SRINAGAR, July 10: A trailer from a documentary that will be aired Tuesday night by a British television Channel 4 claims: “Now from Kashmir, more dark secrets are emerging.”
The television is turning its attention on Kashmir, where militants and army have engaged in violence for more than two decades, because the issue is in danger of becoming a “forgotten conflict, overshadowed by Syria and the euro-zone debt crisis, the Wall Street journal has reported.
It appears the dark secrets in the documentary are the unmarked graves of thousands of Kashmiri civilians that were unearthed by local human rights activists in 2008 and acknowledged in a report last year by the official State Human Rights Commission.
A story Monday in The Guardian, a U.K. based newspaper, which linked to the Channel 4 documentary, also focused on the mass graves.
These mass graves, human rights groups believe, contain bodies of ordinary civilians who were killed by security agencies in staged gunbattles and were later dubbed as “foreign militants”.
The Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s FBI, has been pushing ahead with a case against five army officers accused of killing five innocent Kashmiris at Pathribal in 2000.
The army blocked the case, citing its immunity under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.
But in May, the Supreme Court, which was hearing the CBI’s appeal, ordered the army to either allow the case to go ahead or court-martial the men.
Last month, the army said it was finally moving ahead with court-martial proceedings.
The Channel 4 documentary could bring the focus back on Kashmir in the west which is battling its own financial problems amidst rising concerns about the uprising in Syria.
