An Indian army soldier killed three of his colleagues and then fatally shot himself in the Indian Held Kashmir state on October 2, American news agency Associated Press reported the next day. Though the Indian army has ordered an inquiry in to the killings by Santosh Kumar in an army barracks in Rajouri, a town 160 kilometers northwest of Jammu, most of the Indian officers were quoted as saying that this was the result of frustration by the decades’ long deployment of troops in the occupied state.
“Troops are not allowed even week-long holidays, what to talk of annual P-leave”, an officer said. “Kumar had recently returned from home leave in Jharkand state” but probably the good days passed at home with his wife and family pinched him the most. However, there was no immediate indication of what might have triggered the rampage. The Associated Press commented that the Indian army troops fighting the Kashmiri freedom fighters in the Held Kashmir “often work under stress due to long duty hours in inhospitable, mountainous terrain.”
In another report dispatched by veteran Kashmiri journalist, Iftikhar Gillani, October 6 says: India’s new vice-chief of staff, Lt General S Pattabhiraman, announced after assuming office on October 2 that the army was implanting measures to monitor the mental health of soldiers, particularly in the occupied Kashmir. Army headquarters has been ordered to screen troops at the unit level for symptoms of stress and fatigue, following the gunning down of two senior officers and a colleague by a soldier in Kashmir. It was the second incident of “fragging” in exactly a month in Jammu and Kashmir. “The army views the number of stress and fatigue cases with concern. We will make it compulsory to build up a psychological profile of troops at the unit level and trace people who are stressed,” the vice-chief said Lt General Pattabhiraman said he was in favour of re-introducing the system of briefing and de-briefing personnel when they go on leave and when they return to active4 duty.
A senior officer based in Srinagar said that in the last year army psychologists based in the corpse battle school had been being asked to visit camps and carry out regular checks. “The idea is not to make life stress-free. A certain amount oif stress is a pre-requisite for the tension of working in counter-insurgency areas. But it is important for stress to be managed and directed,” he said. Army headquarters sources told Iftikhar Gillani that they were concerned about the lack of communication between unit commanders and troops deployed beyond combat-related activity and the easy availability of firearms with increased weaponization. He went on to say that when a soldier takes leave, he is exposed to a different life and that it was necessary to reintegrate him into army life. But the “standard operating procedure” that helps the company commander establish a personal rapport with troops is necessarily observed in breach in a counter insurgency environment.
Meanwhile, according to an Agencie France Presse report published on October 6, the Indian army is probing charges that a frustrated group of soldiers butchered four civilians in Kashmir and presented them as Islamist guerillas in the hope of securing military awards. “The incident shows the height of pressure the Indian troops face from the higher-ups for doing something ‘valiant’ against the innocent and unarmed Kashmiri people to get ‘gallantry’ awards”, said Shabbir Shah, the Kashmiri leader.
Indian held Kashmir police have also joined the investigation into the allegations that an Indian Army Colonel, a Major and 10 troops gunned down the four men in the northern Kashmiri village of Devar and claimed they were insurgents killed in firefight. The probe was launched after the father of one of the slain men, Madan Lal, said he had received an anonymous letter alleging the four were killed by the 12 glory-hunters. “The soldier lured the four men to a village with promises of jobs as porters and then staged the gunbattle, killing them all,” said Sunil Dutt, a police officer from the northern Kupwara district. Lal said the soldiers drove their four victims from Indian Kashmir’s winter capital of Jammu to Devar near Kupwara, a distance of 300 kilomteres, and then shot them. The 12 suspects belonged to counter-insurgency Rashtriya Rifles, said Dutt.
The very fact has been confessed by the puppet chief minister of IHK, Mufti Saeed. His finance minister, Muzaffar Hussain Baig said the police and security forces personnel involved in custodial killing are murderers and they must be dealt with as per the law. According to The Nation report, the minister asked the Director General of Police, Gopal Sharma, to initiate action against such murderers. “A person wearing uniform has no license to kill and killing a person in custody amounts to murder.” Earlier in its reply to a question regarding human rights violations, the IHK government had stated that 22 custodial killings took place during the past three years of the coalition rule in the State. Raising the issue in the debate, Bilal Lodhi of PDP had sought a statement from the government that what action was taken against the forces’ personnel involved in these custodial killings. “We have to ask the concerned agencies that if 22 persons got killed in custody, why?” Baig questioned adding the persons in uniform involved in such killings are the enemies of peace and they should be dealt with sternly.
Meanwhile, PPI news agency quoted the APHC (Geelani Group) spokesman on October 5 as saying, the Indian army men of Jat Regiment threatened to kill APHC chairman, Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The troops have warned that the anti-army stance adopted by the Hurriyat leader could lead “towards his death.” A spokesman said Geelani along with a delegation was heading towards Kokernag-Anantnag when he was stopped by the security forces personnel of Jat Regiment at Bijbehara after following him from a long time. The security forces used harsh language against Geelani and told him that the way adopted by him could lead to his death.

