The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  ‘Ghayr mulki,’ said the anonymous caller. The phrase meant ‘foreign’. Yusuf bit his tongue and wondered: ‘This could be a very significant story. Do I have it to myself?’

  The caller spilled some more details, saying that the abduction of the foreigners was the work of ‘al Faran’. Like everyone else who heard this name, Yusuf frowned, as he jotted it down on his pad. He suspected that this group must be either a blind or an offshoot of a better-known faction. In an insurgency that had disintegrated into many hundreds of outfits, prompted by spies from Pakistan and India who encouraged dogfights and jealousies by sponsoring sectarian hits and fomenting betrayals, this was by no means unusual. ‘Anyhow,’ Yusuf thought, ‘whoever’s behind the kidnapping doesn’t really matter just yet. It was enough that there had been a crime.’ He knew the news would trigger a feeding frenzy: foreigners (for which he read tourists) abducted at gunpoint, no doubt while trekking in the mountains of Kashmir, the only place to which a trickle of backpackers still came. He spared a momentary thought for the unsuspecting holidaymakers, whoever they were, unfamiliar with the local terrain and language, uninitiated in the pervasive terror of the valley, hauled from their tents by masked men speaking a Babel of languages.

  The caller recapped. Four foreigners trekking above Pahalgam had been seized at gunpoint by a militant outfit calling itself al Faran. There would be dire consequences for the hostages unless the Indian government agreed to free twenty-one Muslim prisoners incarcerated in Indian jails. The man rattled off a long list of names, and stressed that the clock was ticking.

  After he had hung up, Yusuf wondered how he should proceed. Reporting these kinds of incidents in Kashmir carried considerable personal risks. Twice, over the years, masked men had lobbed grenades at his office and his home, unhappy about one of his bulletins. Another aggrieved group had demanded he appear before its qayadat (leadership council), or face execution. A third had denounced him as a collaborator just for reporting the outspoken views of a junior Congress minister, Rajesh Pilot.

  Threats came from all sides. Back in the summer of 1990, soldiers from the 11th Gurkha Rifles had abducted him from Srinagar and transported him several hours away to remote Uri, far from friends and contacts, for interrogation. There was no point in his blaming whoever had made whatever unsubstantiated allegations the Indian Army was now acting upon. In those early days of the militancy, becoming a suspect was as unavoidable as catching a cold. All it required was for a needy contact to haemorrhage the names of everyone he could think of while being dangled by his ankles, with a funnel shoved up his rectum. And then his whole neighbourhood was incriminated. This was a favoured method of the security forces – petrol, preferably laced with chilli powder, decanted into a naked, upended prisoner. After thirty gruelling hours in the hands of Lt. Col. Bhanwar Singh, Yusuf somehow talked his way free, having to make his own way back to distant Srinagar. But in a dirty war you learned not to take things too personally.

  Nine months ago the Indian security forces had got him again, beating him viciously as he covered a protest by the Daughters of the Nation, a fringe women’s group lobbying for strict adherence to Koranic law, demanding that women completely cover up. For centuries, Muslim women of all ages had walked with their faces uncovered in Kashmir, having little truck with Islamists or their garb. But after the attack on Yusuf some people came to the conclusion that maybe the Daughters were right, and only by concealing their entire persons within an Afghan burqa would they be protected from a state so pathological that it was happy to see a BBC man thrashed in broad daylight.

  Yusuf had been hospitalised for four days. Afterwards, friends in the Press Enclave had warned him to get out of the valley and let things simmer down. But he had stayed. Not long afterwards Ghulam Mohammed, a well-liked freelancer, had received a night visit from the Indian Army’s Punjab regiment and been asked to write up a heroic tale about the recent slaying of two militants. Ghulam had told colleagues that his research revealed that the dead men were in fact blameless locals who had been killed in cold blood. The soldiers were furious, warning Ghulam that there would be repercussions, and days later the journalist lay dead, shot in his own parlour, along with his eight-year-old son. The front pages of the next morning’s papers were printed black all over in protest at the killings.

  Still, there was no shortage of Kashmiris wanting to do what Yusuf did. The reason lay flapping in the wind on the walk up to Amira Kadal, the arched bridge that linked Residency Road to Srinagar’s central market. On any morning, come rain or snow, newspaper vendors laid out titles in a fan on their handcarts. A literate state of loquacious inhabitants, gripped by an emergency in which every form of communication was often withdrawn as a form of collective punishment, had become fixated by news. Yusuf kept the voice of Sikander in his head as he prepared a late-night dispatch.

