Mary Scully Reports

An important report published in March 2018 by the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) on the different forms of violence affecting children & the impact of violence on children in occupied Kashmir. It also provides a historical overview of the occupation & an understanding of just how brutally violent it is. It’s 63 pages of very powerful & damning information.

http://jkccs.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/2018-Impact-of-Violence-on-Children-of-JK-JKCCS.pdf?

(Cover photo by Abid Bhat is Central Reserve Police Force officers punishing a teenager in Srinagar in March 2017)

I’m preparing a report on Cordon & Search Operations in Kashmir which have escalated dramatically since the uprising in 2016. I’d like more information about their use up till the late 90s & am having some trouble finding it. Do any Kashmiri friends have a good resource on the issue? Our ignorance about your struggle must be appalling & distressing to you but we’re trying very hard to correct that.

In an interview before his death in 2014, 80-year-old Hajo Meyer, a Jewish anti-Zionist Auschwitz survivor, said: “If we want to stay really human beings, we must get up & call the Zionists what they are: Nazi criminals.” He added that Zionist brainwashing of Israelis means “They cannot see a Palestinian as a human being” & his message to Palestinians was that “they should not give up their fight.”

One of his last political acts was joining with forty other survivors of the Nazi genocide in a public letter condemning Israeli genocide in Gaza. He was a supporter of BDS.

(Photo is screenshot of Hajo Meyer from “My Good Fortune in Auschwitz”, a documentary about Meyer by Reber Dosky.)

In 2018, the US military is conducting ‘counterterrorism’ operations in 76 countries (about 39-percent of the world’s nations). These operations are accompanied by violations of human rights, including torture, & civil liberties in those 76 countries & in the US.

Now can supporters of US humanitarian bombing against dictators explain to us again where they see the humanitarian potential in the US Pentagon? We’d really like to understand such cognitive dissonance.

Photo is bombing site in Syria.

(Photo from New Yorker)

The US has spent nearly $6 trillion on wars that killed at least 507,000 people in Iraq, Afghanistan, & Pakistan since the 9/11 attacks of 2001. That does not include indirect deaths caused by bombing such as loss of food, water, health facilities, electricity. Nor does it include fatalities for Syria, Yemen, Libya, or US support for Israeli bombing & occupation of Palestinians. Since the Pentagon does not make an accounting of civilian deaths in any of its wars–it’s hard to do so when war planes are dropping thousands of bombs indiscriminately & quite frankly, the Pentagon doesn’t give a damn–these figures are approximations & are considered quite conservative. Of course, there is also no honest accounting of US soldiers killed.

Shall we talk about humanitarian US interventions now?

Photo is US Marines at an undisclosed location in Syria on September 10th.

(Photo by Gabino Perez/US Marine Corps/Defense Department)

A new clinic in downtown Srinagar which will provide excellent doctors for consultation & subsidized medicine to the general public & free consultations & medicine to the poor. The Kashmiris who set up this clinic were disturbed to see people discontinue life-saving medicines & parents or grandparents give priority to food over medical care for their children because they were not affordable.

–information via Imtiaz R Chasti

Excellent interview with Rohingya activist Ro Nay San Lwin on deportation of Rohingya refugees back to killing fields of Burma:

https://www.france24.com/en/video/20181117-rohingya-crisis-cycle-violence-has-been-repeating-1978?

“The activist women who form the Association of the Parents of the Disappeared Persons (APDP) keep public attention focused on the 8,000 to 10,000 Kashmiri men disappeared by the Indian government forces since 1989. Surrounded by Indian troops, international photojournalists, & curious onlookers, the APDP activists cry, lament, & sing while holding photos & files documenting the lives of their disappeared loved ones. In this radical departure from traditionally private rituals of mourning, they create a spectacle of mourning that combats the government’s threatening silence about the fates of their sons, husbands, ” fathers.

“Drawn from Ather Zia’s ten years of engagement with the APDP as an anthropologist & fellow Kashmiri activist, Resisting Disappearance follows mothers & “half-widows” as they step boldly into courts, military camps, & morgues in search of their disappeared kin. Through an amalgam of ethnography, poetry, & photography, Zia illuminates how dynamics of gender & trauma in Kashmir have been transformed in the face of South Asia’s longest-running conflict, providing profound insight into how Kashmiri women & men nurture a politics of resistance while facing increasing military violence under India.”

–a new book by Ather Zia available on Amazon

This is the true character of Israeli apartheid, genocide, & military occupation.

Stand with Palestinians through speak-outs, rallies, & by building BDS, the economic & cultural boycott of Israel.

The ubiquitous faces of death & grieving in occupied Kashmir:

Stand with Kashmiris in demanding “Go back, India, go back!”

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo by Kamran Yousuf)