What Needs to Happen in Kashmir Before it’s Taken Seriously?
By Ghulam Nabi Fai
Mar/Apr 2024
In its unofficial press release of Dec. 29, 2023, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) stated, “South Africa filed an application instituting proceeding against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, concerning alleged violations by Israel of its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the ‘Genocide Convention’) in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Earlier in December 2019, Gambia, with the support of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), also filed a case before the ICJ alleging that the human rights violations committed by Myanmar against the Rohingya violate various provisions of the same convention.
Both of these developments are significant steps toward greater international recognition of the serious alleged abuses committed against civilian populations. Filing an application may lift the veil of secrecy off these alleged violations. Perhaps now the global community will share the outrage felt by these two civilian groups.
Similar Pattern in Kashmir
Yet in another part of the globe — Kashmir — the 900,000 Indian military and paramilitary forces (https://theintercept.com, Oct. 3, 2019) continue to perpetuate a similar pattern of atrocities with no fear of a corrective international response. The scale of these human rights atrocities dwarf those in Kosovo, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and East Timor, all of which triggered international interventions. But the world powers and the UN continue to remain silent, not even bothering to employ the usual moral suasion against India’s shockingly indiscriminate violence in Kashmir, as they did to South Africa during its ugly years of apartheid.
Dr. Gregory Stanton (president, Genocide Watch; chair, the Alliance Against Genocide) warned the world on Feb. 5, 2021, that “We believe that the Indian government’s actions in Kashmir have been an extreme case of persecution and could very well lead to genocide.” His warning was largely ignored. On Jan. 18, 2022, he stated that genocide is a process, not an event … and early signs and this process are already visible.
It is painful but necessary to mention here how Indian law grants virtual legal immunity to any type of war crime perpetrated in Kashmir. The Indian army has subjected countless Kashmiri women to rape, a recognized war crime. Despite torture being an international crime, as the legal proceedings against General Augustino Pinochet in Britain proved, Indian leaders who permit it aren’t prosecuted in jurisdictions they may be visiting.
Narendra Modi was once banned from entering the U.S. and U.K. because of his involvement in the 2002 massacre of Gujarat’s Muslims — he was the state’s chief minister at that time. And now he’s being given the red-carpet reception in many capitals! People are asking if an international crime is somehow less criminal if the aggressor is India and the victims are Kashmiris.
Kashmiri civilians are also asking: “Are we less human than peoples of other nations?” To borrow from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” “Hath not a Kashmiri eye? hath not a Kashmiri hand, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as other peoples are? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”
It is true that violence characteristically stems from dehumanizing an adversary or an enemy. The more that others seem distant, odd, inferior or different, the easier it is to kill, maim and oppress them. This psychological insight is corroborated by thousands of years of experience. Take genocide. The Nazis and Germans generally perpetrated the Holocaust by demonizing Jews and inculcating the idea of their racial or religious inferiority. Jews looked different from Aryans and for centuries had been stigmatized by Christian officials and their followers as the killers of Christ, making them all deicides.
Perceiving the “Other” as Subhuman
In this way, participants were psychologically able to block out their own evil by perceiving Jews and others (e.g., Gypsies, Slavs, Sinti, and the handicapped) as subhuman, and thus their extermination was no different than killing animals for food. The Holocaust would never have reached its horrifying scale if the Nazi Party had perceived and treated their victims as human peers and subscribed to John Donne’s (d.1631) timeless poetic recognition of humanity’s unity.
Ditto regarding the Hutu’s genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. The two tribes viewed themselves as different, physically and otherwise. The Hutu resented their sense of inferiority, which they ascribed to Tutsi arrogance and refusal to treat them as social equals. Difference led to dehumanization, which fostered mass killing based on ethnicity.
If international law had been applied evenhandedly in Kashmir, it’s quite possible that an international war crimes tribunal would have been established years ago to try the scores of Indian civilian and military leaders guilty of crimes against humanity and aggression. What Slobodan Milosevich did in Kosovo and Bosnia pales in comparison to what the Indian civilian and military grandees have done in Kashmir for 76 years — something resembling genocide on the installment plan.
Let’s have a pragmatic view of the world. The world powers seldom place democracy and human rights above their geo-strategic or economic concerns. Let me conclude with these sobering observations. U.S. foreign policy does not emerge from a simple algorithm, but is driven partly by popular emotions, daily headlines, domestic considerations and long-term global concerns that transcend the momentary and transient. And what relative influence these varied elements play in a particular foreign policy decision varies depending on the country, the timing and the circumstances. If anyone thinks there are simple markers for predicting American foreign policy, then they are seriously mistaken. It’s much more ad hoc and improvised than systematic and thematic. Thus, the opportunities to try to reason with policymakers are great, but so are the hazards and imponderables of such an enterprise.
Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai is chairman, World Forum for Peace & Justice. He can be reached at gnfai2003@yahoo.com.
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