Between the Great Divide

by Anam Zakaria

  As the sun sets and the room becomes dark, we take our leave. On our way out, Haroon tells me of a man he saw on our drive here. ‘He was lying on the road, in the middle of the chowk, near the Press Club. He was talking to himself and seemed very disturbed. Maybe he was a refugee too.’

  5

  THE WOMEN HAVE HAD ENOUGH

  ‘If we don’t have people left alive, what is the need for Kashmir?’

  ‘My name is Ayesha (the name has been changed to protect her identity). I’m a resident of Neelum Valley. I was born in 1992. Since I gained consciousness, there has been firing in Neelum… from as early as I can remember. Even during snowfall there was heavy firing. Woh kuch nahi dekhte the (they wouldn’t care who they were hitting or what the conditions were like). The firing could begin at any time and it would disturb everything. It was up to them… the Indians… whenever they willed, they would fire. Where you are sitting, a mortar once landed there too. Our fruits would get damaged, our livelihood was destroyed. We had no life. If we were alive at one moment, we didn’t know if we would be alive 10 minutes later… Our area (Athmuqam) was their main target because a Pakistan Army camp was right next to us and the main markaz (market) of Athmuqam town is nearby too.’

  As the headquarters of Neelum district today,1Athmuqam town is one of the most important areas in Neelum Valley.2 Situated right by the Neelum river, which serves as the LoC, it directly faces Indian Army posts across the river. From Ayesha’s house, one can see ‘enemy’ army pickets, staring down from the tall mountain peaks. ‘On one side, you have a girls’ college, on the other you have the Boys’ Degree College. But in those days, colleges were just empty names. Teachers wouldn’t come because of the firing. Obviously, everyone was concerned with saving their own lives. On most days we would hide inside the bunker you saw on your way up. But everyone couldn’t make bunkers—there were just two to three in every mohalla (neighbourhood)—and even if you had them, they couldn’t protect you from heavy firing. They would collapse. Those of us who could run away, would go to places like Muzaffarabad, Kutton, Sundokh, Jaghran (towns and villages further away from the LoC), where the mortars wouldn’t reach. Later, many of these places became unsafe too. And how long could we stay away from our homes anyway? Our income, our lives, were dependent on our lands, our livestock. We had to come back…

  ‘…But whenever we would come home after a while, everything would look so strange. There was fear in all of us. We would pray so much before coming. Pata nahi kitni mannatein mangte the. Often, we would only return during a ceasefire, or we would hide and return at night. In the mid-1990s, things were so bad that even if you lit a cigarette, you were likely to be a target for a mortar shot. We had no light, no torch… the night would be pitch dark, har jagah khauf ka manzar hota tha (there was fear everywhere). And when we would arrive, sometimes after walking for hours and hours, we couldn’t even light a fire to cook food or warm ourselves because they would see us and shoot. I remember, once one of the children was very hungry and we wanted to give him milk so we had to warm the milk on top of a lantern inside the bunker, from the little heat that came from the lantern. Otherwise, we may have been shot at because we’re right on the LoC and the Indians can see everything we do… Many people from our village became martyrs in the 1990s. We are right now sitting at my tai ammi’s (father’s elder brother’s wife) house. My first cousin, her eldest son, became a martyr too. A mortar hit him on his side and there was nothing left of his body. He was like minced meat.’

  It is winter of 2015 and I am sitting opposite Ayesha on the floor, my back resting on the long round cushions they have put up against the white walls for our comfort. Haroon sits next to me, with Sharjeel seated beside him. We left Muzaffarabad early this morning to arrive in Athmuqam, a tehsil (administrative division) that is said to have suffered the worst of the conflict during the decade of the 1990s. Ayesha, an employee of Islamic Relief, an NGO, speaks to me in fluent Urdu. When we begin talking, only she and her mother are in the room with us. Over the next few hours, about sixteen other women join us, each with her own story to tell. One of them is her tai (aunt), who lost her eldest son to the conflict.

  ‘You see this picture? This was my son,’ her tai says as she walks in holding a photograph of a young man. ‘I would have been a grandmother today were he still alive but he became a martyr. He was on the bypass going to work when a mortar shell hit him. A car raced over him right after and crushed him. I had to collect pieces of his flesh and bones in my hands so that we could bury him.’