The many degrees of disaster, from Sri Lanka to Pakistan
Ameen Izzadeen

THE Friday sermon at mosques across Sri Lanka was about the earthquake in Pakistan. The imams extolled the virtues of charity and urged the people to give freely to earthquake victims of our neighbouring country, which came to our help when we were hit by the tsunami catastrophe ten months ago. Hundreds of Pakistani military personnel arrived here quickly as a flash and set up medical camps in the tsunami-hit areas while the people of Pakistan also responded generously in Sri Lanka’s hour of need. Sri Lanka’s eastern province, where the Muslims are a majority, was the worst hit. When radio channels asked the affected Muslims what they wanted, they said that apart from food and clothing, they wanted white raw cotton cloth to shroud the bodies for burial in accordance with Muslim tradition. The response from Pakistan was prompt. Sri Lankan newspapers published photographs showing hundreds of Pakistani volunteers, most of them women, cutting and packing cloth to be dispatched to Sri Lanka.
Now it is our turn to help Pakistan. A few days ago, a Sri Lankan Muslim minister flew to Pakistan with a cheque for US$ 100,000 — double the aid little Sri Lanka sent to the United States when the mighty superpower was hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — and tents and other tsunami relief surplus which are lying in warehouses. However, there is also concern among some Sri Lankans over the international community’s attention being shifted from Sri Lanka to other disaster-hit countries, although the World Bank has said that what has been pledged to Sri Lanka will be given to Sri Lanka. A Sri Lankan official heading the state organisation which oversees reconstruction operations in the tsunami-hit areas said she was hopeful that the donors would not renege on their pledge to Sri Lanka.
The international donor community had pledged about US$ 3.2 billion to Sri Lanka, but firm commitments amount to only US$ one billion. Out of the one billion dollars, the country has received only US$ 454 million, but the sorry state of affairs is that the government has only spent some 13 per cent of the aid received, because of a lack of proper planning or a system. The earthquake in Pakistan strikes a personal chord in me. I was in Muzaffarabad three months ago as a member of a six-member Sri Lankan media delegation that accepted an invitation from the Islamabad-based Policy Research Institute, a semi-government think-tank. After spending a few days in Islamabad, we were taken to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pak-administered Kashmir.
To me, Muzaffarabad looked like a young girl weeping for her twin sister, who lives on the other side of the Line of Control. In comparison to Islamabad, Lahore or Karachi, Muzaffarabad had not seen much development, as though my metaphorical girl was refusing to wear jewellery or the mirror-worked colourful salwars until her sister is reunited with her. When I read a news report that about 200 Pakistani troops had died in the quake, my visit to the Line of Control flashed through my mind. We met Lt. Col. Chiragh Haider at the Chikothi Brigade headquarters after a two-hour ride along the Srinagar Road — the road that leads to the capital of the Indian side of Kashmir, which the Pakistanis call the Indian-occupied or Indian-held Kashmir (IOK or IHK).
Ironically enough, for more than half a century, the Srinagar road had not led to Srinagar. It was only in April this year that a fortnightly bus service was started between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad across the Line of Control for people of both sides of Kashmir to visit relatives and return. We were taken to the forward-most Pakistani defence line, from where we saw the forward-most Indian defence line and the bridge which hit international headlines when the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service was started. That bridge has reportedly suffered some damage. I remember the journey along the mountainous terrain as our van passed through scores of villages where the simple life of the people added colour to the breathtaking landscape along the Jhelum river. Have the schools, the houses, the shops, the village mosques and the children who waved at us as our van passed them survived the quake? Is Hotel Sangam still there? It was Muzaffarabad’s only luxury hotel where we spent a night and it overlooked the sangam — confluence — where the River Neelam becomes one with Jhelum?
I remember Lt. Col. Haider telling us that for the troops stationed on the Line of Control, nature was an enemy. Eight out of ten casualties reported from the Line of Control, especially in the Siachen and the Kargil sectors, where one cannot walk four steps without taking a break due to lack of oxygen, were inflicted by nature, whose cruelty is masked by its awe-inspiring beauty at altitudes ranging from 10,000 to 22,000 feet. So nature kills and when it roars in fury — like the Kashmir quake — it kills en masse.

