Refugee Crisis Worsening in Western Kashmir

Zoltan Istvan
National Geographic Today

March 13, 2003

On the eve of what could become a new war-generated refugee crisis, an old one worsens in western Kashmir.

Azad Kashmir is a territory of Kashmir under Pakistan's jurisdiction. Twelve miles (19 kilometers) outside of Muzaffarabad, capital of Azad Kashmir, the mountains once were green and empty. Now they are speckled with white tents. More than 100 refugees have just moved into a new camp there above the Jhelum River.

The refugees, Kashmiri Muslims, are trying to rebuild lives ravaged by the decades-old Pakistan-Indian Kashmir conflict. The newcomers join the 17,000 other refugees who have made Azad Kashmir their home—some since 1989.

"Many of them have fled out of fear for their lives from the Indian forces, as well as the destruction of their houses," said Hiram Ruiz, director of communications for the U.S. Committee for Refugees in Washington, D.C., who has witnessed the situation firsthand.

The region of Kashmir, divided among China, India, and Pakistan, represents a melting pot of ancient cultures against the backdrop of some of the world's most striking landscapes: the Kashmir Valley and the Karakoram Range, including K2.

The on-again, off-again conflict over Kashmir, which erupted in war between India and Pakistan in 1947, has resulted in more than 33,000 deaths just since 1989. Nuclear arms in the hands of both India and Pakistan have only stepped up international concern about the region.

Atrocities of War

The war headlines overshadow the refugee problem in Kashmir. More than 350,000 refugees have flooded other parts of Kashmir.

Sheikh Bashir Ahmad, a human rights activist, professor and chairman of the Association of Applied Social Services Network in Muzaffarabad, recently visited the new refugee camp above the Jhelum River.

The war's worst atrocities show starkly among the camp's torn tents and dirt paths. About 150 refugees have moved in. Many have little to eat.

"These people used to have farms and houses," Ahmad said. "Now they have nothing. And many have lost family members."

In 1999, the latest group of refugees began a slow mass migration to Azad Kashmir from villages near the Neelum Valley, which straddles the Line of Control between Indian and Pakistan Kashmir.

The refugees claim that Indian soldiers forced them out of their homes. While escaping to Pakistan across the LoC, as the border is known, they were in harm's way from land mines.

At first the refugees migrated only five miles from their villages, hoping they might soon return to their homes in India. But constant shelling near the LoC forced them to start new lives elsewhere. For Kashmiri Muslims, Pakistan appeared safer than Indian-held Kashmir

Last year they chose the mountains of Muzaffarabad, 30 miles (48 kilometers) from the LoC. There the Azad Kashmir government has provided land and minimal assistance.

In the camp, an old woman rushes up to a journalist with a videocamera and holds up her deformed fingers—from torture, she said—to be sure they are captured on film.

Disaster Conditions

Another refugee, a mother of three whose surname is Nujan, said, "The soldiers came into my house looking for militants. Afterward they took me outside and beat me with their guns."

"She was also raped by the soldiers," Ahmad said. "Many of the other female refugees were also raped."

About half the refugees are crippled or ill. Some are amputees on cheaply-constructed prosthetic legs. The amputees are the lucky ones—they didn't bleed to death after stepping on land mines.

Despite Azad Kashmir's status as part of Pakistan, its own people broadly control the region's administration. For a poor and unstable area in Pakistan, notorious for breeding militants, the government does manage to allocate basic necessities.

Foundations are going up for stone houses that will replace the tents in the new camp. Already a rusty pipe is snaking its way down the mountain from a stream bringing water to the refugees.

"The Azad Kashmir government is helping us," said a man named Dahoundhan, crying, holding his young son and looking at his crippled wife lying next to him. "But we need the U.N. to solve the Kashmir issue. We need the U.N. to help us get our land and homes back—because we are living in a disaster condition."

With the Kashmir conflict in its sixth decade of deadlock, the outlook for resolution is bleak.

Outside Dahoundhan's tent, refugees dig with shovels and struggle to carry rocks to build a foundation for the new camp.

Dahoundhan's wife watches them, then turns her head away and cries softly. For her as for many of the refugees, their plight seems overwhelming and hopeless.

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