an evangelical church that tries to get criminals to give up their lawless ways, said he does not oppose having more police in the neighborhoods. But he said community-policing units do not make up for a lack of services and opportunities in the favelas, nor does the deployment of new officers automatically alleviate residents' tense relationship with police.
"It's not enough to bring in a police officer who doesn't know the problems of the community," Dos Santos said. "The people don't respect the police because the police don't give them any respect."
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The mastermind of the militant assault on Saturday that shook the heart of the Pakistani military was behind two other major attacks in the last two years, and the police had specifically warned the military in July that such an audacious raid was being planned, police and intelligence officials said Sunday.
The revelation of prior warning was sure to intensify scrutiny of Pakistan’s ability to fight militants, after nine men wearing army uniforms breached the military headquarters complex in Rawalpindi and held dozens hostage for 20 hours until a commando raid ended the siege. In all, 16 people were killed, including eight of the attackers, the military said.
The surviving militant, who was captured early Sunday morning, was identified as Muhammad Aqeel, who officials said was a former soldier and the planner of this attack and others. Mr. Aqeel, who is also known as Dr. Usman because he had once worked with the Army Medical Corps before dropping out about four years ago, is believed to be a member of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a militant group affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.
The army has been promising to fight back against the fierce Taliban insurgency holed up in the tribal region of South Waziristan amid pressure from the Obama administration, which is about to secure a major aid package that would give $1.5 billion a year to the government here.
The attack on the headquarters was a signal that the Taliban insurgency had penetrated deeply into Punjab Province, where the military headquarters are located, and was no longer confined to the wild tribal areas that serve as the operational center for the Pakistani Taliban.
The militant leader, Mr. Aqeel, led the commando operation against the Sri Lankan cricket team during its visit to Lahore earlier this year, according to a senior police officer in Punjab involved in the investigation into that assault. He was also behind the suicide bombing that killed the army surgeon general in 2008, military officials said.
In a warning to the authorities in July, the criminal investigation department of the police in Punjab said the militants who attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team in March would make a similar kind of assault on military headquarters. The warning, contained in a letter to the leading intelligence agencies, predicted militants would dress in military uniforms and would try to take hostages at the headquarters.
The contents of the letter were published in the Oct. 5 editions of a leading newspaper, The News, and were confirmed Sunday by a senior official of the criminal investigation department.
The letter specifically said that militants belonging to the umbrella group of the Pakistani Taliban would join forces with two other groups, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Muhammad, to attack the military headquarters. The Pakistani Taliban took credit for the Saturday attack in a telephone call to the television network Geo.
The assault on the headquarters represented a severe breakdown in military security and intelligence for the army, which is regarded with the highest esteem among the Pakistani public and is widely considered as the one institution that can keep the fractured country together.
In London on Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, said the attack showed the severe threat that militants pose to stability in Pakistan. But they brushed aside a question about whether, given the increased militant activity, the Pakistani government could be trusted to keep its own nuclear weapons secure.
“In respect of the nuclear issue, there is no evidence that has been shown publicly or privately of any threat to the Pakistani nuclear facilities,” Mr. Miliband said at the news conference.
Mrs. Clinton reiterated that the Obama administration had “confidence in the Pakistani government.”
The attack on Saturday showed intimate knowledge of the layout of the military headquarters in Rawalpindi and was skillfully planned, said a retired Pakistani Army brigadier and special forces officer, Javed Hussain.
The attackers, apparently driving in one van, managed to drive easily through the first security post on the main road into the headquarters, Brigadier Hussain said. At a second security post soldiers opened fire, and four of the attackers were killed.
But four or five of the attackers survived the firefight at the second post and appeared to have made a beeline on foot for the military intelligence building, which is close to the main entrance, according to accounts from military officials.
The hostages, including soldiers and civilians, were held in two rooms in the one-story military intelligence directorate building inside the headquarters, according to several army officers, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.
Among those killed in the attack was Brig. Anwar ul-Haq, the director of security for military intelligence. He was shot in the first hour of the siege by one of the gunmen who had penetrated his building, according to relatives of the brigadier who attended his funeral Sunday.
When Brigadier ul-Haq heard shooting, he interrupted a conference he was conducting and went into the corridor with an aide, according to the relatives’ accounts. When he saw a man in military uniform with his back turned to him, the brigadier told him to flee, but instead, the man turned around and shot the brigadier, the relatives said.
