The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  Their first stop was Batamaloo, the Kashmiri police headquarters, where Director General Sabharwal was waiting for them, smiling nervously, his hair slicked down. Pens hovering above blank notebook pages, Jane and Julie had decided to comprehensively document everything, and to make it known to everyone they saw that whatever they told them was on the record. There was something they needed cleared up, Jane explained to Sabharwal. Either the authorities had believed the sightings of the hostages moving around Anantnag throughout the spring of 1996 (not to forget the DG’s own statement in March that Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk were very much alive), or they accepted Naseer’s story, that they been shot and buried in the forests of Magam in December 1995. It was one or the other, Jane said.

  The DG paused, then winced and pursed his lips. ‘Money may have exchanged hands,’ he mumbled. What exactly did he mean, Jane asked. ‘Eyewitnesses may have been paid to make statements,’ he expanded. Then he bulldozed on, leaving this provocative thought hanging, as if he had never expressed it. But Jane and Julie were already taking its implications in. Every sighting they had meticulously plotted on the trekking maps since January 1996 was potentially unreliable. They left Sabharwal’s office enraged by his casual admission. Out in the streets of Srinagar they tried to digest it. Coming back to the city now, armed with all the knowledge they had gained over the past year, Jane could not believe she had once considered it a holiday destination. Yet everywhere she and Julie went they saw young trekkers and backpackers, on their way to the mountains.

  General Saklani was next. They expected the Security Advisor of all people to toe the line when it came to backing Naseer’s account. But from the moment their meeting started, Saklani distanced himself from the Movement’s financier. Naseer ‘could not be trusted’. There was plenty of ‘room for hope’. All this despite the hundreds of police who had been ferried to the hunt in Magam woods, and the weeks of hoopla surrounding Naseer’s confession. Jane and Julie were thrown, as they tried to understand how the General could have flipped so completely from believing in the deaths of the hostages to championing a continuing search. Saklani recited a gamut of new sightings, explaining how the police had come by the information, whether they were thought to be reliable, and plotting the hostages’ movements on a map. Jane and Julie concluded that it did not really matter what he thought – he probably did not have a personal view on anything that he was prepared to share. Saklani dutifully represented the opinions of others, and presumably these others had performed a volte-face on Naseer for some reason that was not clear. The women decided to take advantage of this apparent change of heart. They asked Saklani if he could help them to visit some of the key locations, and he agreed. Soon he was driving them to an airstrip, where they boarded an army helicopter. On 1 August they were flown to Kokernag, the scene of several reported sightings over the winter. However, as they landed, they were greeted by a press pack that Saklani had called to record every moment of what they now realised was a whistle-stop tour of Pakistan-backed terror in the valley.

  Another election was coming, this time for the Kashmir state legislature, a key vote that would, if successful, see Governor’s Rule replaced by an elected Kashmir assembly, and release Saklani from a duty he had never wanted, but that had lasted four long years. Jane could feel the tension rising as people came out of their houses and spotted Indian military uniforms. No one wanted to talk to them. On 5 August Saklani flew them south again, heading this time for Magam, where the Naseer-inspired search had foundered. The helicopter landed in the village cemetery. The local maulvi scowled. People bolted. It was raining. Jane and Julie asked if they could walk alone, but here too the press pack thronged forward while the locals hung back. ‘The villagers said they knew nothing and had seen nothing,’ Julie said, frustrated. Some of them were baffled by the women’s presence, as the whole village still lived in fear of Alpha, who dominated the region, and who, as far as everyone knew, was a paid-up government ally.

  After their visits had been completed, Jane and Julie felt they had been manipulated, and when they left Kashmir it was with Sabharwal’s gaffe about sightings elicited by cash ringing in their ears. They had resolved nothing. Naseer was a stooge, the sightings unreliable. But they had proved to themselves that they could go out into the deep countryside and meet people for themselves. As Jane saw it, this was the only way they would ever discover the truth. Next time they would do it with less fuss, and no escort. They would get people talking. As they said farewell to each other in New Delhi, they agreed to return after the local elections were wrapped up in October.

