Oppression minds neither gender nor age, at least in Kashmir. Bullets fired in the name of maintaining law and order by paramilitaries and local police, are to kill lives, not voices of freedom. In yet another blatant abuse of the Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict, a nine-year-old boy was killed by paramilitary CRPF troopers in SD colony Batamaloo in the afternoon of August 2. Earlier the locality had witnessed the killing of a girl at the hands of paramilitaries on July 6.
The boy Sameer Ahmad Rah was a student of Grade II. According to eyewitness accounts Sameer was watching the stone-pelting scene that was going on in the locality between the CRPF troopers and the local boys when a large contingent of troopers accompanied by police managed to push the stone pelters in the bylanes of the locality. In the scurrying that ensued the charge of the men in uniform, Sameer tried to run away but he stumbled and fell on the ground.
He was caught by his neck by one of the CRPF trooper and dragged out of the bylane on to the main road. The trooper then swung Samir into air and threw him against the steel shutter of a shop. Samir’s head crashed against the shutter and fell down. Meanwhile another trooper came rushing along and forced his steel cane into the mouth of Sameer, who by then was almost dead. According to eyewitness the trooper kept pushing his cane down the throat of Samir for several minutes.
This didn’t satiate the trooper who finally, kicked Samir repeatedly on his chest and forced life out of him. Eyewitnesses say that a police constable tried to offer water to Samir but finding him dead, threw his body into a nearby empty plot of land. The Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict that was adopted by U N General Assembly vide resolution 3318 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974 , makes it mandatory for all signatories “to protect children and women in periods of emergency and armed conflict in the struggle for peace, self-determination, national liberation and independence”.
The declaration doesn’t seem to be meant for trouble torn valley of Kashmir or rather India doesn’t treat Kashmiris as human. Fifty people have been killed so far since the start of current uprising in mid June. Most of these were in their teens. An ever adamant Chief Minister of State seems to be unconcerned and unmoved about the dance of death the paramilitaries have been playing for the last two months in the streets of Kashmir. The Prime Minister of India, supposedly a man of integrity and compassion hadn’t a word of sympathy for Kashmiris. Instead, the unbridled support, which New Delhi has extended to the beleaguered CM has emboldened the men in uniform who seem to enjoy the role of Demon of Death.
In the last twenty years Kashmir has witnessed scores of incidents wherein youth below 18 years of age were killed, forcibly disappeared and tortured. The June uprising of 2008 which started over the Amarnath land transfer saw the killing of around 70 persons at the hands of Indian paramilitaries deployed in Kashmir, half of whom were below 18 years of age. In all this the mute point remains whether India adheres to any commitments it had made at the highest international bodies like UN.