The hostage-takers held their captives in at least two groups, military officials said. In one room, 22 hostages were clustered with three assailants, one of whom wore a suicide bomb jacket. There were 12 hostages in another room, where another assailant wore a suicide jacket.
In their assault to free the hostages, special commandos successfully killed one would-be suicide bomber, but other militants in the room fired at two of the commandos, killing them, a military official said.
As commandos approached the second room, another suicide bomber blew himself up, bringing down the roof and causing injuries among the captives, the military official said.
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Ismail Khan from Peshawar, and Waqar Gillani from Lahore.
AHMEDABAD, India — The tableau was as improbable as it was grisly. The bullet-riddled bodies of four Muslims lay neatly lined up in the middle of a road. One of the dead cradled a machine gun. Bomb-making chemicals and a suitcase full of cash sat in the trunk of their car. Intelligence reports had identified the four as terrorism suspects.
It was a tidy crime scene with a story to match: four Islamic extremists who planned to assassinate the powerful chief minister of India’s richest state stopped cold by a fearless band of policemen early on the morning of June 15, 2004. The officers were hailed as heroes.
But the story was too good to be true, according to a recently released magistrate’s report. The supposed militants included a 19-year-old college student, a woman named Ishrat Jehan, who had no evident links to terrorist groups, the magistrate wrote.
The forensic evidence showed that the four had not died in a shootout but were shot at point-blank range, much earlier than the police had said. None of the four had actually fired a gun. They had been killed, the magistrate declared, in cold blood.
The sensational case has fed a heated national debate about the longstanding Indian police practice of killing suspects. Known euphemistically as “encounter killings,” such extrajudicial executions have been a tolerated and even celebrated method of dealing swiftly with crime in a country with a notoriously slow and sometimes corrupt judiciary. An officer in such cases invariably “encounters” a suspect and kills him, supposedly in self-defense.
In cities like Mumbai, which was for decades gripped by violent organized crime syndicates, officers who killed notorious gangland figures were often seen as dark folk heroes, selflessly carrying out the messy business of meting out justice. These officers, known as encounter specialists, became celebrities, even boasting about the number of gangsters they had killed.
But Indians have become increasingly wary of police officers crusading as judge, jury and executioner. Since 2006, 346 people have been killed in what seem to have been extrajudicial police killings, according to the National Human Rights Commission.
In many of these killings, investigations have found, the motive was not vigilante justice. The police often staged such killings for personal gain: bumping off a rival of a powerful politician in the hopes of a big promotion; killing a crime boss at the behest of one of his rivals; settling scores between businessmen.
Here in the state of Gujarat, the grim practice took on an even more sinister form. According to court documents, lawyers, human rights activists and the families of the victims, police officers seeking the favor of Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, began killing small-time Muslim criminals and framing them as big-time terrorists bent on mass murder. No evidence has been offered to show that Mr. Modi encouraged such killings.
Riots in Gujarat killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, in the aftermath of an attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims that killed 59 people in 2002. Mr. Modi, a prominent member of the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has long been accused of fueling the anti-Muslim violence with inflammatory remarks.
Tensions between Hindus and Muslims here are high. The officers who carried out the killings hoped to win promotions and other favors from lawmakers, according to court documents and human rights workers here.
In Gujarat, the team of officers suspected of carrying out these killings usually chose their victims carefully. In all five cases pending in the courts so far, the main targets had shady pasts confirmed by an arrest or conviction, usually for a petty crime. Most were Muslims.
But in the killing of Ms. Jehan that formula went awry. She hardly fit the usual profile of encounter victims. She was a full-time college student who also worked to provide for her widowed mother and six siblings.
According to her family, she was on a trip with her employer to help him set up his marketing business. On June 15, she was shot, according to the police, along with her accomplices as they tried to evade capture.
But the Gujarat magistrate’s report shredded that claim. The food in the victims’ stomachs proved that they had been killed much earlier, the report said. Their wounds were consistent with point-blank shootings. Their hands showed no trace of gunpowder residue. The police had planted weapons on the victims and staged the crime scene.
Gujarat government officials dispute the magistrate’s report, and Gujarat’s High Court has stopped the authorities from arresting the officers it named as the court conducts an inquiry.
