SPOTLIGHT

Liberated Marrah

Text & photographs:
PRAVEEN SWAMI
recently in Poonch

A mountain village in Surankote, Jammu, fights against terror.

"WE buried one of them here," says Fazl Hussein Tahir, "and the other four there. Nobody would bury Abu Faris, so the dogs got him."

A Pir Panjal Scouts patrol passes a makeshift shelter once used by terrorists as a machine-gun nest.

Hil Kaka sprawls below the Banota ridge, the highest point in the Marrah valley; behind it towers the Pir Panjal range, cut by passes leading to Chrar-e-Sharif and Shopian in southern Kashmir. Until this summer the Hil Kaka bowl was what Jammu and Kashmir might look like if the Islamist Right has its way. The armies of the jehad extracted forced labour, levied taxes, issued permits to graze on mountain pastures, and killed at will. In Hil Kaka, they had communication centres, stores, and even a makeshift hospital to treat the sick and injured. Then, this summer, the Indian Army launched a massive military operation to drive terrorists out of Hil Kaka. Underlying its success, though, was an extraordinary village that found the will to resist. No one in Marrah has seen a terrorist for six months: and many residents carry guns in their hands to make sure it stays that way.

Three years ago, upper Marrah resident Mohammad Arif heard the unhappy story of a local woman who said she had been repeatedly raped by Lashkar-e-Toiba cadre. The village elder took the unusual step of complaining to their commander, a Pakistani national code-named Abu Faris. Days later, Arif was declared an Army informer and was ritually executed by having his throat slit. Arif's killing was just one of hundreds of similar outrages that have taken place over the years in the high mountains of rural Jammu. It was, however, to have the most unusual consequences. Far away in Riyadh, Arif's brother, Tahir, decided that enough was enough. He decided to set up a vigilante organisation, the Pir Panjal Scouts, to hit back. Another migrant worker from the village, Mohammad Sharif, pitched in the first 700 Saudi rial needed to get the group going.

Patrolling at Banota near the Hil Kaka bowl.

By 2002, the Pir Panjal Scouts were functioning as an undercover unit, the Jammu and Kashmir Police's Special Group III. Its personnel were hired as Special Police Officers, and paid Rs.1,500 as monthly stipend to carry out counter-terrorist operations. The 15 Rashtriya Rifles, the Army counter-insurgency force tasked with securing Marrah, provided the muscle power; and Special Group III the local knowledge needed to pinpoint terrorists and guide soldiers through the mountains and forests. When Operation Sarp Vinash began this summer, members of Special Group III played a key role, working with the crack 9 Paracommando Regiment to pinpoint and destroy terrorist defences guarding the passes into the Hil Kaka bowl. "I had the honour," Tahir candidly admits, "of executing Abu Faris with my own hands. The village refused to acknowledge him as a Muslim, so he was not buried."

While covert operations by Special Police Officers are relatively common in Jammu, the villagers of Marrah went one step further. As Operation Sarp Vinash wound down, they decided to set up a village defence committee. Over 50 volunteers have been armed with ageing but effective .303 rifles and provided rudimentary training to protect their village against attack. Now, efforts are being made to push the Marrah experience into other areas that are hard-hit by terror. Marhot, another major line of communication into Hil Kaka, is one major target. So, too, is Azmatabad, to the east of Hil Kaka. Both areas have seen a substantial escalation of violence since Sarp Vinash, often effected by terrorists who fled Hil Kaka. Earlier this month, Mohammad Akbar, the village headman of Azmatabad, was brutally beaten by terrorists for having encouraged local men to volunteer for recruitment in new Territorial Army units. Akbar had to be evacuated by air to Jammu, and is now being treated for multiple fractures at the Government Medical College in Jammu. Marhot headman Noor Ahmad received a similar beating two months ago.

WHY did Marrah revolt against jehadi terror?

Guarding his village, at Banota.

One possible explanation seems that, unlike the Kashmir Valley, the rise of jehadi forces here had no clear political foundations. Terrorists began using the Hil Kaka route to enter the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s, but did not stop there long. Until the mid-1990s, the command of groups operating in the Surankote area stayed in the hands of local residents or ethnic Kashmiris, who were relatively sensitive to local culture. Javed Kashani, a Mendhar resident who led the Hizbul Mujahideen, and Javed Haider, the south Kashmir native who replaced him, are still remembered with something resembling affection. "They minded their own business," says Dofali headman Zakir Hussain, "and we minded ours".

