The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  The Squad knew it needed to do something before the remaining hostages fell victim to the emerging divisions in the kidnappers’ camp and the rage of the Movement’s ISI sponsors. Al Faran was disintegrating. Political will in Pakistan was ebbing. ‘In these conditions Pakistan is liable to conceal all clues of its involvement and burn the whole operation,’ thought one Squad veteran. The lives of the hostages hung by a thread. But before it could make any contingency plans the Squad lost its eyes.

  Agent A went missing. He failed to turn up at a prearranged rendezvous with his Crime Branch handler at the southern end of the Warwan. Soon after, the Squad received reports of a firefight between a Rashtriya Rifles unit patrolling near Inshan and unidentified ‘Pakistani militants’. Afterwards, the army, following normal procedure, handed over a body to the police at Anantnag. The Squad identified the dead man as Agent A, and sent a sombre report up the line: Agent A’s double dealing had been rumbled, the ISI having worked out that he was in the pay of India. ‘Rather than bloodying themselves, the ISI, posing as Kashmiri villagers, had contacted the Rashtriya Rifles base to report a Pakistan spy in the valley, giving away his rendezvous spot,’ the Squad reported bitterly. ‘Indian soldiers were waiting for our agent when he arrived, not knowing he was one of ours.’

  The death of Agent A was a body blow, but it got Squad leader Mushtaq Sadiq thinking about the mess of Kashmir. He dwelled on India’s secret surveillance of Sukhnoi, its apparent tactic of keeping the kidnappers deliberately penned in, and how Pakistan had hoodwinked the Indian security forces into killing their own agent. India and Pakistan fought each other in the valley by manipulating the lives of others. Everything that happened here involved acts of ventriloquism, with traitors, proxies and informers deployed by both sides, and civilians becoming the casualties. Veterans like him and his counterparts in Pakistan called it ‘the Game’. One leading hand in the Squad said: ‘Pakistan tried something, India blocked it and turned it around, or the other way around, and there were so many angles to it, that really when you were playing it you forgot yourself completely, until it seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world.’

  The overarching strategy of the Game, the detective said, was to use any means necessary to sow confusion, hatred and suspicion between the different religions, races and competing militant outfits in Kashmir, so that no one group dominated, and all remained weaker than India’s security forces. But the Game went far beyond the age-old tactic of divide and rule: ‘We slandered and manipulated. We placed words into someone else’s mouth to poison friendships. We created false fronts, fictitious outfits, to commit unthinkable crimes. We tapped phones, listened in to illicit lovers and blackmailed them. There was no moral compass. The Game had absolutely no boundaries, and this was something you only came to realise once you were no longer in it. And then you would stand back, sickened by what you had done.’

  Soldiers, policemen and spies, the constitutional guardians of the state, became killers or hired them, disguising themselves as Islamic militants or Kashmiri political activists to spill the blood of soft targets, blackening the name of the freedom movement: ‘Massacres in a village, rapes at night of women fetching water, morale-sapping shootings and bombings that targeted lawyers, journalists, trade unionists and philanthropists in the high street, their offices or homes. Some of it was accidental, but most of it was done to inflame, poison, erode and terrify all residents.’

  There were no rules, only outcomes. The result was a permanent, rumbling chaos in the valley that both prevented Pakistan or the Kashmiris from moulding a resistance that was capable of capturing the state from India, and stopped India from imposing a profound enough peace to be able to incorporate the state into its union.

  The Squad began to wonder whether the Indian response to the kidnappings was in some way a part of the Game, a reaction to Pakistan’s sponsoring of the terrorist incident. It had happened before, back in June 1994, when Indian intelligence had made a few daring and brutal moves during the Housego/Mackie hostage crisis that had jeopardised the whole operation to free them, but that were later claimed to have been justified since they almost extinguished the militancy in south Kashmir.