  ‘He was my nephew.’ Ayesha’s mother now speaks. ‘Maine apne haath se uska gosht andar kiya taki uska janaza ho sake (I had to shove some of the flesh back inside his body with my own bare hands so that we could have his funeral)… There were times, though, when the firing would continue for so many days that we couldn’t even go outside and pick up the dead bodies of our loved ones. They would rot outside while we mourned inside the bunkers, without any food, without any water, sometimes for days.’ As she speaks, Ayesha’s mother sits sideways on the bed, dressed in a dark purple shalwar kameez, her head covered with a dupatta. ‘Sometimes, in an attempt to save ourselves, we would end up getting hurt. There was no schedule, no warning before the firing started. It would happen all of a sudden. I remember once my son was very hungry. We hadn’t eaten in three days because the roads were shut due to the firing and no food supplies could reach our area. For a few hours the firing stopped and somehow, I got my hands on some okra. I rushed to cook them and as soon as my son smelt the food he ran for it. But all of a sudden the Indian Army started mortar shelling and my son panicked and slipped. He hit his head hard against the concrete. I dragged him inside the bunker and for three hours, I put my hand on his wound to stop the bleeding. There was nothing else, there was no concept of first-aid back then.’

  ‘It was always all of a sudden,’ adds Ayesha. ‘For instance, back then, if we were sitting as we are right now, we’d all know that at the slightest sound we would have to rush to the bunkers. I remember once there was a small lull in the firing and we were sitting on the steps right outside this room. We weren’t allowed to go any further because of the threat of firing. My khala (maternal aunt) was holding my hair and combing it when a mortar hit a home nearby. There was such a loud bang that everything around us shook. I remember she yelled “Allah,” and grabbed me by my hair and dragged me inside the bunker, my hair still clenched in her hands.’

  She tells me that it was during periods of relative peace, when a short ceasefire would be announced, that these bunkers would be constructed, serving as the only respite when Indian and Pakistani forces fought each other during the 1990s, one of the bloodiest decades of the Kashmir conflict. Ceasefires would be initiated off and on, sometimes for several months, only to be broken by another burst of fire. The back and forth between momentary relief and prolonged violence continued for fourteen to fifteen years, with Neelum Valley becoming the worst victim of it, until the 2003 ceasefire was implemented. But it was perhaps the women and children who faced the brunt of it. With many of the men working in cities like Muzaffarabad, Karachi and Rawalpindi, the women had been left behind to take care of livestock and the children. It was they who had to face the shelling day in and day out, tend to injured relatives and wailing children, risk their lives on a daily basis to provide food to their families and attend to their land and livestock.

  ‘There has been so much loss,’ interrupts another woman, in Pahaari. ‘There’s no family that hasn’t been affected here. The splinters crushed our homes; can you see the cuts in the wood? There were holes everywhere, everything was destroyed. After the ceasefire, we had to rebuild it all from scratch. We went into debt doing that, we had to take so many loans.’

  As Ayesha translates for me, I turn towards her and the other women in the room; they are sitting in the corner with their heads covered with big chaddars. They all belong to the same mohalla (neighbourhood) and seem to be tightly knit with one anot
her. I ask them to tell me how it all started. I’m interested in hearing about their earliest memories of that time and to understand how they make sense of a conflict that predates even Ayesha’s birth.

  ‘It all started when the mujahid came and settled here. I don’t know if it was Zia-ul-Haq or some other Pakistani president but unhone tareekh jari ki hai (they started the movement). This was around 1990-91. It was because of this that the Indian forces started the mortar shelling. It killed our boys, destroyed our land, homes, livelihood. But for what? Kashmir is still not azad. So what’s the point of this struggle then? You count how many years it has been. For fifteen years mortars were fired at us and we had to run away to the jungles. Ayesha’s elder sister wasn’t even twenty days old when the firing began and it wasn’t until she and others like her had children of their own in the early 2000s that peace came. We want all of this, all of this struggle for makbooza Kashmir, to end. Nothing will come out of it.’

