Jawed Naqvi
NEW DELHI, Feb 11 (1994) – A Red Cross team allowed into India’s strife-torn Kashmir will confine itself to aid and not touch on alleged human-rights abuses, an official of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Friday.
“We do not want to be involved with any politics,” said Mianrad Studer, ICRC’s Delhi-based official.
“Our mandate is clearly to provide humanitarian relief. We do not have the same approach as human-rights groups.”
India on Thursday asked the visiting ICRC director general for the Far East, Jean Michel Monod, to send a team to the Himalayan state — a rare move for a government which has refused nearly all visits to the region by international organisations.
Approval for the ICRC tour follows India’s decision to allow four European ambassadors to visit Kashmir early this week and meet militant organisations.
No human-rights groups have been allowed in. Security forces battling a four-year-old separatist uprising in Kashmir, the only Moslem majority state in mainly Hindu India, have often been accused of widespread human-rights violations, including rape and torture.
India dismisses the allegations, voiced most loudly by neighbouring arch-enemy Pakistan. But New Delhi recently set up a National Human Rights Commission to monitor what it says are stray cases of abuse.
The Press Trust of India quoted Monod on Thursday as saying the ICRC’s new role in Kashmir would involve briefing security forces on international human-rights laws.
“That is not correct,” Studer said. “We have discussed the issue of humantarian relief with the local police, which is not the same thing as human rights.”
Diplomats said India’s move to allow the ICRC into Kashmir had raised expectations of further openness in the region, where hospital and police sources say more then 15,000 people have been killed in the last four years.
“It means our efforts are begining to take effect,” said Pakistani diplomat Zamir Akram.
“This shows that our option of putting the issue on a world forum will prove useful in protecting human rights in Kashmir,” Akram said, referring to Islamabad’s efforts to persuade the United Nations to send a fact-finding team to Kashmir.
India and Pakistan, believed by Western intelligence agencies to be nuclear powers, have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir. Two-thirds of the mountainous region is ruled by New Delhi, the rest by Islamabad.
Foreign ministry officials on Friday hinted at further relaxation on Kashmir visits and said the government had invited Amnesty International to visit northern Punjab state, where security forces have also been accused of rape and torturing Sikh militants.
“There is already considerable transparency on the rights question,” a senior Indian diplomat said. “We have welcomed Amnesty International to Punjab. Perhaps Kashmir will be next.”