Jay Narayan Vyas, a spokesman for the state government, said that the four people killed had been identified by the central government as terrorism suspects. A government intelligence report said that the four were possible terrorism suspects, but the central government has said that these were merely suspicions and could not justify the killings. Mr. Vyas said that the magistrate had overstepped his authority. He dismissed the findings as “false propaganda” from political opponents who wished to discredit Gujarat’s leaders.
Lawyers had known for years that something strange was happening in the Gujarat police force and that the killings of terrorism suspects were dubious, said Mukul Sinha, a lawyer for the relatives of several victims. But hardly anyone thought the killers would be brought to justice.
Then in 2005, the brother of one victim — a small-time bandit named Sohrabuddin Sheikh — sent a letter to India’s Supreme Court demanding an inquiry into the death of Mr. Sheikh, who had been killed by the police and branded a terrorist and who, like the four killed in June 2004, had been accused of planning to kill the chief minister of Gujarat.
Under Indian law any citizen can petition the country’s highest court directly, and the Supreme Court demanded an investigation. In 2007, Gujarat’s government acknowledged that the killing did not happen as the police had claimed and that the police had also killed Mr. Sheikh’s wife to cover up the crime.
The revelation opened the floodgates. “People realized that something can be done, that it is not impossible to get justice in Gujarat,” Mr. Sinha said.
After the officers who made up the elite squad that had carried out these encounters were arrested in the death of Mr. Sheikh, the killings stopped.
“All of a sudden the terrorists have stopped coming to kill Modi,” Mr. Sinha said.
But families of the victims are still waiting for justice.
Ms. Jehan’s mother, Shamima Kausar, said that the charge that her daughter was a terrorist was ludicrous. “She was just a college girl,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “She was my right hand. I am lost without her.”
HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. — An environment of racial intolerance and ethnic hatred, fostered by anti-immigrant groups and some public officials, has helped fuel dozens of attacks on Latinos in Suffolk County during the past decade, says a report issued Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups around the country.
“Latino immigrants in Suffolk County live in fear,” said the report, which the law center released at a news conference here. “Political leaders in the county have done little to discourage the hatred, and some have actively fanned the flames.”
The law center, based in Montgomery, Ala., came to prominence in the 1970s for anti-discrimination efforts and its legal battles against the Ku Klux Klan. It started looking at Suffolk County after Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, was stabbed to death last November in Patchogue. Seven youths, who prosecutors say were driven by prejudice against Latinos, are awaiting trial in that case.
The center’s report is the product of months of investigation on Long Island, including scores of interviews with Latino immigrants and local civic leaders. While it draws heavily on news accounts and public records, center officials said it was the most comprehensive compilation of statements and events showing a pattern of hate crimes in Suffolk that were at least tacitly condoned — if not actively encouraged — by some local leaders.
The center’s investigators made “frightening” discoveries, the report said: “Although Lucero’s murder represented the apex of anti-immigration violence in Suffolk County to date, it was hardly an isolated incident.”
Many Latino immigrants in Suffolk say they have been beaten with baseball bats and other objects, attacked with BB guns and pepper spray, and been the victims of arson, the report said. Latinos, it added, are frequently run off the road while riding bicycles or pelted with objects hurled from cars.
On Aug. 15, after the center’s report had been printed, an Ecuadorean man in Patchogue was attacked by three men who used racial epithets as they kicked and punched him, the police said. The three were arrested, and two were charged with assault as a bias crime, Newsday reported.
On Aug. 20, a man in Smithtown told a mother and a daughter who wore traditional Islamic garb that he was going to “chop you into little pieces and kill you,” the police said. The man was charged with second-degree aggravated harassment, the Associated Press reported.
And on Wednesday, the police said, hate-crimes detectives were investigating a burglary Tuesday night at a Latino evangelical church in Patchogue, in which notes with anti-Hispanic comments were found on the altar.
The law center report, echoing often-repeated statements by advocates for immigrants, accused the Suffolk County executive, Steve Levy, of helping to create an atmosphere of anti-immigrant sentiment by taking a hard line against illegal immigration.
In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Levy said, “While we can continue to disagree about policies related to the economic and social impacts of illegal immigration, we can all agree that any violence against a fellow human being cannot and will not be tolerated.” In the past, Mr. Levy has repeatedly denied accusations that he has fomented bias.
The report pointed to a statement by Michael M. D’Andre, a county legislator from Smithtown, at a 2001 hearing on a bill to penalize contractors who hire undocumented workers. Mr. D’Andre said that if his town were “attacked” by an influx of Hispanic day laborers, “we’ll be up in arms, we’ll be out with baseball bats.” He apologized the following week for his remark.