  Yusuf Jameel and Sikander had spoken many times, and had met at least twice. The first time had been early in 1994, when Sikander had telephoned the Press Enclave to rant about the arrest of Nasrullah Langrial, the notorious Pakistani militant who for more than a year had been careering around the valley causing mayhem. Six weeks previously the Indians had finally caught up with Langrial, and Yusuf had reported the incident, telling colleagues afterwards that the arrest of such a high-profile Pakistan-backed mujahid would ‘result in bloodshed’.

  The Movement would do whatever it could to spring their man, Sikander had warned then. He had also asked Yusuf to come to a mountain hideout, promising him a scoop. Heart in mouth, the BBC stringer had eventually agreed to meet him at an isolated rendezvous. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he had said to himself. Which is all well and good somewhere like London or New York, where at worst you might lose a handful of banknotes on a wasted lunch. But here in Kashmir, if things went wrong someone was likely to find his body thrown into a gutter behind the cemetery in Anantnag. For security, and in case there were any picture opportunities, Yusuf had taken along his great friend Mushtaq Ali, an Agence France-Press photographer.

  Following detailed instructions, the two had climbed up through the steep woods rising to the east of Anantnag, eventually arriving at a remote col somewhere near Chhatargul village, where a tall, bearded young Kashmiri introduced himself as Sikander. Alongside him were other fighters: one called the Turk, another called the Afghani, and a Yemeni who was referred to as ‘Supahi’. At the time, Yusuf and Mushtaq had had no idea of the significance of these men, or of the aspirations of the newly launched Movement. But just as Sikander was beginning to explain what all this was about, chaos had broken out. ‘Run!’ Sikander had screamed, pointing to a glint high up on a mountain ledge that Yusuf had assumed was just sunlight bouncing off some long-abandoned shrine. ‘Telescopic sights!’ Sikander had bellowed as he headed for cover.

  Yusuf and Mushtaq had run for their lives, following the gunmen into the pine trees. Here, to their shock, they found several miserable-looking Indian soldiers tied to each other. ‘Sikander told us that these men had just been captured at the water gardens of Verinag.’ He was referring to the former holiday retreat for Mughal Emperors, south of Anantnag town. One of the prisoners was identified as Major Bhupinder Singh, whom Sikander intended to trade for Langrial. Following Sikander’s instructions, Mushtaq had taken some photographs, and he and Yusuf returned to Srinagar to break the kidnapping story. After New Delhi had refused to budge, Major Singh had been photographed once more, this time dead and face-down in an open sewer.

  Barely a month later, Yusuf had been called to a press conference in Badami Bagh, Srinagar’s army nerve centre south of Dal Lake, a vast encampment of razor wire, whitewashed lookout towers and sandbags that ran alongside Maulana Azad Road and extended into the forests of Shankarashariya, the pointed hill that sat beside Dal Lake. Badami Bagh was named after an almond orchard that had once grown there, but these days all Kashmiris knew it as BB Cantt: headquarters of the Indian Army 15th Corps, the force responsible for maintaining law and order throughout
the whole of Jammu and Kashmir. Now it was the security forces’ turn to gloat. A gleeful Corps Commander, Brigadier Arjun Ray, had a surprise. His troops had just captured Masood Azhar and Sajjad Khan, aka the Afghani, two key players in the Movement, a relatively new ISI-backed militant group that the Indian Army described as being ‘intent on spreading chaos through the valley’. Yusuf says: ‘The army was understandably in a back-slapping mood over the arrests.’ That evening he received an anonymous phone call with another angle on the story. His voice shaking and incoherent, the caller had warned that the Movement would respond. Yusuf knew at once. This was Sikander, and his message presaged a fifteen-day bombing spree.

  When Yusuf next heard from Sikander it was June 1994, and this time the young militant was calmer, and sounded pleased with himself. He revealed that the Movement had just kidnapped two British tourists from the hills above Pahalgam. One was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, Kim Housego. The other was a video director from London called David Mackie. ‘Now,’ Sikander warned Yusuf, ‘their lives are hanging by a thread unless Langrial, Masood and the Afghani are freed.’

