SRINAGAR, August 19 (Reuters): More than 40 days of clashes between protesters and security forces have overwhelmed the main hospital in Indian-administered Kashmir, where some patients with severe injuries said they had been beaten in their homes by troops.
House-to-house searches continued on Friday, authorities said, for suspected ringleaders of street protests sparked by the killing on July 8 of a popular field commander of a Pakistan-based separatist group.
At least 65 people have been killed and 6,000 injured in the ensuing clashes, many of them wounded by shotgun rounds fired by security forces enforcing a curfew across the Muslim-majority region.
Pictures taken by a Reuters photographer at Srinagar’s main SMHS Hospital on Thursday showed men with weals across their backs and buttocks that they said had been caused by beatings. Another showed a crying boy, his head swathed in bandages, as he was comforted by his family, who said he had been wounded by shotgun pellets.
Doctors at the hospital were exhausted, with one saying they had performed more eye operations in the past month than they had over the last three years.
The Indian army has admitted to, and apologised for, the death of a college lecturer in one beating. A senior army officer said on Friday the forces were trying not to react to acts of provocation.
“Militants are hiding behind the stone pelters and are trying to provoke security forces into firing on them, but we are exercising restraint to avoid civilian casualties,” Lieutenant General SK Dua told a news conference in Srinagar. “They want us to fire on them and we will not do it. We are exercising restraint to avoid collateral damage.”
HOSPITAL
OVERWHELMED
Dozens of volunteers received the injured at SMHS Hospital as ambulances brought them in from rural areas. Paramedics and ambulance drivers said government forces attacked them on the way. The curfew restricts movement, severely disrupting daily life.
“India and Pakistan are fighting over my homeland but in the end it’s is only our blood that they manage to secure,” said Faizal Wani, 24, whose father was being treated for pellet wounds suffered in the clashes.
Another doctor said patients have been brought in with abdominal injuries from rifle bullets. “Our operating theatres are working non-stop,” the doctor told Reuters.
The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), which deploys a large contingent of paramilitaries in Kashmir, told a regional court that more than 100 people had been partly or completely blinded by shotgun pellets.
Kashmir is at the centre of a decades-old rivalry between India and Pakistan, which rules a northwestern section of the divided region, and backed an insurgency in the late 1980s and 1990s that Indian security forces largely crushed.
UN deplores Kashmir deaths,
offers to facilitate dialogue
New Delhi, August 19 (IANS): UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has deplored the deaths in the current unrest in Jammu and Kashmir and also offered his good offices to facilitate dialogue between India and Pakistan to “achieve a negotiated settlement” on all outstanding issues, including Kashmir.
“I deplore the loss of life and hope that all efforts will be made to avoid further violence,” the UN Secretary-General said in his letter, obtained by IANS. “I appreciate the continued commitment of Pakistan to the peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute for the sake of regional peace and security, as you reaffirmed in your letter,” Ban said in reference to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s letter.
“The United Nations remains convinced that it is only through dialogue that the outstanding issues between Pakistan and India, including on Kashmir, can be addressed.” “I stand ready to offer my good offices, should it be requested by both sides, to facilitate dialogue in order to achieve a negotiated settlement,” Ban wrote.
In his letter earlier, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif apprised the UN chief about the “deteriorating” situation in Kashmir.
Nearly 70 people have been killed and thousands more injured in the Kashmir Valley in clashes with security forces in the wake of the killing of a prominent Kashmiri separatist Burhan Wani, in a military operation on July 8.
In his letter of August 5, Prime Minister Sharif called for efforts to end the “violation of human rights” of the Kashmiri people and also to “implement the decades old UN Security Council resolutions for the settlement of the Kashmir dispute through a plebiscite”.
The UN Secretary-General said that he looked forward to meeting the Pakistani leader again during the upcoming 71st session of the UN General Assembly to “discuss matters of common interest”.