The report also highlighted a comment by Elie Mystal, a county legislator from Amityville, who said during a hearing in 2007 that if day laborers started gathering in his neighborhood, “I would load my gun and start shooting, period.” He later apologized and said he had been joking, according to news media reports.
Mr. D’Andre and Mr. Mystal are no longer legislators.
The report said Latinos’ fears were fed by nativist groups like Sachem Quality of Life, a local organization that has disbanded.
After Mr. Lucero’s death, many immigrants in the county stepped forward to describe their attacks to the police and media. In some of the cases, the allegations were reported to the police at the time the assaults occurred, but no arrests were made, in part because language barriers made communication difficult, the authorities have said.
Law center officials said that according to immigrants they interviewed, there may have been another reason for the inaction: police indifference.
Many immigrants told center investigators that the “police did not take their reports of attacks seriously, often blaming the victim,” the report said. “They said there’s little point in going to the police, who are often not interested in their plight and instead demand to know their immigration status.”
The Suffolk County police commissioner, Richard Dormer, said in a statement, “Some of the report had concrete ideas, most of which we are already implementing, but other parts were rife with inaccuracies due to the law center’s failure to interview the Police Department, the district attorney or elected officials.”
The report urged officials to adopt measures including halting “their angry demagoguery” about immigration, promoting programs that encourage respect for diversity, and training police officers to take seriously all allegations of hate-motivated crime.
“If these measures are taken to combat an increasingly volatile situation,” the report said, “it’s likely that angry passions in Suffolk can be cooled and a rational debate on immigration and its consequences begun.”
By William Booth Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, August 27, 2009
EL PASO -- José Daniel González was living the sweet life in America. He bought the $365,000 two-story Mediterranean with the tile roof and swimming pool. He started a trucking company, was raising a family. But on a Friday night in May, he was executed in his front yard -- eight shots, tight pattern, close range.
According to police detectives, González knew the man who ordered his killing. He also knew the man who stood on his lawn and watched him die. These things are often personal, especially among high-level drug traffickers.
A gangland-style slaying is no big news across the river in Ciudad Juarez, the bloodiest city in Mexico, where more than 1,300 people have been killed this year and only a handful of cases have been solved, despite the presence of 10,000 soldiers and federal police officers as part of President Felipe Calderón's war on drug cartels.
But in El Paso, where local leaders boast how safe their city is and the 12 homicides this year have almost all been solved, the González slaying was as disturbing as it was sensational. For people here, the blood splashed on a pretty American street was a jarring sign that Mexico's drug violence is spilling across the border into U.S. suburbia.
Most unsettling for many, especially El Paso police officials, was that both González and the man accused of ordering his killing turned out to be ranking drug traffickers from the notorious Juarez cartel, as well as informers for the U.S. government.
"So this is how these people end up in our country," said El Paso police Lt. Alfred Lowe, the lead homicide detective and a 29-year veteran whose team made the arrests in the González case. "We bring them here."
As a spectacular wave of drug violence washes over Mexico, the Obama administration, the U.S. Congress and leaders in the Southwest states are spending billions of dollars and massing thousands of agents to keep the chaos from crossing the border. But in order to fight the drug traffickers, federal anti-narcotics agents have brought Mexican cartel members north of the border, to use them to gather intelligence and build cases.
That has also led to friction between U.S. law enforcement agencies. El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen, who lives close to the González home and heard the shots the night of the slaying, said he has complained to federal counterparts about a lack of cooperation and information sharing. Allen told reporters that he raised those complaints in meetings with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, which, according to police and charging documents, arranged for González's visa so he could live in the United States.
Lowe said ICE agents were uncooperative during the investigation, misleading El Paso officers by failing to provide accurate names, photographs of suspects and timely intelligence that might have helped solve the homicide more quickly.
"We've never worked well with ICE," Lowe said.
ICE officials declined to comment on the specifics of the González case or the conduct and cooperation of their agents. "As a matter of policy, we don't confirm or deny confidential sources or sources of information," said Richard Rocha, spokesman for ICE in Washington. "All allegations of misconduct are taken seriously and, if reported, will be fully reviewed."