  The Movement had crossed a line. Up to now, most home-grown Kashmiri militants had agreed that targeting foreigners would destroy any hopes Kashmir had of returning to its former incarnation as a haven for backpackers and trekkers once this war was over and done with. Until the kidnapping of Housego and Mackie, this understanding had largely been adhered to, barring two deviations very early on in the conflict. A couple of Swedish engineers had been captured back in March 1991 by the Muslim Janbaz Force, a Kashmiri outfit, but had been released unharmed after ninety-seven days. Three months later, eight Israeli tourists were seized from a houseboat on Dal Lake. This incident had quickly degenerated into farce, with the tourists snatching the kidnappers’ weapons and all escaping, except one who was fatally wounded.

  As Yusuf wrote up his story on the kidnapping of Housego and Mackie, wondering why Sikander had broken the unspoken rule, he had an unexpected visitor in the Press Enclave. It was David Housego, whom Yusuf had known from his days as the New Delhi bureau chief for the Financial Times. Now retired, David had remained in the city to run his own business. David and Yusuf were men of the same mould, the Englishman having been a much-admired reporter with influential contacts across the subcontinent and a wide circle of loyal Indian friends. Now David explained that he wanted Yusuf to help kick up a stink in order to try to free his son Kim, who had just been seized with David Mackie while the family was trekking to celebrate David’s wife Jenny’s fiftieth birthday and Kim’s impending departure for Britain, where he was about to start boarding school.

  Yusuf grabbed his notebook, and David described how he, Jenny and Kim had been held up on their return from a day trip to the Kolahoi Glacier. Having camped in the Meadow for a night, just as Jane and Don, Keith and Julie, Paul and Cath and John Childs would do a year later, they had packed up and were walking down to Aru when three men carrying Kalashnikovs stepped out from the trees to block their path. David’s initial assumption was that they were Kashmiris from one of the groups he had interviewed during his many trips to the state for the Financial Times. But without saying a word, one of the men had put his hand in David’s pocket and taken his money. ‘The leader then said, “We are looking for Israeli spies. No harm will come to you,”’ David told Yusuf. ‘He told us we would be escorted down to Aru to have our passports checked. We would wait for his return that evening.’

  At Aru, the Housegos had been taken to the Milky Way Tourist Bungalow, the run-down-looking establishment Paul Wells had photographed a year later, until his guide had urged him to move on, filled with a wariness that he chose not to share with his guests. Here the Housegos found another British couple, David and Cathy Mackie, who had been woken in the middle of the night by armed men who had raided the Milky Way. David told Yusuf, ‘The Mackies watched our arrival from a first-floor balcony, and said they had been told they would be released that night, after the militants moved out of the village.’

  While they waited, David Housego got a closer look at the gunmen. ‘I could tell from their language and dress they were Afghanis and Pakistanis from the frontier, one of the Islamic fundamentalist groups that had been thrown up by the Afghan conflict.’ He worried that such men might be ruthless. ‘Night came. There was still no sign of us being set free.’ More militants arrived. ‘We began to feel apprehensive.’ After dinner, David and Jenny Housego and Cathy Mackie were called one by one into another room, on the pretext of writing down their names and addresses. ‘It was only when the door was locked behind us that we realised that my son and Cathy’s husband had been separated from us.’

  In the middle of the night, David heard what sounded like the militants moving out. Restless and exasperated, at 4.30 a.m. he broke down the door of their room to find they were alone. ‘We searched the village, going with growing despair from house to house. No sign of Kim and David.’ Instead, they found a note in Urdu, left behind in the room where Kim and David Mackie had been. It demanded the release of three men: Masood, the Afghani and Langrial. The names had meant nothing to David.

  At Pahalgam police station, where they reported the kidnapping, just as Jane Schelly would do thirteen months later, the Duty Inspector had ‘burst into tears’, setting Jenny off too. Afterwards the party had come down to Srinagar, ‘Cathy walking barefoot as her shoes had been stolen’, where the well-connected David had called up the Chief Secretary of Kashmir, the state’s most senior bureaucrat, who was a personal friend. Afterwards he had visited the offices of Rajinder Tikoo, the Inspector General of Kashmir Zone, one of the valley’s most senior police officers, and had spoken on the phone to Brigadier Arjun Ray, the army chief at BB Cantt. ‘Ray made it clear there was no question of prisoners being released,’ David told Yusuf. The Brigadier also said the army would not launch any rescue operation that would put the hostages’ lives at risk. David’s best bet was to try to get friends to bring pressure on the Pakistani government.