  By October 1996, Jane and Julie’s low-profile trip had become something very different from what they had imagined, with Cath Moseley, Mavis and Charlie Mangan, Bob Wells and a British documentary film crew all wanting to come along. Jane had no desire to be filmed, but she was not the only one involved, and she respected the wishes of the others.

  Bob Wells in particular wanted everything to be highly visible, having come to the same conclusion as David Housego: ‘The Foreign Office had told us repeatedly that hostages never get released in a blaze of publicity, but we’d had enough of waiting for them to sort this out.’ He also wanted to go to Kashmir because he and Dianne had been talking about having some kind of memorial event for Paul, although they could not bring themselves to make it a funeral. ‘I would never be able to live with myself if we did that and then Paul came home,’ Bob said.

  Things had got off on a sombre note when David Gore-Booth, the British High Commissioner, picked Bob up from Indira Gandhi International Airport and told him not to get his hopes up, as Paul was almost certainly dead. Even if the news was discouraging, Bob was pleased to hear someone speak his mind: ‘After so many lies, I was grateful that Gore-Booth was able to be straight. It set me up well for all the disappointments that were to follow.’ Mavis and Charlie’s visit, their first to the region, had been reported by the Middlesbrough Gazette, which made much of their working-class roots, describing them as ‘just two ordinary everyday Teessiders, she a dinner [lady], originally from Brambles Farm [council estate], and he a steel worker for forty-five years’. Until the previous year they had never even heard of Srinagar, Jammu, Islamabad or Muzaffarabad, but they had overcome their fears and saved up every penny to see things for themselves. Like the other families they were tired of being dictated to from afar, run ragged by people they had never met.

  Arriving in Srinagar, the families, film crew and a G4 liaison officer were put up at the Welcome Hotel, overlooking Dal Lake. The previous year it had been crammed with journalists and photographers pursuing the hostage story, but now it was empty. Taking a look around town, Bob hardly noticed the mountains or the shimmering lake, the kestrels that swooped down from the hills to snatch fish from the water. Instead, he was overwhelmed by the militarised and decaying city: ‘The building next door to us had been commandeered as a police barracks. We were surrounded by bunkers. It was a bloody war zone, and yet these little rowing boats were going around the houseboats as if everything was normal.’ Julie was worried about how Keith’s parents would cope. ‘We feel quite guilty going to bed in a nice duvet, thinking what are the boys sleeping on,’ said Mavis, as the film crew recorded their initial impressions. ‘You sit down at a table to eat, and think, what are the boys eating?’ That night she lay awake, listening to the sound of gunshots echoing across the lake: ‘I’d never even seen a gun before, and now they were going off all around me.’

  The families kicked things off in the morning with a press conference, Cath, Julie and Jane announcing a ten-lakh-rupee (£20,000) reward, funded by the US State Department, for information leading to the hostages’ release. The British government had refused to participate, as it did not condone giving money for information, and Jane had worried that the cash might elicit more false rumours, such as those the Kashmir police had admitted disseminating in the first four months of 1996. Charlie Mangan made a poignant appeal: ‘We hope and pray to all the people in t
his country and Pakistan that they must know, they have sons of their own, they must know how we feel.’ He hesitated. The word ‘sons’ rattled in his throat. Cameras snapped, catching the moment his composure broke. ‘I just hope and pray that you get them out quick,’ he managed to say, before giving up.

  Next, they trooped to police headquarters for an update from DG Sabharwal, who welcomed them in a darkened conference room. For Mavis and Charlie, it was their first experience of Indian officialdom, but Cath, Jane and Julie got their notebooks out. Sabharwal smiled, but looked uncomfortable. ‘Indirect reports sometimes emanate from quarters,’ he said, ‘but unless they are fully verified and corroborated, we are not pursuing them.’ He was picking up on what he had told Jane and Julie before, only now he was claiming that the process was vetted to rule out false positives. The women wrote his words down. Sabharwal straightened his collar. The hostages would soon be returned to their loved ones, he said. Someone asked if he could tell them straight, whether the men were alive. ‘Certainly, most certainly,’ he replied, appearing to have dismissed the Naseer episode and gone back to his position of March. The families said they were hoping to distribute reward posters around the valley, but they wanted to be discreet. The DG said he could help them do it without a fuss.

