AI slams India over rights abuse: US accused of using world as battlefield
By Our Correspondent
NEW DELHI, May 23: Amnesty International on Wednesday slammed the Indian government for continued human rights abuses in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere, and said the scourge continued to enjoy impunity across the country.
In its annual report for 2006, released in New Delhi by lawyer and rights campaigner A. G. Noorani, Amnesty said politically motivated violence had slightly decreased in Kashmir, but "torture, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions continued to be reported".
Some six deaths in custody, 38 enforced disappearances, including several juveniles, and 22 extrajudicial killings were reported in 2006. "Identity-based attacks by Islamist fighters continued," the report said.
In April, India's Central Bureau of Investigation indicted five army officers for the extrajudicial killing of five villagers at Kashmir's Pathribal hamlet in March 2000. The officers were charged with fabricating evidence to support their claim that the men were foreign fighters killed in an "encounter" with security forces.
A new report indicated that some 10,000 people had been victims of enforced disappearance since 1989. The Association of the Parents of Disappeared People reported that the authorities failed to provide information to the families of the victims about their whereabouts.
"Perpetrators of past human rights violations continued to enjoy impunity," the Amnesty report said. Concerns grew over protection of economic, social and cultural rights of already marginalised communities. Human rights violations were reported in several states where security legislation was used to facilitate arbitrary detention and torture.
Socially and economically marginalised groups such as adivasis, dalits, marginal/landless farmers and the urban poor continued to face systemic discrimination and loss of resource base and livelihood because of development projects.
The report recalled that more than 200 commuters were killed in multiple bombings in Mumbai in July last year. "Concern about such attacks continued to dominate peace talks between India and Pakistan, which made little progress, the report noted.
In Gujarat, justice continued to evade most victims and survivors of the 2002 violence, in which thousands of Muslims were attacked and more than 2,000 were killed.
"Rehabilitation continued to be slow. Members of the Muslim minority in Gujarat reportedly faced difficulties in accessing housing to rent and public resources. An official panel concluded that over 5,000 displaced families lived in "sub-human" conditions," the report pointed out.
There continued to be few successful prosecutions relating to the violence. However, 1,594 cases closed by the state police were reopened on the orders of the Supreme Court and 41 police officials were being prosecuted for their alleged role.
There was rising violence in the Dantewada area between Maoists and members of the anti-Maoist Salwa Judum, a militia widely believed to be sponsored by the Chhattisgarh state government.
Civilians were routinely targeted by both sides and 45,000 adivasis were forced to live in special camps putting them at increased risk of violence. The Chhattisgarh authorities enacted legislation banning media coverage of certain human rights violations.
Around 300 million people remained in poverty despite implementation of new legislation guaranteeing minimum annual employment for the rural poor.
AFP adds from London: The Amnesty launched a scathing attack on the United States, accusing it of trampling on human rights and using the world as ‘a giant battlefield’ in its ‘war on terror’.
The war in Iraq and the politics of fear being spread by the administration of President George W. Bush around the globe were fuelling deep international divisions, the group charged in its report.
Washington was guilty of ‘breathtakingly shameless’ double speak, claiming to be promoting human rights while at the same time brazenly flouting international law, the group said.
“Nothing more aptly portrayed the globalisation of human rights violations than the US-led ‘war on terror’ and its programme of ‘extraordinary renditions’, which implicated governments in countries as far apart as Italy and Pakistan, Germany and Kenya,” said the group’s secretary-general Irene Khan.
Last year, evidence revealed how “the US administration treated the world as one giant battlefield for its ‘war on terror’, kidnapping, arresting, arbitrarily detaining, torturing and transferring suspects from one secret prison to another across the world with impunity,” she said.
Hundreds of people had been transferred by the US and its allies through the secret renditions to countries such as Syria, Jordan and Egypt.
Yet, Washington remained deaf to pleas to shut down its remote military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where many of the detainees had ended up, held without charge or trial, virtually incommunicado, the group said.
The report identified ‘an arc of instability’ from the borders of Pakistan to the Horn of Africa, where armed groups were flexing their muscles.
“Unless governments address the grievances on which these groups feed, unless they provide effective leadership to bring these groups to account ... the prognosis for human rights is dire,” said Ms Khan.
The “misguided military adventure in Iraq had taken a heavy toll on human rights and humanitarian law,” she said.
It berated the US administration for its “continued failure to hold senior government officials accountable for torture and ill-treatment of ‘war on terror’ detainees despite evidence that abuses had been systematic.”
The US “is unrepentant about the global web of abuse it has spun in the name of counter-terrorism,” Ms Khan wrote.
“It is oblivious to the distress of thousands of detainees and their families, the damage to the rule of international law and human rights and the destruction of its own moral authority, which has plummeted to an all-time low. ”
President Bush had ‘invoked the fear of terrorism’ to boost his powers without any oversight by Congress, she said, warning how too many leaders were ‘trumpeting an ever-widening range of fears’.