As the investigation into the González killing progressed this summer, police said they were further surprised to learn that the man charged with orchestrating the slaying was a fellow drug cartel member, a specialist in assassination -- and a federal informer for ICE living in El Paso.
Rubén Rodríguez Dorado, a Mexican citizen, was detained this month and charged with murder in the González case. Before he was a suspect, police detectives said, they were introduced to Rodríguez by ICE agents, who presented him as an informer who might be able to help on the case.
When he met with El Paso police, who said they were not given his name, Rodríguez bragged that he was "the main man in El Paso" for the Juarez cartel. Detectives said they later learned that his specialty was arranging hits for hire. "He told us that he was high in the food chain and that he'd ask around and see what he could find and that he would let us know. Of course, he didn't let us know anything," Lowe said.
El Paso police arrested three American teenagers they said Rodríguez recruited to his crew: U.S. Army Pfc. Michael Jackson Apodaca, 18, who allegedly pulled the trigger; Chris Duran, 17, who drove the getaway car, according to the court papers; and a 16-year-old who police said did surveillance for the gang. Apodaca and Duran were charged as adults with murder. The name of the youngest teenager is being withheld.
Rodríguez's attorney did not respond to telephone messages. Attorneys for the teenagers could not be located.
Lowe said that during the investigation, ICE agents introduced local police to other federal informers. One man was a cartel assassin. "His role was very brutal in Juarez. But here he is, just another cooperating witness, and we thought, if this guy is living here, how many more of them are there? This man is a known threat," Lowe said. "We should be informed, not only for our safety but the safety of the community."
El Paso police said they have evidence that González continued to work with the cartel while he was a federal informer in El Paso. While Rodríguez was cooperating with federal agents, he was arrested and charged in May with trying to steal an 18-wheeler filled with flat-screen televisions.
Law enforcement officials said El Paso is home to many cartel members and their families.
"Without a doubt, there are a lot of cartel members among us," said Robert Almonte, executive director of the Texas Narcotic Officers Association and a retired deputy chief of the El Paso police. "They've been here for a long time. They come for the same reasons as you or me. It's safer here. And if they have wives and kids, this is the place to be."
Joseph M. Arabit, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's office here, said that El Paso serves as an important staging point for Mexican drug trafficking but that violence is rare north of the border because cartel members "don't want to face justice in the United States."
Ranchos del Sol, the east-side El Paso neighborhood where the cartel hit occurred, is invitingly neat. On each block are new stucco homes painted in sand and sunset colors inspired by the desert. From the top of Bob Hope Drive, Ciudad Juarez can be seen in the hazy distance.
A number of residents in the neighborhood declined to give their names for publication, saying they were nervous about becoming targets.
A grandmother inspected plants outside her daughter's home after picking up the mail. "I'm afraid that other people will be executed Juarez-style here in El Paso," she said.
Three blocks away, Veronica Ortiz was getting ready to go on a drive with her husband and small children. "It doesn't really affect us," she said about the killing on Pony Trail Place. "I don't think they go against innocent people."
Another neighbor, a father of two, said he rode his bike past the cul-de-sac the night of the hit, moments before police arrived. "I would be outraged to know if the federal government owned that house and put a snitch in my neighborhood," he said.
"We live in a city of don't ask, don't tell," said Tony Payan, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies the drug trade. "The city is filled with stash houses, money laundering, shipments. Trucks come. Trucks go. Garage doors open and close. But the perception and reality of safety must be maintained at all costs. Leaders are obsessed with our ranking as the second or third safest city in America."
Before González was shot dead in front of his house, he knew that he was in danger, police said. In May 2008, a leader of the Juarez cartel was arrested in Mexico. El Paso detectives said they read news accounts reporting that the tip had come from González. That kind of public disclosure is a potential death sentence in Juarez.
El Paso police said that González fled north sometime in 2008 and that ICE agents knew he was in trouble with the cartel.
According to police investigators, shortly before his death, González told his wife that if she ever heard from a man called El Dorado -- Rodríguez's street name -- to warn him immediately, and that if anything happened to him, she was to call a telephone number he gave her. Police said the number was for his handler at ICE.
Researcher Monica Ortiz Uribe contributed to this report.
CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan -- Thursday's presidential elections will be the biggest test to date for the Afghan army and police, which will have primary responsibility for protecting nearly 7,000 polling places from Taliban attack.
Ramazan Bashardost, a popular candidate who runs his campaign out of a nomad's tent, may force Afghan elections into a second round. Courtesy of Reuters.
