Kunanposhpora rapes: Valley's worst nightmare still haunting

Kashmir Times


Sana Altaf




SRINAGAR, Feb 22: It was 11 pm on February 22, 1991. The whole village of Kunanposhpora lay silent in sleep. The heavy snowfall wrapped the village in its ambience when security forces cordoned the whole village. Unaware of the happenings, the villagers woke up to a posse of army personnel barging forcibly into their houses.




The village was under siege during a crack down. Men were ordered to leave their homes while children, threatened by the scenes, ran out of the houses. The entire male population of the village was directed away from the villages. While many were subjected to questioning and beating, others became victim of interrogation.

The whole village was vacant of men, with only women and young girls left alone at home. With no men to guard, the security forces barged into the houses of the village and raped women all night.

The mass rape incident of Kunanposhpora happens to be one of the most grievous human rights violations in Kashmir. In the intervening night of February 22-23, 1991, security forces raped 30 women of the village. Aged, young, married and unmarried women, manybecame the victim.

Sharief u-din revealed that the men folk were kept away all night from the village. It was at 10.30 in the morning of February 23, that the crack down was lifted. His sister- in-law, Rafiqa Begum, wife of Mohammad Amin was one of the victims of the incident. Rafiqa was then a mother, with two-year-old son and a daughter to care for.

"When security men entered our house and ordered us to leave, they had entered our house and raped my brother's wife. They had attempted it on my wife too, but some how she managed to escape from the place," stated Sharief.

Sharief like other men of the village knew nothing of their wives for whole night.

"In the morning there was an announcement in the mosque that crackdown was lifted and then we went to our homes. And what we saw was brutality and cruelty on our women."

Soon it became known that the incident was not limited to Sharief's house but had engulfed the entire village.

'We all men went about the whole village and saw families where 2-3 women were raped in a single house,' recalls Sharif.

The whole village had been ruined, not a family was spared, he claims Ironically, security forces cordoned the village for three consecutive days after the incident to prevent them from lodging complaints or an FIR.

"It was after three days when the security forces relaxed the village, that we were able to file the FIR in the concerned police station," added Sharif.

The case was handed to then DSP Kupwara for investigation.

"We thought that the investigation was going on. We trusted them. But the DSP was promoted and transferred too, of which we had no knowledge for long time. We assumed that the case is going on. It was after a long time that we came to know that the case was nowhere," informs Sharief.

The villagers made complaints to various authorities and official, but of no avail. What followed was visits from officers and an authority, recording of statements, but nothing was done, neither justice nor any aid," says Sharief.

Having faced enough failure, the villagers filed compliant in the State Human Rights Commission in 2007 and the case is still going on.

"We are fighting our best. We want justice and some aid for the victim families which has been denied even after 19 years now," said Sharief, who is fighting the case on behalf of the whole village.

Whether justice would be brought to the victims or not is not known, yet the victims continue to endure the brunt of the incident even after 19 years.

The victim girls could not get suitable match for marriage. Their families have been struggling since years to get their daughters married but the incident seems to have left a deeper mark that is difficult to wash off.




"No outsiders are ready to marry those girls. Men who married some of them were either their own cousins or relatives. Many of them are still unmarried as they get no match," reveals Sharief, adding the women of other villages would taunt their women for the rapes they suffered.




Those who worked as teachers in schools at some distance away had to give up their jobs because of humiliation. "Fifteen years after the incident the victims "still wait for justice". To their dismay the only investigation panel in this case by the Press Council of India, a one man show by journalist B.G. Verghese, gave a clean chit to the accused troopers and accused the women of fabricating the story.

When the incident happened, the village men complained to the officials but no action was taken. According to the Asia Watch Report, officials claimed that no formal complaint was lodged. A local magistrate was called for investigation but authorities in Delhi vehemently denied the incident without even verifying with local officials. A police investigation never commenced. Then, three months after the incident, an Army official requested the Press Council of India to probe the allegations only after the forces were pressurised by media criticism. The one man Commission, that spent only a few hours in the village, found the charges "baseless" based on gaps in statements and medical examination of 32 women that was conducted three weeks later. The then Divisional Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah questioned the manner in which allegations had been dismissed even before the investigations had been carried: "While the veracity of the complaint is highly doubtful, it still needs to be determined why such a complaint was made at all" he pointed out while calling for a thorough inquiry in the incident which never happened.