  Their next stop was the offices of the newly-elected Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, the first civilian administrator in Kashmir since the militancy had taken hold, whose appointment had meant Saklani could head back at last to his modest apartment in the military cantonment of Mhow. After they had taken their seats, Abdullah made an announcement. ‘There are certain things I cannot say on record because it’s better and it’s for their safety,’ he said, plumping himself up as the new master with his hands on the reins in Kashmir. ‘But in ten days we will give you proof.’ Of what, someone asked. ‘That the hostages are alive,’ he replied. ‘He’s given us quite a significant promise,’ Cath said quietly.

  Finally they were ready to make an unobtrusive sortie into the countryside. They stepped out of the Welcome Hotel, only to be met by a convoy of Ambassadors led by armoured trucks and Gypsy jeeps with paramilitary police and soldiers with submachine guns hanging out of their gaping doors. Pony carts and civilian vehicles were forced off the road as they sped south, heavily armed specialists from the Rashtriya Rifles riding the roof of the lead truck, their black bandanas flying as the vehicles barged and hooted through Kashmiri lives. Jane quietly fumed, until she was introduced to one of her travelling companions, Group Captain Jasminder Kahlon, the ace helicopter pilot who had plucked John Childs to safety. She listened eagerly as he gave her one of the only first-hand accounts of anything connected to the hostage crisis she had heard in sixteen months.

  They approached Vail Nagbal village, the scene of Hans Christian Ostrø’s beheading. ‘I feel in a way we ought to go,’ said Cath, welling up. ‘To pay our respects,’ said Bob. ‘Yes,’ said Cath. ‘For Anette and his parents.’ Charlie was haunted by his imagination: ‘It was awful. The body in one place. His head in another.’ Bob took photographs, wishing he had any kind of certainty about Paul, even if it was a brutal one.

  And then they were off again – whistles, canes, lights, sirens and balaclavas – until they came to the semi-deserted trekking station of Pahalgam, where it had all begun. Taking in the scenery, the densely wooded mountains carved up by two gushing rivers, Mavis understood the scale of the crime scene for the first time. ‘It breaks me up, actually, just wondering where he is,’ she said, gazing at the Pir Panjal. ‘It’s just so vast. He could be anywhere, couldn’t he? I’d walk every inch of it if I could.’ Later, Jane confided in her journal: ‘We were required to check in first with the local authorities, who informed me that I would be allowed to walk up the valley only one or two kilometres in either direction. Trekking no longer occurs in this seemingly idyllic valley. I was angry. If only they had been this cautious before, instead of telling us, “No problem. Have a nice holiday.”’

  Broken Dabran was next, Sikander’s village, where al Faran’s commander the Turk had been killed out in the paddy. ‘This is my husband,’ said Julie, standing in the mud and pointing at a laminated photo of Keith, hoping to make the villagers understand their plight. ‘He’s missing. It’s been a long time now.’ Women with their own missing – children, husbands and fathers – trudged past, shaking their heads. ‘How could they feel sorry for this handful of foreigners escorted by the security forces that they accused of having killed, detained and vanished thousands of Kashmiris without the world caring a jot?’ one customer mumbled to a shopkeeper. Eventually, Sikander’s mother was rousted from her house. Terrified, tears streaming, she recalled that afternoon: ‘I asked them if they knew I had lost a son too. The Western families had no idea.’ Bob winced seeing the old woman break down. ‘It was terrible,’ he recalled, crushed between his own desperation and the villagers’ tragedy.

  Finally they were taken to Magam, stacked along sharp ridges and around hairpins, surrounded on all sides by hills and forests. Naseer had claimed that here, in a village under Alpha’s control, where he placed sentries by day and informers all night, the hostages had been concealed and then killed by the Movement. Earlier that day soldiers had poured into the village, and every man and boy had been forced out of their houses at gunpoint and ordered to squat down in the road and wait for the foreigners to arrive. They had been kept like this in the rain for seven hours, and now they were exhausted, sodden and angry.