U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan have hit a record high of 62,000, but senior American commanders say their forces will stay in the background on Election Day. U.S. troops will function primarily as "quick response" units charged with reacting to large-scale attacks and preventing Afghan police and army outposts from being overrun.
Reuters
Afghans attend an election rally in support of President Hamid Karzai, who is seeking a second term in the upcoming presidential election.
"They'll be the ones out front and in charge," said Col. George S. Amland, deputy commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which oversees more than 4,000 Marines in volatile southern Afghanistan. "We'll help if needed, but security on Election Day will be an Afghan operation."
The hands-off U.S. approach means Afghan security forces will be charged with preventing attacks like Saturday's deadly car bombing outside the gates of the main North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Kabul.
The suicide attack, the worst in the capital in months, killed at least seven and wounded nearly 100. U.S. military personnel said that the death toll would have been higher if Afghan security personnel hadn't stopped the car and prevented it from drawing closer to the compound.
The attack comes as the Taliban step up their efforts to disrupt the elections, which the armed group sees as illegitimate. The Taliban have pledged to close roads in the areas they control to make it harder for Afghans to vote, and have threatened to harm those who manage to cast ballots.
Qari Yussef Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman in southern Afghanistan, said in an interview Sunday that the armed group will shift to "new tactics" on Election Day that will involve specifically targeting individual polling centers.
With Taliban violence and intimidation on the upswing, the elections will be a referendum of sorts on the capabilities of the Afghan security forces, which are emerging as key components of the new U.S. strategy for pacifying the country.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is finalizing a plan to increase the Afghan army to 240,000 from 135,000 and to boost the police to 160,000 from 82,000, according to officers familiar with his thinking. The general is likely to ask the Obama administration for thousands of additional U.S. trainers, the officials said.
The Afghan government plans four levels of security on Election Day. Afghan police will guard the immediate vicinity of each polling site, while the Afghan army will provide perimeter security around individual villages. Afghan officials expect suicide-bombing and car-bombing attempts by the Taliban.
U.S. and NATO forces will have backup forces on high alert in volatile areas of the country, but the foreign troops are being deliberately kept away from polling sites to avoid giving the impression that they are interfering in the process.
The fourth tier of security will come from newly formed tribal militias, who will be stationed on highways and roads leading to individual villages and polling places. The militias will be paid by the government, but will be responsible for providing their own weapons and ammunition.
A spike in attacks and threats by the Taliban cloud the prospects for Afghanistan's election, which are less than a week away. Courtesy of Reuters.
Still, the plan may not be enough to protect all polling sites. Internal Afghan government documents seen by The Wall Street Journal suggest that up to 15% of polling places won't open because of inadequate security.
The majority of those sites are in the south and east of the country, the Taliban's main regional strongholds. In Kandahar, for instance, 40% of provincial polling stations are in areas of Taliban control, according to the documents.
"We won't have an idea about how many of these we will be able to secure until Election Day," said Zekria Barakzai, deputy electoral officer with the Independent Elections Commission, the Afghan body that is conducting the polls.
Three of the leading presidential contenders appeared in a televised debate Sunday, the first attended by President Hamid Karzai, the front-runner. They answered questions from a moderator and didn't address each other.
Mr. Karzai reiterated his pledge to expand nascent talks with the Taliban. The two other candidates, Ashraf Ghani and Ramazan Bashardost, vowed to improve security and fight the corruption that plagues the Karzai administration. Noticeably absent was Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, who is running second, according to a pair of recent polls.
Gay Iraqi men are being murdered in what appears to be a co-ordinated campaign involving militia forces, the group Human Rights Watch says.
It says hundreds of gay men have been targeted and killed in Iraq since 2004.
So-called honour killings also account for deaths where families punish their own kin in order to avoid public shame.
The report says members of the Mehdi Army militia group are spearheading the campaign, but police are also accused - even though homosexuality is legal.
Witnesses say vigilante groups break into homes and pick people up in the street, interrogating them to extract the names of other potential victims, before murdering them.
"Murder and torture are no way to enforce morality," said HRW researcher Rasha Moumneh, quoted in the report.
"These killings point to the continuing and lethal failure of Iraq's post-occupation authorities to establish the rule of law and protect their citizens."
In some cases, Human Rights Watch says it was told, Iraqi security forces had actually "colluded and joined in the killing".