  Since 1989 the south of the valley had been increasingly dominated by two militant outfits. The home-grown Kashmiri rebels of Hizbul Mujahideen, generously backed by the ISI and steered by Sunni clerics in Pakistan, competed for dominance with the Movement (Pakistan-born, but having recruited Sikander and other Kashmiris to give it grassroots credibility). Alarmed at the power wielded by these two outfits, which had made the region’s main town, Anantnag, and the hills that ringed it ungovernable, the IB tried to penetrate both in order to set one against the other. Eventually Indian intelligence turned a senior field commander in HM, known as ‘Umar’. As the kidnappings of Kim Housego and David Mackie were unfolding, Umar was fed false intelligence that the Movement’s key spiritual advisor in Anantnag, Qazi Nisar, was stealing money from his own mosque, while collaborating with India to actively canvass against the militancy. The embezzlement allegation was an outright lie, but was particularly damaging for an ascetic cleric. The collaboration claim was subtler, and far harder to refute, as it relied on a nasty distortion of the truth.

  Cleric Qazi Nisar, who was much respected by Sikander, had been persuaded by the Housego family to intercede to get Kim and David Mackie freed. Twisting this out of context, Umar passed on the false charges against Qazi Nisar to the HM command. Hardliners there ruled that the much-respected holy man was a treacherous double-dealer, and ordered his execution. A few days later, on 19 June 1994, Umar carried out the cleric’s killing, bringing a shocked Anantnag to a standstill. Following orders from his Indian handlers, Umar called Kashmiri journalists like the BBC’s Yusuf Jameel and blamed the murder on Sikander, telling them that he had been angered at Qazi Nisar’s meddling in the kidnapping. Since the Movement was known locally to be responsible for the Housego/Mackie abductions, this claim appeared credible, and Sikander was widely blamed, threatening to wipe out his standing in the district that was his power base. As hundreds of thousands of people massed for Qazi Nisar’s funeral, distraught at the killing of such a holy man, the Movement, understanding the danger it was in, declared war on HM for framing it. According to a Squad veteran, ‘The Indian security forces sat back to watch the slaughter, months of tit-for-tat killings exploding in the district that drained HM and sapped the Movement, getting rid of a troublesome cleric along the way.’ Having lost its intermediary, the operation to free the two Western hostages almost collapsed. Only the perseverance of David Housego saved the day, as he struggled relentlessly to find new ways to pressure the Movement into releasing his teenage son.

  Whether it was the recent death of Agent A, or the setting-up of Qazi Nisar, the simple truth was that every tragedy that struck the benighted valley was contrived or manipulated by either India or Pakistan. The Squad veteran concluded: ‘For the security forces, winning the war in Kashmir, playing the Game, came before everything else, including the lives of a few unimportant backpackers.’

  Pakistan had already played its hand in the current operation, backing the Movement. The Squad was certain, too, that the ISI had helped to form and equip al Faran. Islamabad was keen to see India squirm as it tried to defuse the resulting hostage crisis, drawing international attention to the Kashmir imbroglio, which garnered few global headlines these days. ‘Then it had been India’s turn to play,’ a Squad officer said. ‘India responded chaotically at first, letting the abduction meander on while the pilgrimage to the ice cave was concluded.’ New Delhi only turned its attention to the captives in the mountains in August, and then took every opportunity to focus worldwide attention on Pakistan’s responsibility for the kidnappings, with Islamabad labelled as ‘the architect of terror in the valley’. Every day the abduction was allowed to continue, another statement came from New Delhi haranguing Islamabad in a rolling propaganda offensive that made Pakistan increasingly uncomfortable. Thin
king about the Indian helicopter above Sukhnoi that watched everything and did nothing, the Squad sent a report along these lines to the higher-ups: ‘Are we still trying to rescue the hostages? Or does the state have another plan?’

  If India was deliberately dragging its feet on this case, squeezing the kidnapping for maximum propaganda value, someone on the Indian side would have to take the blame if the crisis ended with blood being spilled. The Squad had no intention of being hung out to dry, and branded as incompetent. They needed to do something that did not happen too often in Kashmir: solve the crime. ‘We had become attached to the case, and felt for the hostages,’ said a Squad officer. ‘We feared too for our careers.’ They searched for new sources to help them peer into remote Sukhnoi, but unable to replace Agent A, by the end of August they had only gained a partial view, snatches gleaned from brief conversations with itinerant residents coming and going to and from the village.