China sets sight on moon
Kathleen E. McLaughlin
 
China affirmed its place in one of the world’s most exclusive clubs with the conclusion of a second manned space flight on Monday. More than four decades after the US and Soviet Union accomplished a similar feat, China can still lay claim to being only the third nation to put humans into orbit on its own. But China’s achievement is still more a statement of aspiration, tenacity and prestige than of technological prowess. It’s seen as a signal to other Asian powers that Beijing intends to claim the dominant position in what analysts predict will be the “Asian Century”. “There is implicitly a question of who is going to be the leading power in the 21st century in Asia,” said Dean Cheng, senior Asia analyst the CNA Corporation, a US-based think tank. “For China, this is a statement that Japan is not it.”
Indeed Tokyo and New Delhi have not made human space flight a priority. Neither has launched a manned flight on their own. Japan’s space programme, according to a recent RAND Corporation report, has seen numerous failures and problems over the past decade and faces an uncertain future. India’s relatively low-key space agency has the capability to launch large satellites and has announced plans for unmanned moon exploration by 2007. At home, China’s five-day mission is seen as an effort by the communist leadership to create national pride and blunt criticism over corruption and a widening gap between the poor majority and the country’s wealthy elite who have benefited most from an economic boom.
Newspapers featured front page photos of Colonel Fei Junlong turning somersaults in zero gravity. On Sunday evening, the state news agency reported that the “taikonauts” greeted all Chinese people, including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan compatriots.” It was also reported that the two-man crew (both colonels in the People’s Liberation Army) took notes on ocean pollution, the atmosphere, vegetation and performed unspecified scientific experiments.

Anecdotal evidence
But anecdotal evidence suggests that taikonaut fervour among the Chinese public has dimmed somewhat since China sent Yang Liwei into space for a 21-hour flight two years ago. China’s long-term goals in space are reported to be to put men on the moon by 2010 and build a space station similar to the Russian Mir station. There are some China watchers who say Chinese will step foot on the moon sooner than Beijing is saying. In its annual report on Chinese military power, the Pentagon voiced concern over China’s space programme. Military capability and strategy “is likely one of the primary drivers behind Beijing’s space endeavours and a critical component” of the country’s financial investment in space, the July report said.
China says the Shenzhou programme has cost $2 billion (Dh7.34 billion) over 10 years (a number thought low by international experts, who question whether Beijing is revealing the full cost) at a time when many other key areas of government spending including healthcare, education, and state factories are moving toward privatisation. “Whatever the number is, it is a lot of money, it is a lot of brainpower, a lot of engineering expertise that is not being applied to laying down more pipelines” or building other crucial physical and social infrastructure, said Cheng. “That being said, I can see the Chinese would like ever-more prestige.”
China’s homegrown space effort is partly born out of necessity. While partnering with Russia on the international space station, the US has imposed restrictions on the export of US technology to China that could be “dual-use”. The rockets that can lift capsules carrying humans into orbit, say experts, can also be used to launch nuclear warheads or communications and spy satellites that can be used to guide missiles or direct warfare on the ground. China’s Shenzhou capsule is based on the Russian Soyuz design. China has also relied on Russia for spacesuits and other equipment, but Beijing insists that all of the systems are made in China.