Around 1998, things began to change. A large-scale influx of Pakistani nationals began, upsetting the fragile balance between the local community and the jehadi groups. That summer, Haider was eliminated in an encounter which, it is widely believed, was set up by a Lashkar-e-Toiba commander code-named Abu Abada. Eager to entrench themselves as sources of authority, the jehadi groups increasingly intervened in community disputes. That was done as a bait to attract local people to join their cadre. If a man from one Gujjar clan joined the Lashkar-e-Toiba, another would join the Jaish-e-Mohammad to protect his family's interests. "In one case in 1999," says former Tehreek-e-Jihad Islami commander Abdul Razzak, who recently joined the Pir Panjal Scouts, "the Lashkar insisted that a land dispute be settled in favour of one of their members. A boy from the other clan involved was a member of our group. The Lashkar killed one of our boys, and we killed two of theirs."

Amidst the growing chaos, pitting Gujjar against Gujjar, Gujjar against Rajput, and Rajput against ethnic Kashmiri, the terrorist build-up on Hil Kaka led to a growing demand for casual labour. It was rarely paid for. "Almost every other day," recalls Mohammad Khalid, "someone would show up and demand that we haul rations or tin into the mountains, sometimes 50 kilograms at a time. It was hard and risky work. When they felt like it, they would pay Rs.25, and anyone who protested was looking for a beating." Dofali resident Abdul Ghani found himself taking a three-day walk across the Pir Panjal to Doda, terrified of the prospect that the group he was with might run into an Army patrol. "At the end of it all," he remembers, "they gave me the bus fare to go home. I must have looked unhappy, because one of them patted me on the back and told me that I had made a big contribution to the jehad, for which I would surely be admitted to Paradise."

A sick resident being carried to hospital across the difficult terrain.

By 2001, growing extortion and sexual abuse directed at Gujjar women started provoking an armed backlash. Abdul Hamid, a Pir Panjal Scout who played a key role in the early Sarp Vinash operations and was killed in their course, began cooperating with Army units in the area that year. His home was burned down, but it did little to deter others. Kulali resident Abdul Gani, now a constable with the Jammu and Kashmir Police, left his home after refusing to ferry goods from the Surankote market to the terrorists in the hills. His home, too, was destroyed. Family members of the growing numbers of young men who fled the Marrah valley suffered regular beatings and, as the case of Mohammad Arif illustrates, summary execution. Yet, there was no real focal point to build a community consensus on the issue. That had to await the return of the most influential section of the rural community, its migrant workers in Saudi Arabia.

LIBERATION might now have made Marrah a safer place to live in, but safety has not yet meant a better life.

Marrah's own defenders. Members of the village defence committee.

Two years ago, Lashkar-e-Toiba cadre began carting away the physical assets of the primary school in Dofali to build their fortifications in Hil Kaka. The tin roof went first, and then the wooden beams. Six months after Sarp Vinash, the school has not been rebuilt. Children in Dofali still have to study in Mohammad Khalid's home, battered by the winter winds when he needs to use his living room. Where there is a school building, there are no teachers. In Marrah, villagers complain that the headmaster, Mohammad Razzak, has not made his way up from Surankote in two years. For many teachers in the region, terrorism has become a full-pay excuse not to work in villages - a feeble excuse, because Surankote, or for that matter Jammu and Srinagar, have the same problem.

Most basic amenities are in much the same condition. The dispensary in Marrah generally has no medicines. A government jeep came in the day this correspondent began the climb towards Hil Kaka, sheltering behind an Army escort, but no one accompanied the consignment to hand out appropriate drugs. Anyone seriously unwell must be hauled for several hours down the mountains into Bufliaz, and then by road to Surankote. Lower Marrah is supposed to have a veterinary hospital, but no doctor has made his way there for years. Since sick buffaloes, unlike human beings, cannot be hauled across the mountains, villagers have to suffer quietly the loss of valuable animals, which would have had several productive years ahead of them. Like most mountain farmers, Marrah valley residents depend on a single crop of corn. But they have never seen weather-resistant, high-yielding seed.

Children outside a Gujjar home.

A road into the region would help matters, but terrorism has helped ensure one has never been built. A seven-kilometre link road from Bufliaz to Dofali was sanctioned years ago, and surveys were carried out in 1999. The Public Works Department subsequently assigned the road construction project to an independent contractor. Weeks after starting work, the contractor abandoned the task, claiming to have been threatened by terrorists. Marrah valley residents claim the threats were engineered by the shopkeepers of Bufliaz, who wanted to continue selling to their captive mountain market at high prices. Whatever the truth, work on the road has not commenced, even after Operation Sarp Vinash. The Army is building a road above the Marrah valley, leading directly to Hil Kaka. It, notably, has not faced a single terrorist attack.

