(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Kashmir shut down on Saturday for the 118 compatriots killed by government forces in nearly five months of violent tumult last year, now known as the valley’s summer unrest.
The strike called by separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani coincided with the first anniversary of teenager Tufial Ahmad Matto, whose killing by a tear gas shell on June 11 had sent Kashmir into a deep vortex of bloodshed, curfew and hartal.
This had been the third such spell since the nearly equally bloody agitation in 2008 that brought down the then Azad-led coalition government, forcing it to revoke its harebrained orders to hand over prime forest land in the valley to the Amarnath Shrine Board, the managers of a holy Hindu site high in the Himalayas.
Today’s strike had also been meant to reinforce demands to prosecute the police and the paramilitary personnel whose disproportionate use of force and lethality last summer left a long trail of the young dead, and over a thousand grievously injured, some of them maimed for life.
Except for an excruciatingly slow ‘inquiry’ into 17 killings, the government has made no attempts to fix responsibility for the totally avoidable bloodshed – often by targeted firing and tear gas shelling, with proven cases of brutal beating of young children thrown in – unleashed by its forces across Kashmir last year.
The case of Tufail Mattoo, pursued by his family which has refused to be silenced by the government’s carrot-and-stick of direct cash relief and alleged indirect bullying, has had a tortuous history in court, with the police stone-walling all efforts to bring the facts to light.
Today, the boy’s parents received streams of visitors at their home in downtown Srinagar for remembrance of their only son, a customary practice in Kashmir on first death anniversaries.
Geelani, who had announced to lead special prayers for the victims at the Martyrs Graveyard here today, was confined to his house by the authorities, as were a number of other separatist leaders, to keep a tight lid on the situation in the valley.
The cemetery itself, located in the city’s sprawling Eid prayer grounds, was sealed off for all movement together with a number of adjacent localities.
Though the government had made precautionary deployments in sensitive areas, stone-pelting broke out early in the morning in the interior city, but there were no reports of any casualties.
Police and paramilitary men, claimed to have been trained in non-lethal mob control after last summer’s heavy toll of civilian life, appeared in strength donning new riot gear to keep the streets calm.
Wary now of calling for strikes after the negative fallout of last year’s prolonged calendared hartals which he had termed as ‘do or die’ for Kashmir, Geelani’s call for today’s shutdown came after a fairly long spell of uninterrupted everyday life, considered by many here as a relief from the separatists’ writ and the government’s equally suffocating curfews.
But with hardly anyone reminding the Geelani camp of its “all boats of retreat burnt” slogans fuelling the summer unrest, Kashmiris nevertheless heeded his call today as well, suspending work, closing shops and schools, and keeping public transport off the roads.
As if controlled by unseen switch-masters, the situation in the valley since winter carries barely a mark of last year’s events, except for more untimely graves, and over a hundred stricken families grieving silently to themselves, as the rest of Kashmir carries on, unwilling to ask uncomfortable questions of its leaders, or call them to account.
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