  He suspected New Delhi would do little to secure the hostages’ freedom unless its hand was forced. He also believed that if the story was widely publicised, Kashmiris would not stand by while Westerners were sacrificed in the name of their liberty, especially when a blameless teenager was involved. His explanation complete, David glanced around Yusuf’s office. ‘That’s them!’ he had suddenly shouted, pointing excitedly to Mushtaq Ali’s photographs of Sikander, the Turk, the Afghani and Supahi. ‘They’re the ones who seized us two days back in the Meadow!’ Now Yusuf knew something no one else did: that the Movement was behind the hostage drama, and Sikander was personally involved. He promised to help David any way he could.

  Kim Housego and David Mackie would endure seventeen agonising days in captivity as pressure was heaped on the Movement and Pakistan’s civilian government. Yusuf Jameel had sent regular updates to the BBC, while David Housego did rounds of interviews, visiting Brigadier Ray and Rajinder Tikoo at his headquarters in the Batamaloo neighbourhood of Srinagar. At one point it looked as if the hostages would be killed, after Qazi Nisar, a highly influential mirvaiz, or chief cleric, in unruly Anantnag who had publicly agreed to help the families by acting as an intermediary was shot dead by masked gunmen. Some newspapers reported that the Movement had executed the priest, to stop him embarrassing them into surrender. The militant outfit issued a furious denial, insisting that Qazi Nisar was the victim of the Indian intelligence forces.

  When Yusuf Jameel went down to Anantnag to cover Qazi Nisar’s funeral, he was not sure which of these stories he believed. ‘But whatever the truth, it was murky. And the hostages were still out there.’ The entire grief-stricken town ground to a halt as hundreds of thousands of mourners came out to bear the cleric’s coffin on high. Yusuf spotted Sikander in the crowd, surrounded by masked men. A furious Sikander strode over to him. ‘He blamed the media for the Movement being tarnished with Qazi Nisar’s killing. He said I had to set the record straight.’ Sikander demanded that th
e BBC run a piece right away, carrying his views. Yusuf refused, telling him that the one rule he stuck to in dealing with the army and militants alike was never to report anything under duress. A mob began to close in on the BBC man and his colleagues, young men instructed to pelt them with stones, forcing them to run for a waiting car which was damaged in the fusillade.

  This time Sikander had really scared Yusuf, who vowed that he would not meet the Movement’s district commander face to face again. But a few days later he had received another breathless middle-of-the-night call, instructing him to go to a roadside shrine between Anantnag and Aishmuqam, on the route up to Pahalgam. ‘I knew at once it was Sikander. He claimed that the hostages were about to be released.’ But Yusuf worried that he was being set up. He was torn. ‘I owed it to my good friend David Housego to do anything I could to help rescue his son,’ he said. But he owed it to his own family not to risk his life.

  In the end, a compromise was reached. His photographer friend Mushtaq Ali volunteered to go for him. He too had the advantage of knowing Sikander personally, through the Major Bhupinder Singh affair, but he wasn’t wrapped up in the unpleasantness of the Qazi Nisar killing. Everyone would buy the pictures if Kim and David were released. Mushtaq set out, taking another photographer for back-up. Following Sikander’s instructions, they drove to the shrine, parked in a nearby poplar nursery and waited for a man to arrive carrying a watermelon, as agreed by Sikander.

  Finally, a man had duly emerged with his fruit, and led a tense Mushtaq and his colleague to an empty building. They waited there for several hours, until Kim Housego and David Mackie arrived. It was a moment Kim would never forget: ‘Two rickshaws had taken us through the centre of town to a forest. We walked for a couple of minutes and saw journalists appearing from an empty house clicking with their cameras.’ After seventeen days of being moved around the Warwan Valley and Anantnag, Kim could not believe it. He sat down, ‘shaking with anxiety’, to be photographed by Mushtaq Ali. The Movement had coached him on what to say, and he repeated the story. ‘At the end the militants talked together and then announced that we would be freed to go with the journalists. “You shall be missed around here,” the masked commander said to me.’