  The little that did emerge, recorded in the Crime Branch file, showed that while all official efforts in Srinagar centred on pushing Jehangir into providing proof-of-life information, the kidnap party sat tight in the Warwan. The Turk remained as commander, quarrelling with his deputy Qari Zarar. Sikander, via his safe houses east of Anantnag and in Pahalgam, was the Movement’s linchpin, handling all communications with Pakistan. The four captives remained prisoners in their wooden ‘guesthouse’ in Sukhnoi.

  However, as soon as IG Rajinder Tikoo’s hard-won secret cash deal had been blown into the open on 18 September, convincing Tikoo that ‘someone in the Indian establishment wanted this rescue operation to fail’ and leading him to quit his negotiator role, everything changed. ‘Al Faran packed up and fled,’ said a villager from Gomry, the settlement two down from Sukhnoi. ‘They were gone by the third week of September,’ a teacher from the same village confirmed, having travelled to Sukhnoi to visit sick relatives. ‘The guesthouse was empty for the first time since late July, although in Sukhnoi villagers remained scarred by what had happened. They feared al Faran could return any time, and were on tenterhooks. They wrestled with the guilt, sickened by what they had been forced to collaborate in. No one would go near the guesthouse. But what else could they have done?’ Another local from nearby Brayan saw the gunmen making their way down the valley with Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk. Heavily bearded and ‘wearing Khan dress and plastic shoes’, these days the hostages and the militants all looked alike as they trudged off south. After eleven stationary weeks, much of them under close observation, they disappeared, throwing the Squad into a panic as they searched for their trail.

  Crime Branch agents were sent over Mardan Top and down to Inshan to comb through the scattered lower villages of the Warwan, tramping worn paths that criss-crossed the valley bottom. Given its physical remoteness and its deep connections to the militancy, the Warwan remained a treacherous place. The Squad stayed in the background while their emissaries sat down at smoky firesides, conducting polite conversations that began with tea and discussions about the harshness of life, but then moved on to more probing questions about any militants who had recently passed through with foreigners. Gently, villagers began volunteering information, delighted to be free of al Faran, and revealing how, despite being terrified of the gunmen and the security forces, they had secreted many things away over the past two and a half months.

  Hans Christian Ostrø’s writings had been discovered by someone in the Warwan and smuggled out of the valley, and villagers confirmed that all of the hostages had kept themselves busy by writing on anything they could get hold of: scraps of paper, bits of bandage, food packaging and strips of bark. In 1994, Kim Housego had done the same. ‘Villagers or herders were passing through all the time, on their way up or down the valley,’ he recalled. ‘We did not know where they were going, but we felt they were our only chance of getting a message to the outside world.’ To increase the chances of this happening, as many notes as possible were left lying around. ‘You cannot imagine what you are capable of until you face a situation like this yourself,’ Kim said. ‘We contemplated writing on the rocks, and on our rubbish, on anything we could utilise.’

  This time around, the hostages also appeared to have discarded or hidden their missives whenever and wherever they could. Almost whenever the villagers passed Sukhnoi’s improvised volleyball court, or walked along the meandering silt tracks beside the river, they had found scraps of the hostages’ writings, paper fragments ground into the mud by passing hooves and plastic sandals. When they trotted on their ponies between the protective stone walls of the bridlepaths, they had discovered pieces of paper jutting out of the dark grey rock or peeking out of the cairns left by European climbers who had mapped the region in the early twentieth century. They had pulled yet more from the fields as they turned the soil with their bullock-drawn ploughs. Many things had also been concealed in Sukhnoi village itself, forced into gaps between the large foundation stones around the mosque, between the rocks beside the riverbank that the villagers used as their night-time toilet, and into the split wooden poles that propped up their houses. Any of this material would have encouraged the partners and families waiting for news, but they got to see none of it. ‘Much later, I heard stories that Don had been writing, writing, writing,’ recalled Jane Schelly. ‘But we never saw anything. Not a single sheet.’

