Yusuf Jameel
SRINAGAR, Feb 11 (1991) – Militants fired machineguns in Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar on Monday to salute their leader Maqbool Butt, hanged for murder by India seven years ago.
Hundreds of paramilitary police lined the city’s main streets and police sources said the army was on standby as Kashmiris, including government employees, obeyed the militants’ call for a general strike to mark the anniversary.
But witnesses said security forces did not intervene when more than 20 militants gathered at their “martyrs’ graveyard” in the city’s old quarter to fire salutes beside an empty grave reserved for Butt, who was hanged in 1984 and buried in Delhi.
The militants’ campaign against Indian rule erupted into mass revolt 13 months ago. Since then some 2,200 people have been killed in Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Moslem-majority state.
Militant groups battling for Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan joined Butt’s Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which demands the state’s independence, in marking the anniversary.
Volleys of gunfire could be heard from dawn in old Srinagar, a maze of narrow alleyways where militants move easily across rooftops without detection by police in streets below.
The JKLF said in a statement that it had presented a “Shaheed (martyr) Maqbool Butt Award” — a copy of the Koran and 11,000 rupees (600 dollars) — to the father of a 10-month-old baby who, it alleged, had been shot dead by security forces last December.
Butt was sentenced to death in 1976, convicted of murdering an Indian intelligence officer in Kashmir.
He was hanged only in 1984, after another Kashmiri militant group kidnapped and killed an Indian diplomat in the English city of Birmingham. The kidnappers had demanded Butt’s release.
India accuses Pakistan of arming and training the militants. Pakistan denies the charges but endorses the militants’ demand for a plebiscite on the state’s future.
India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir since Pakistan was carved from the subcontinent as an Islamic state on independence from Britain in 1947.
Pakistan now controls a third of the territory.
The JKLF’s chairman accused Pakistani leaders of cowardice on Monday for not giving enough support to the militant campaign.
Amanullah Khan told a rally in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi marking the anniversary of Butt’s death that Pakistan’s popularity was waning in Kashmir because of what he called Islamabad’s apathy.
“People are dying there and it is complete silence here. We will have nothing to do with cowards.”
“We will continue until we drive India out of Kashmir,” he added.
