Wednesday July 18, 7:32 PM

Kin erect memorial for Kashmir's missing thousands

By Faisal Ahmed, Indo-Asian News Service

Srinagar, July 19 (IANS) Ghulam Nabi Khan went missing five years ago after he stepped out of a local hospital to buy medicines for his wife Dilshada who was about to deliver a baby.

Eyewitnesses later told Dilshada that gunmen in a three-wheeled scooter abducted him promising to "free him soon."

On Wednesday, Dilshada joined thousands of relatives of at least 4,000 missing people to build a memorial in their names near a local mosque.

Weeping mothers, destitute widows and orphaned children assembled to lay the foundation stone of a memorial to those who have vanished in the last 11 years of a bloody separatist insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir.

"We shall never allow the past to be forgotten and we shall never allow it to happen again to future generations," Perveez Imroz, chairman of the association of parents of disappeared persons (APDP), told the highly emotional group.

Most people like Dilshada said lengthy procedures that authorities adopt before they accept the missing as dead -- a necessary condition to make the relatives eligible for receiving compensations -- made their lives even worse.

"This adds insult to a never healing injury," Imroz told IANS.

Such is the spate of abductions that Zahiruddin, a spokesman for the Kashmir Bar Association close to the APDP, recently brought out a second edition of his book called "Those who vanished in thin air," which documents all such cases.

"These include those who were arrested by the security agencies, which deny the excesses, as well as those taken in by the gunmen and never seen again," Zahiruddin said.

"This memorial proves that society still bothers about our plight," said Wali Muhammad, 65, whose only son is among the list of those missing.

The organizers intend to later start a meditation center at the memorial for the anguished relatives to look for peace. A small auditorium will also be built.

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