Worst of all, the local administration actually seems intent on punishing the villagers of the Marrah valley. Ever since violence broke out on the high mountains, Gujjar herdsmen heading for summer pastures were asked to get permits endorsed by the local administration or the Army. Around 1999, though, terrorists in Hil Kaka ordered villagers to stop using these official permits, and began issuing their own passes. Then, early this summer, the Army barred shepherds from taking their herds on to the Hil Kaka pastures. A Rs.7.5-crore compensation programme was put in place. Now Marrah valley residents have been told that they will receive no part of this compensation, for they did not hold endorsed permits for 2002. "Almost every home here lost one or two animals because of hot weather and fodder shortages," says Noor Mohammad, panchayat member of Kulali hamlet. "It is a huge loss."

Elders in discussion. Growing atrocities by terrorists resulted in a Gujjar backlash.

ON the night of February 9, 2001, soldiers noticed a fire in the village of Kot Charwal. By late next evening, 15 bodies had been dug out. Seven were of children, the youngest of them just four years old.

The carnage at Kot Charwal illustrates the perils that lie ahead for Marrah. The victims of that massacre were the families of Bakkarwal shepherds who had dared to take on terrorist groups that were active on the mountains above Rajouri. The hamlet had formed the first all-Muslim village defence committee in December the previous year, after a local resident was brutally executed by Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. When troops were pulled out in the course of the Ramzan ceasefire to meet commitments elsewhere, brutal reprisal followed. Wireless intercepts show the Lashkar-e-Toiba hopes to execute something similar in Marrah, and bus passengers in nearby Bufliaz have been asked by terrorists if any of them belonged to the village. Sooner or later, then, Marrah will again be under assault.

Children attending an open-sir class in the chill of December. Their school was destroyed by terrorists.

Signs of the building storm are already evident. A large-scale terrorist build-up is under way in Sillan Dhoke, on the fringes of the Hil Kaka area in Poonch. Sillan Dhoke, like Hil Kaka, offers terrorists easy access to the passes across the Pir Panjal range into southern Kashmir. At least three intelligence reports have suggested that terrorists are building up caches of rations and semi-permanent shelters to replace the facilities now denied to them in the Hil Kaka area. Intelligence estimates suggest that upwards of 50 terrorists, mainly from the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Tehrik-ul-Jihad Islami, are operating in the area. As such, Sillan Dhoke threatens to become a safe haven for terrorists, much as Hil Kaka once was. Residents of the Marhot area, the main line of access to Sillan Dhoke, say terrorists have made them haul substantial supplies of wood, grain, tarpaulin and gas cylinders up into the mountains, presumably for use in building up semi-fortified structures.

Two Army units, the 45 battalion and 40 battalion of the Rashtriya Rifles, are deployed around the Sillan Dhoke area. The 45 Rashtriya Rifles has responsibility for the Marhot area, which provides the main route of access through the mountains into Sillan Dhoke. Sillan Dhoke is a five-hour walk from Marhot, and a three-hour walk from Jabbi Toti, the nearest military post. Neither unit has launched offensive operations in the Sillan Dhoke area since the end of Operation Sarp Vinash. Army sources say the crack 9 Paracommando Regiment carried out covert reconnaissance activities above the Marhot area in early December, although it is unclear if these were linked with future offensive plans in Sillan Dhoke. The Army's Rajouri-based Romeo Counter-Insurgency Force has also sanctioned the construction of a road from Surankote to Marhot, which would help future operations.

Pir Panjal Scouts and police personnel prepare for a patrol.

If nothing else, though, the new build-up has exposed the limitations of Sarp Vinash-type ground-holding operations in rural Jammu. While Sarp Vinash attracted considerable controversy for overstating its successes, as represented by the numbers of terrorists killed, it did succeed in ridding the Hil Kaka bowl of terrorists. A full battalion of the Rashtriya Rifles, or some 1,000 soldiers, are now permanently deployed in the bowl to keep terrorists from reoccupying the area. This has been a source of huge relief to the villagers of the Marrah valley - but the fact remains that there are simply not enough troops to deploy in force everywhere they might chose to go along the Pir Panjal. Village defence committees offer some a way out, but in multi-caste villages of Marhot, however, key Muslim communities, notably Gujjars, ethnic Kashmiris, Rajputs and Lohars are divided on who is to lead these. Nor is it clear, given the experience of Kot Charwal, that the Marrah village defence committee will be able to survive if troops are at some stage thinned out or withdrawn. The fragility of the situation is evident in the fact that none of the immediate family members of the Pir Panjal Scouts lives in the village, fearful of reprisals.

And yet, Marrah must be helped to stay free, for the collapse of its rebellion against the Islamist Right would signal to others that resistance cannot succeed.

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