Mirza Waheed

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de diciembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

A Kashmiri man kissing the body of Shabir Ahmed, a teenage boy, during his funeral procession in Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir, this month. Credit Dar Yasin/Associated Press

Every year, or at the least every other year, there arrive seasons of killing and mourning in the valley of Kashmir. On Sunday, April 9, elections were held for a parliamentary seat left vacant in the main city of Srinagar after a lawmaker resigned in protest against last summer’s killings. A majority stayed away, with only 7 percent turning up to vote.

Young Kashmiris — fed up, brutalized, growing up in the most densely militarized zone in the world — surrounded polling stations to protest Indian rule. Some protesters threw stones at the polling booths and the troops stationed there. The troops responded as they do, with shooting, beating and blinding protesters and bystanders alike.…  Seguir leyendo »

Last September, a lawmaker in Indian-controlled Kashmir stood up in the state’s legislative assembly and spoke of a valley filled with human carcasses near his home constituency in the mountains: “In our area, there are big gorges, where there are the bones of several hundred people who were eaten by crows.”

I read about this in faraway London and was filled with a chill — I had written of a similar valley, a fictional one, in my novel about the lost boys of Kashmir. The assembly was debating a report on the uncovering of more than 2,000 unmarked and mass graves not far from the Line of Control that divides Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.…  Seguir leyendo »