Witch-hunt
Recently, posters appeared in Sadr City - a conservative, Shia area of Baghdad - calling on people to watch out for gay men and listing not only their names but also their addresses.
One gay man in Baghdad described the killing campaign as a witch-hunt.
“ These killings will continue, because it has simply become normal in Iraq to kill gay men ” Unnamed gay Iraqi man
Nearly 90 gay men have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of January and many more are missing, local gay rights campaigners say.
The report, called They want us exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq, says horrifically mutilated bodies of gay men have been left on rubbish tips.
Sometimes their bodies are daubed with offensive terms such as "pervert", or "puppy" which is a hate word for gay men in Iraq.
The report contains detailed testimonies of a range of brutal treatment of gay Iraqi men.
"We've heard stories confirmed by doctors of men having their anuses glued and then being force-fed laxatives which leads to a very painful death," says Ms Moumneh told the BBC.
'Feminised men'
When questioned in the past, officials in Iraq have condemned the killings, but the BBC's Natalia Antelava in Baghdad reports that gay men there say nothing has been done to protect them.
"These killings will continue, because it has simply become normal in Iraq to kill gay men," said a gay Iraqi man who did not want to be named.
Mehdi army spokesmen and clerics have condemned what they call the "feminisation" of Iraqi men and have urged the military to take action against them.
The report said many gay men have fled to other countries in the region, despite consensual homosexual activity being illegal there, because the risk of victimisation is reduced.
HRW says the threats and abuses have spread from Baghdad to Kirkuk, Najaf and Basra, although persecution remains concentrated in the capital.
Officials say part of the problem in dealing with the attacks is that victims' relatives seldom if ever provide information to the police.
"They consider talking about the subject worse than the crime itself. This is the nature of our society," ministry spokesman Major General Abdul-Karim Khalaf said.
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8204853.stm
SHOPIAN, Kashmir — On a sunny late spring afternoon, Asiya and Nilofer Jan left home to tend to their family’s apple orchard. Along the way they passed a gauntlet of police camps wreathed in razor wire as they crossed the bridge over the ankle-deep Rambi River.
Little more than 12 hours later their battered bodies were found in the stream. Asiya, a 17-year-old high school student, had been badly beaten. Blood streamed from her nose and a sharp gash in her forehead. She and her 22-year-old sister-in-law, Nilofer, had been gang raped before their deaths.
The crime, and allegations of a bungled attempt by the local police to cover it up, set off months of sporadic street protests here in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. It is now the focal point for seemingly bottomless Kashmiri rage at the continuing presence of roughly 500,000 Indian security forces. The forces remain, though the violence by separatist militants whom they came here to fight in the past few years has ebbed to its lowest point in two decades.
“India says Kashmir is a free part of a free country,” said Majid Khan, a 20-year-old unemployed man who has joined the stone-throwing mobs. “If that is so, why are we being brutalized? Why are women gang raped?”
India and Pakistan have fought two wars over Kashmir, and the Himalayan border region remains at the heart of the 62-year rivalry between the nuclear-armed neighbors.
Settling the Kashmir dispute is crucial to unlocking the region’s tensions, something the United States hopes will eliminate Pakistan’s shadowy support for militant groups and allow its army to shift attention toward fighting Taliban militants.
Despite Kashmiri rage and the damage to India’s image, the Indian government has bridled at any outside pressure to negotiate a solution, let alone reduce its force level here. Caught in the middle are Kashmir’s 10 million people. The case of Asiya and Nilofer is only the latest abuse to strike a chord with Kashmiris, who say it is emblematic of the problems of what amounts to a full-scale occupation.
Kashmir has its own police force, but it works in close tandem with the Indian forces here and is seen by many as virtually indistinguishable from them. Four Kashmiri officers are suspected of trying to cover up the crime.
Kashmiri activists and human rights groups say that rapes by men in uniform, extrajudicial killings and a lack of redress are endemic, not least because security forces are largely shielded from prosecution by laws put in place when Indian troops were battling a once-potent insurgency here. Both local and national security forces here operate with impunity, they say.
The question for India, Kashmiris say, is whether the huge security presence is doing more harm than good.
“Maybe at some point in time when the militants were in the thousands it made sense to have so many soldiers here,” said Mehbooba Mufti, leader of a major opposition party here. “But at this point they are not helping in any way. Their mere presence has become a source of friction.”