  Jane and the other women refused to get out of the car. Bob and Charlie were furious, and felt they had to go and talk to these people who they feared had, by this single thoughtless action, been turned against their cause. ‘We’re so sorry for this,’ Bob told them. ‘We wanted to come quietly, see you and ask for your help.’ Charlie struggled to retain his composure: ‘They came here as holidaymakers, tourists in your country. They should have been allowed to go.’ He dried up. The villagers stared, filled with bile. A local student pushed his way to the front, shaking with anger. ‘What is our sin?’ he asked, barely able to hold back tears of frustration. The village had been repeatedly swamped, by militants and now by renegades, he told the Westerners. After that, Naseer and his procession of searchers and soldiers had come too. And now here were the families and their convoy. ‘Kashmir is very big,’ he stuttered, waving his arms to show the extent of the valley. ‘We have never seen them.’ A flurry of flashbulbs caught the moment. His heartfelt rage at having been humiliated was described by an army press attaché as ‘surly, disrespectful behaviour’ of the sort that justified the military’s overwhelming presence. With that vignette the family members understood why India had revived the hostage story, embracing their trip wholeheartedly.

  There was nowhere else they wanted to go, other than home. Chief Minister Abdullah never came up with the news he promised. Nor did police chief Sabharwal.

  The families did not give up when they arrived back in their own countries. They would never let go until they had proof. ‘Bones or a body’, as Bob put it. ‘I don’t want to think that they’re dead,’ said Mavis. Julie was the same: ‘I strongly believe Keith is alive. I want to believe, I am going to keep on believing. Otherwise I don’t think I could carry on.’

  Jane was less certain. After Kashmir, she had made it to Pakistan, and talked to the Movement’s military commanders, picking up nothing other than a bad case of giardiasis. Her stomach in spasms, she had returned to the US to spend Christmas alone, opening a few presents, including a gourmet recipe book from her sister and brother-in-law, Nancy and Don Snyder. But even this act of kindness nettled. Who did they think she would cook for now? She read and reread all the messages their friends had written the previous Christmas morning, almost six months after Don had been taken, having gathered at the house to light a candle. ‘Back then, I really didn’t think that he could ever be killed,’ she said. But twelve months on, she was struggling to stay positive. A couple of nights later she summoned up the strength to write down in
her journal what she was really thinking: ‘In my heart I don’t believe he’s alive, but I’ve been wrong so many other times that I have no faith in gut feelings now. We had planned on growing old together.’ She finished off by addressing Don directly: ‘I love you sweetheart.’

  In July 1997, the second anniversary of the kidnapping, Jane returned to Kashmir for one more try. This time she was alone, having secured an offer of a US$2 million (£1.2 million) reward from the US Department of Justice. ‘I realise at some point, if Don doesn’t come back, I will have to concede that my life goes forward,’ she wrote. ‘I want to be able to look back and know I did everything. I don’t want to say, “I should have done that,” because it will be too late.’ In her luggage she had brought along thousands of lavender-coloured fold-up matchbooks, printed with details of the reward, in the knowledge that ‘almost every Kashmir man smoked’.

  Travelling with a Kashmiri politician on his campaign trail, Jane flew over the snowcapped crags to the Warwan Valley. Escorted everywhere she went, she found the villagers fascinated by her story, but wary of eavesdroppers, as the militancy still held the valley in its grip. ‘We dropped down after crossing spectacular and rugged terrain in the Indian Army five-seat helicopter,’ Jane wrote. ‘We saw caravans of ponies, sometimes twelve to twenty-two in a group, heavily loaded with supplies, travelling amongst flocks of sheep being herded by their nomadic bakarwal shepherds from the desert areas. We were in the heart of militant country, I was told. Hans Christian Ostrø’s beheaded body was found on 13 August 1995, just fifteen miles due east of here.’