  For a moment I’m taken aback. These women are the first people I encounter in ‘Azad’ Kashmir who see the conflict as something triggered by the mujahideen and the Pakistani establishment. Almost everyone I had spoken to until then had spoken highly of the mujahideen, they had seen them as holy warriors, as an army of protectors. I’m surprised at the narrative, particularly by how vocal they are of their disappointment in the movement. I sit back and decide to let them continue speaking without any interruption from my end. I want to hear everything they have to say.

  I must look visibly surprised for Ayesha takes one look at me and explains, ‘You see, to gain azadi, a movement was started by the mujahid. At that time, some mujahideen forces had come here and had got the local people involved with them. The locals didn’t have much awareness, they didn’t know the difference between good and bad. These mujahid told them that they would get azadi for Kashmir, that they would go from here and take makbooza Kashmir away from the Indians, they convinced them to join hands. But nothing like this happened. No azadi was gained. We see no point to the whole armed struggle. It was futile.’

  ‘Who were these muhajid?’ asks Haroon, ‘Were they locals?’

  Almost all the sixteen women in the room speak out in unison, ‘No, no. These were not local people. They came from outside. They came from that Kashmir. Later, Pathans from Afghanistan, or I don’t know where, also got involved but in the beginning there were only mujahids from makbooza Kashmir who came here. They came here for training so that they could go back there and fight for freedom. But this is not how you get freedom. In the process the awam (ordinary people) get killed. We are the ones who lose everything. They finished us in the process. There was no business, no livelihood, no jobs left. For fifteen years, we lived through mortar shelling…’

  ‘…Fifteen years,’ say the other women, rocking back and forth, almost in a state of trance. They keep repeating it, as if they are still living in the midst of those years, as if they are enveloped by that decade-and-a-half from every corner, unable to rise above it even to be able to breathe.

  Then one woman, dressed in a blue shalwar kameez, breaks the spell. ‘The Indians fired a mortar which hit a government school right on the LoC. Twenty-eight children became martyrs. So many others lost their legs, had to get their arms cut off. They were saying a dua (prayer) when the mortar hit there. After that incident, everyone stopped sending their children to school (this incident was quoted by a number of different local sources during the course of my research. However, I could not find a media report on the incident, which indicates how isolated the region was in the 1990s and how under-reported such incidents were). Teachers stopped coming too. Everyone was so scared.’

  ‘When was this?’ I ask.

  ‘Sorry, Madam, it happened so long ago that we don’t remember. After a while such incidents became so common that it was difficult to keep track of them. We were badly affected at the psychological level,’ she replies apologetically.

  ‘I think the incident happened in 1992 because right after that Islamic Relief came here and helped us build bunkers to minimize the damage,’ says Ayesha, an employee of the organization. Islamic Relief Worldwide is an international humanitarian organization that has a presence in over forty countries and was founded in 1984 by Dr Hany El-Banna and students from the University of Birmingham in UK (as a response to the famine in Africa).3 Recently, it has been accused, first by Israel and then by the UAE, of having militant links. The organization has, however, denied the claims, providing audited financial reports to refute the allegations.4 In 2016, it was reported that HSBC bank ended its ties with the organization over fears of terror funding. Islamic Relief expressed surprise at the bank’s decision but told its supporters that its mission of alleviating poverty and suffering would continue unabated.5

  ‘Islamic Relief,’ Ayesha asserts, ‘has done much more for us than the government. They helped build one concrete bunker for every twenty homes, helped us restart our lives… but after that bombing of the school, there was no concept of education left in the area. An entire generation has grown up uneducated. Schooling is for fifteen to sixteen years but for fifteen years the schools remained shut down in Neelum Valley. People who could have completed their matriculation were left illiterate. At first even I studied in a school here but when the firing was at its peak, there was no school left. Around five to six families, including ours, moved to Muzaffarabad for education but not everyone could afford that.’

  It is my understanding that rather than the governments of Pakistan or ‘Azad’ Kashmir stepping in to meet people’s needs at this time, non-state actors and organizations like Islamic Relief were at the forefront. The army maintains its stronghold here while civilian forces remain removed from areas close to the LoC, particularly those prone to shelling. The locals tell me that government officials are nowhere to be seen during episodes of heavy firing. Their only hope during these times is to turn either towards the army or relief organizations. The absence of strong government infrastructure is one of the main reasons that relief agencies—and militant outfits operating on the pretext of providing relief—have found it so easy to gain foothold in the region, a topic I will return to later in the book. Because of this, I found many locals expecting little from the government.