Indian government officials point to statistics showing a decline in infiltration from Pakistan as proof that their tough methods have worked.
According to the government, 557 civilians died in 2005 in what the government calls “terrorist” violence in Jammu and Kashmir, which is India’s full name for the area. By 2008 that number had plummeted to 91. The number of militants killed has fallen by nearly two-thirds, while the deaths of security personnel in the region have been more than halved. Where tens of thousands of armed men once roamed, government officials now estimate there are as few as 500.
Analysts say that other events have also played a role in reducing militancy and infiltration. Secret talks between India and Pakistan over Kashmir made progress but broke down in 2007, when Pakistan’s president at the time, Pervez Musharraf, began losing his grip on power.
In addition, after two decades of militant separatism, in December 2008 voters ignored separatist calls for a boycott and cast ballots in huge numbers in state assembly elections. It was a hopeful sign that Kashmiris believed they could influence their destiny by peaceful means.
The election brought Omar Abdullah, the scion of Kashmir’s most famous political family, to power as chief minister of the state. He promised to roll back the laws that shielded Indian security forces in Kashmir from oversight, and to put Kashmir’s police force, rather than federal police and troops, at the forefront of securing the region. But that has not happened, and the details of the Shopian killings have fed the darkest and most personal fears of Kashmiris as the investigation into the deaths has stalled.
“Who does not see their wife in Nilofer, their daughter in Asiya?” said Abdul Rashid Dalal, who lives in Shopian.
Nilofer and Asiya Jan had walked to the orchard around 3:30 p.m. on Friday, May 29. When Shakeel Ahmad Ahanger, Nilofer’s husband, came home at 7:30 p.m., the two had not yet returned. He went to search for them but found no trace.
By 9:30 p.m. he was frantic. He went to the police station, and along with several officers scoured their route, including the shallow bed of the Rambi River. The police called off the search at 2:30 a.m., urging Mr. Ahanger to return at daybreak. After his dawn prayers, he went back to the bridge with police officials.
“Look, there is your wife,” the local police chief said to Mr. Ahanger, pointing at a body lying prone on some rocks in a dry patch in the middle of the stream.
He rushed to her, but she was dead. Her dress had been hiked up, exposing her midriff. Her body was bruised. “I knew immediately something very bad had happened to her,” Mr. Ahanger said. His sister was found a mile downstream. Their bodies were taken for autopsies, but the cause of death seemed clear to residents who have longed lived in the shadow of the security forces.
“Two girls disappear next to an armed camp,” said Abdul Hamid Deva, a member of a committee of elders set up in response to the killings. “Their bodies then mysteriously appear in a river next to the camp. It does not take much imagination to know what is likely to have happened.”
Town residents gathered at the hospital for the autopsy results. Initially a doctor said the women drowned. But the crowd rejected the conclusion; the stream was barely ankle deep. Residents pelted the hospital with stones. A second team of doctors was called in. They confirmed that the women had been raped.
“What was done to these women even animals could not have done,” the gynecologist who examined the women told the crowd, weeping as she spoke, according to witnesses.
Two men who had been at a shop near the bridge would later tell investigators they saw a police truck parked on the bridge and heard women crying for help.
Initially, the chief minister, Mr. Abdullah, also told reporters that the women had drowned. Later security officials said that advisers had misinformed him. A few days later he acknowledged that the women had come to harm and appointed a commission to investigate. But investigators say that crucial evidence has been lost and that they are no closer to finding the culprits despite the arrest of four local police officers on suspicion of a cover-up.
Kuldeep Khoda, the director general of Kashmir’s police force, admitted that his forces had made mistakes. “There is a prima facie feeling there was destruction of evidence, whether deliberate or inadvertent,” Mr. Khoda said. “The investigation is going on and the results of that investigation will come.”
Indian government officials say that the security forces here are needed to head off more insurgent violence or a Pakistani invasion. “If there would not be a war that is fought by external forces, our soldiers would not be there,” said a senior Indian intelligence official, referring to groups in Pakistan.
But residents of Shopian say the security forces are the only threat. “The only thing I can do now is hope justice will be done,” said Mr. Ahanger, Nilofer’s husband, who is struggling to care for his 2-year-old son, Suzain. “Nobody is safe in Kashmir — even a child, an elderly man, a young girl. Nobody is safe.”
Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from New Delhi.
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Reuters 