Mary Scully Reports

An absolutely heartbreaking story of a Kashmiri man outside Kashmir trying to connect with his father in Kashmir who has dementia:

When I left home amid chaos, curfew I promised my father that I will be back in a day or two and he was happy. From seconds to hours to days to weeks passed but I couldn’t keep the promise.

After two weeks I got a call from the police station which in my case is 2 KMs away from home, from my mom and helplessly(selflessly) she said ‘They are fine’. I insisted that I wanted to talk to my father. On receiving phone he wasn’t able to recognize me at all. My father is suffering from Dementia but being always around he has a close bonding with me and recognizes me but now being away for a few weeks he couldn’t recognize me at all. And all of the conversations had to happen in 30 seconds only else they forcibly take phone and disconnect. I couldn’t even tell them if they have money or stock.

When I left home, I left as a son but I will be going as a stranger now.

All of you making fun, troll emotions of helpless fathers, wailing mothers, hapless sons, and daughters. You too will see something same in life. But we won’t be trolling making fun, giving analysis based on youtube videos from hyper national. Because we value Humans over nationalism.

This is the 25th day of the siege.

–Junaid Masoodi

The same senior Indian official who told AFP that at least 500 protests & “incidents of stone throwing” had taken place in Kashmir since August 5th also told them that “Nearly 100 civilians have been injured so far, with a further 300 police & more than 100 paramilitary troopers hurt.” Try not to cry me a river but it is highly unlikely that unarmed civilians, even if they had entire phalanxes of stone pelters, have injured four times the number of war-equipped soldiers & paramilitaries. Since India officially admitted to 36 pellet gun victims & turns away pellet injury victims from treatment in hospitals, it is criminally pathetic that they would pawn this rubbish off on us.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, Mudasir Ahmed Parry, speaking for the largest orthopedic hospital in Srinagar, says more patients have died in the past three weeks than in the entire year because they have run short of lifesaving drugs & surgical implants due to the siege & blockade. Severing communications & isolating Kashmir means doctors cannot contact specialists in other hospitals & delays critical treatment.

This article about the arrest of Omar Salim, a urologist at the Government Medical College, after he spoke out about the healthcare crisis caused by the blockade shows that the health crises are widespread. Dr. Salim said, “If patients don’t receive dialysis, they will die. If cancer patients don’t receive chemotherapy, they will die. Those patients who can’t be operated on can die,”
This falls entirely under the rubrics of genocide.

https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/kashmir-doctor-speaks-up-whisked-away/cid/1700525?fbclid=IwAR2NZTxTR5pfMAog8-8l9wwUycmLPMJDLKsPoGj6We7gSaUOm6p-0d1xx7w

J&K governor Satya Pal Malik–about whom Ashok Swain said, “India doesn’t need political satirists when you have politicians like the Governor of Kashmir.”–actually said, “the medium of phone & internet is used less by us & mostly by terrorists & Pakistanis as well as for mobilisation & indoctrination. It is a kind of weapon used against us so we have stopped it. Services will be resumed gradually.”

Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir, #StandWithKashmir student protest.

Syrian refugee children’s art in 2014. Is it ‘from the mouthes of babes’ or would we rather believe Assad propagandists who call these children “crisis actors” trained to play dead, traumatized, mutilated by bombs for al-Qaeda cameras?

Media often reports that Kashmiris living outside Kashmir are the ones protesting at #StandWithKashmir rallies around the world. On the contrary, what’s significant about them is that there are as many non-Kashmiris as Kashmiris, often from groups fighting their own freedom struggles but just as often unaffiliated human rights activists: Palestinian groups, Jewish Voice for Peace (an anti-Zionist group), Syrian Arab Spring protesters, Pakistanis, Sikh activists, human rights groups, Tibetan activists, immigration rights activists. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Sikhs all have a stake in #standingwithKashmir.

When Satya Pal Malik, who is an appointed Indian governor of J&K said, “It was necessary for the government to impose restrictions primarily to ensure that militants & terrorists are handicapped in their movements & don’t succeed to create fear and terror,” he was using Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ rhetoric to justify India’s barbaric siege & blockade.

By most reliable estimates, including from knowledgeable & respected Kashmiris like human rights leader Khurram Parvez, there were about 200, no more than 250, armed militants remaining in Kashmir in about 2016. Since the military crackdown on the 2016 uprising, India has been on an almost daily campaign of hunt to kill operations ostensibly to wipe out armed resistance. Though stone pelters & unarmed protesters often got the worst of these operations in injuries, deaths, livestock killed, homes vandalized & razed. According to figures from Indian officials & media, Indian occupying forces killed 213 Kashmiri militants in 2017, 222 in 2018, & 113 so far in 2019. That’s more than double the amount of militants that operated in all of Kashmir. Something’s not adding up to the truth.

Whatever one thinks about guerrilla warfare as an effective strategy, it is not armed militancy that the Indian Army is attempting to destroy in Kashmir. It is the considerably more powerful unarmed, massive popular resistance to colonialism & occupation, the undaunted demand for #azaadi that India is trying to destroy first through the occupation using pellet guns & hunt to kill operations & now through genocide & ethnic cleansing.

#StandWithKashmir

War criminals bonding at the G7: let’s hear another round of asking Trump to ‘mediate’ between India & Pakistan over the fate of Kashmiri self-determination. This encounter should have one of those gruesome image warnings to cover it.