  ‘Haan, these people (Ayesha and others) could get up and leave and go to cities like Muzaffarabad but we couldn’t,’ says another woman, after Ayesha finishes off. ‘We had to run away to the jungles. My son was in Class 2 but we had to make him leave school. He remained an illiterate. How could we give him education in a jungle?’

  ‘What benefit do we get of freedom in Kashmir?’ Ayesha’s tai, in whose house we are sitting, asks after a while. She has been listening quietly, her expression becoming tense each time one of the women speaks about the violence they have been subjected to. Her voice is fierce and she seems to be one of the toughest women in the room. I wonder if the loss of her son has transformed her over the years. What would it do to a mother to have to pick up pieces of her child?

  ‘We don’t need “azadi”. We just need peace in our homes. The government says we will continue our fight against Indian occupation but who will give us money to rebuild our homes again? If the firing restarts, what will we do? We will lose everything once more. We don’t need that Kashmir. We don’t accept it, we don’t want it,’ she finishes off angrily and walks out of the room.

  It is commonly assumed that every Kashmiri wants both parts of Kashmir to unite. But these women are claiming something else. They are openly telling me they do not care about the movement, they do not care about the struggle for makbooza Kashmir, they do not care about ‘azadi’. They are sick and tired of it. They have lost too much. This is contrary to anything I have heard so far and makes me realize how much more there is to uncover about this region and its people, how many more stereotypes and assumptions I have to examine, how many state narratives I have to peel away…

  I am not certain if the tai will return but a few minutes later she
is back, holding another picture of her son. She brings it close to me and says, ‘Look at him. What did he do to deserve death? He was only twenty-two, only twenty-two.’ I stare at the picture. A young clean-shaven boy in a blue shirt stares back at me. I feel like throwing up, imagining him as crushed pieces of bone and flesh. I don’t know what to say to her. Could anyone deserve such a death? Could any cause, any goal, justify such an end?

  I look up at her, my eyes filled with tears. I want her to know I’m sorry but I find no words. She stares back at me, her eyes dry, her face taut. For a little while our eyes linger on each other. Then I look away, awkwardly, knowing there’s no relief I can offer her. She slowly removes the picture and walks out of the room again.

  Ten minutes later she is back, with hot cups of tea and cake for all of us.

  ***

  ‘Do you see my son, that one sitting outside?’ Ayesha’s mother points to a young boy sitting on the steps outside. I had first noticed him a few minutes after entering the house. Although close to two hours have passed, he has remained on the spot, fixated on the pebbles. ‘He has been psychologically impaired because of the war.’ Reluctantly, I ask her what happened. I’m afraid of what she may say, afraid to hear another horror story, another anecdote from their everyday reality. I almost wish I could get up and leave, pretend that these incidents had never taken place.

  ‘There was a moment of peace in between the firing, so I had come out to bathe my son… he was six or seven months old,’ she says. ‘I bathed him and put him to sleep on a small charpai in the verandah. We were hearing that there was peace, aman, like there is right now, so I came inside to clean the house. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, there was intense shelling, followed by smoke everywhere. I ran to the bunker to save my life, leaving my son outside on the other side of the house. He was too far away for me to reach… Had I run to the other side, I would have been hit by the mortar. I could hear him screaming but I couldn’t get out from the bunker to grab him. I would’ve been killed too. Imagine the fear, that a mother couldn’t even pick up her child and bring him inside. You cannot imagine what I went through, stuck inside a bunker, hearing his screams, thinking my son was going to be killed and there was nothing I could do to save him. The firing continued nonstop for 15 minutes—and then intermittently—but miraculously it missed him. It was only an hour later, when the firing changed its direction, that I ran out discreetly and grabbed my son. He was still lying naked, screaming. I ran with him to the road, where there were a few cars trying to take the injured to the hospitals. Thirty-five people were injured in Athmuqam that day. I sat in one of the cars and rushed to Sundokh (a village approximately 10-12 kilometres from Athmuqam). Only once I had reached there could I dress my child. There was such frenzy, such chaos everywhere. Ever since that day, my son is psychologically impaired. It’s been so many years, he’s fourteen years old now, but he still gets these fits…’