SRINAGAR, Feb 4 (1992) – Police beat back scores of Moslem health workers Tuesday after they gave a signed letter to a U.N. observers office here alleging atrocities by Indian troops against Kashmiri Moslems, witnesses said.
One physician was slightly injured when the police used canes to disperse some 800 doctors and nurses who drove hospital vehicles to present the letter to the United Nations military observers group stationed here, witnesses said.
The observers’ office was set up in Srinagar in 1948, a year after Kashmir’s partition between India and Pakistan. New Delhi has not given the centre diplomatic recognition.
The observers’ mandate is to monitor a ceasefire line delineating Indian-held Kashmir from the Pakistani-administered northern third.
The witnesses said some 50 women participated in Tuesday’s rally organised by the Medical Fraternity of Kashmir, an association of 40,000 Moslem medics, to highlight alleged incidents of “murder, torture and rape” by security men.
The protest note, signed by 3,000 doctors, said Indian troopers were committing atrocities “day in and day out.”
It also alleged that security forces shot dead some 60 men, women and children on India’s Republic Day January 26, describing it as a “greater wave of terrorism” in the valley.
Tuesday’s rally at the U.N. office was the first reported protest demonstration by Kashmir doctors in support of the Moslem militant drive for the northern state’s secession from India.
The police took action after the grouop shouted anti-Indian and pro-independence slogans, the witnesses said.
It was not known whether security men arrested any of the protestors who fled the site in hospital vehicles after the brief rally was broken up.