  Like the residents of Zargibal, who had been too scared to report Ostrø’s abduction immediately, the people of the Warwan feared being found with incriminating papers by either the kidnappers or the Indian security forces. So they had handed most of what they picked up to literate schoolteachers or pharmacists, who then copied their contents, as best they could, into dog-eared exercise books that they stashed with their animals, or beneath the floorboards of their homes. The originals were burned. Unfortunately, some of these copy books had also been deliberately destroyed shortly before the al Faran party departed the area, the hostages’ thoughts and fears lost forever, as villagers were panicked by al Faran gunmen trawling through the Warwan looking for supplies for their next mission.

  Now, with the valley theirs again, the villagers retrieved what remained to paint a picture of an increasingly isolated and frustrated party of men who could not understand why no one came to rescue them.

  ‘We have been kidnapped,’ one shopkeeper read from some spidery notes. He said he had paraphrased the original document, a sheet of paper found wrapped around a ball of mud, getting down what he took to be its meaning, but not the exact words. He had not used English in many years. ‘We are being kept in a wooden hut, a four-hour walk north from here,’ the notes continued. ‘We do not know the name of the place. We are in extreme danger. We need your help. Take this message to the authorities.’ There were five signatures beneath a map with a dotted line tracing a route from Pahalgam over the tops of mountains and passes labelled ‘Sheshnag’ and ‘Sonasar’, and down into a valley spelled ‘Varvan’. The shopkeeper had noted the unusual spelling, a transcription of the strong accent of Sukhnoi people, who pronounce the ‘w’s in Warwan as ‘v’s.

  This note appeared to have been written soon after the hostage party reached the Warwan Valley in the second week of July, when the hostages had a fresh mental picture of their route. If, like Kim Housego, they had listened to reports about their abduction on the radios carried by al Faran, they would already have had an inkling that search efforts were unfolding. For much of Kim’s time in captivity, the kidnap party had been glued to their radio sets, he said, listening avidly to news reports about the kidnapping on Indian state radio, Pakistani channels and the BBC World Service. Kim recalled the delight of one particular night when he heard his father’s name mentioned several times in a BBC Urdu broadcast. He also remembered how the kidnappers had become electrified whenever they heard any of the Movement’s leaders back in Pakistan referred to on air. ‘All the group [would] raise their hands in salute,’ then shout the commander’s name followed by the word ‘Zindabad’, or ‘Long live’. Isolated as they were, everyone fe
lt desperate for reassurance. The Squad wondered how the hostages would have felt if they had overheard the reports of the first press conference given by Jane, Julie, Cath and Anne at the Welcome Hotel on 13 July. The detectives themselves had been moved as they listened to Julie’s voice, trembling across the airwaves: ‘In the name of God, let our loved ones go. We miss them terribly.’

  On other scraps of paper, four of the hostages had written brief descriptions of themselves, according to records kept by a schoolteacher.

  Don: ‘I am a US citizen. I am married to Jane. I am 42 years old. I’m still pretty fit. I was surprised how well I managed the walk over the top from Pahalgam. Spectacular views despite doing it under duress. Now we are resting beside the river. The most frustrating thing is not having language in common. And the microbes. Some of us have been hit by dysentery. We cannot drink the glacier water as its high mineral load gives everyone a raging thirst. The pure water stream behind the village is fine but almost dry. There is very little food. We have organised a rota to forage for wild herbs. The gunmen never leave our sides. They are all devout. They do not seem like killers. Some of them act like kids.’

  Kim Housego had picked up Hindi during his school days in New Delhi, and also had a few words of Urdu. Hans Christian Ostrø was the only one of the 1995 hostages who could speak a word of either language, leaving the others powerless to communicate with their captors. Hans Christian wrote of himself: ‘I am from Oslo, Norway. I am 27. The villagers call this place Sukh-nis. They speak differently to everyone else I have met. It was a long and difficult walk but if I could get away I would be able to find the way back to Pahalgam. We have drawn maps, using charcoal we stole from the fire. This was our first task. The people who took us are frightened. They do not know how to look after us. Schub, he is good. But the Kommando [sic], he is not a good man. Sometimes he looks like he wants to kill me. We have started a volleyball team. I am also trying to get villagers to learn kathakali, but the gunmen have told them not to speak to us and so we have to dance in silence. These are superstitious, stupid men. This place is at the end of the world.’ As always, Ostrø had been looking for any way to communicate with and reach out to the strangers around him, unafraid of being somewhere alien and new.