Author: Joshua Hammer
Publication: Newsweek Web Exclusive
Date: October 13, 2001
URL: http://www.msnbc.com/news/642314.asp
Once a majestic summer capital,
Srinagar now faces war, terror-and the fallout from the U.S. attacks on
Afghanistan
Oct. 12- Sprawling on a hilltop
on the outskirts of Srinagar, the former summer residence of the Maharajah
of Kashmir, is one of the most glorious patches of real estate on earth.
Heavily Forested Hills covered in
juniper and cypress rise sharply behind the whitewashed palace, while a
lawn the size of four football fields slopes gently down toward the houseboats
and lotus gardens of Dal Lake. Now known as the Grand Palace Intercontinental,
a luxurious five-star hotel with 125 suites and cottages, the villa in
ordinary times would be a booming resort filled with well-heeled vacationers.
But these are not ordinary times.
The first indication that something's
not right is the large sign posted on the circular driveway: NO WEAPON
BEYOND THIS POINT. Just past the uniformed Sikh doorman poised at rigid
attention, the vast columned lobby is as silent as a mausoleum. After a
10-minute wait the receptionist arrives, mumbling apologetically. "We are
not used to guests," he says. How many of the Grand Palace's 125 rooms
are presently occupied? I inquire. The clerk pauses, clears his throat.
"You are the only ones," he says.
That's hardly surprising. After
12 years in which nearly a dozen militant groups have fought without respite
against India's rule of this disputed Muslim-majority area, few locals
can even remember the days when the fabled Vale of Kashmir was a tourist
paradise. Today the mood here is grim and desperate, the result of repeated
terrorist attacks, the ubiquitous presence of the hated Indian Army, and
a creeping fundamentalist Islamic influence for which the average Kashmiri
citizen has little sympathy. Suicide attacks on military convoys and bases
in the remote countryside-and sometimes the capital-by separatist militants
known as fedayeen are near-daily occurrences, as are reprisals carried
out by the Indian Army against civilians. Officials say more than 30,000
people have been killed in political violence since the revolt against
Indian rule began in 1989; India 's government has stationed half a million
troops in Kashmir, and Srinagar, the chaotic capital on Dal Lake, has become
an armed camp.
Now, the shikaras-canopied longboats-that
once paddled honeymooners across the lake are filled with armed troops
from the Border Security Force, on the lookout for Kashmiri guerrillas.
And the hundreds of houseboats that line the shore stand empty, in varying
states of disrepair, like indigent dowagers who've lost both the resources
and the will for self-upkeep. Two weeks ago the militants struck again,
this time with an act of unprecedented audacity in the heart of the capital.
Just before 2 p.m. on Oct. 1, a suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden
Tata Sumo-a Land Cruiser-like vehicle popular in India-into the heavily
guarded front gate of Kashmir's State Legislature. As the huge explosion
sent body parts flying and ripped a hole in the gate, three more militants
disguised in police uniforms entered the compound, Kalashnikov assault
rifles blazing. They killed several people in the courtyard and then swept
through one of the buildings, shooting ministerial aides dead as they cowered
behind their desks. The final death toll was 38, including the bomber and
three attackers, who were killed by police.
The Pakistani-based Islamic fundamentalist
group Jaish-e Mohammed, which has close ties to Afghanistan's Taliban,
claimed credit for the suicide attack, then later denied responsibility.
Five days later, when I arrived in Srinagar from New Delhi, most damage
had been repaired, and a semblance of calm had returned to the city. But
the hundreds of police and paramilitary forces who lined the streets were
on high alert, and our car-a Tata Sumo, just like the one driven by the
suicide attacker-was pulled over repeatedly whenever we drove around town.
For those who remember Kashmir's
glory days, the transformation has been gut-wrenching. At Butt's Clermont
Houseboats, opened by the Butt family during the last days of the British
Raj in 1940, Gulam Butt wages a lonely battle to keep things afloat. During
its heyday a generation ago, Butt's played host to American ambassadors,
political eminences such as Adlai Stevenson and Nelson Rockefeller and-most
famously-to George Harrison, who holed up here for several weeks in 1966
during the Beatles' spiritual pilgrimage to India. Now Butt's elegant wooden
boats, hand-crafted beauties floating in the shallows at the pristine northern
end of the lake, provide refuge only to foreign correspondents passing
through for a glimpse of the war. Rare visitors are greeted with a warmth
usually reserved for family members returning home after a long exile.
"Welcome, my dear," Butt cried as I stepped out of my taxi, hugging me
and leading me into his office, where he pointed out fading black-and-white
photos on the walls of illustrious guests from decades past. "Those were
better days," Butt said. "Inshallah [God willing], they'll return." He'd
been forced to scuttle five of his nine houseboats and had laid off most
of the staff; the four employees who remained spent weeks at a time, they
conceded, with nothing to do. (The previous guest on my houseboat had checked
out 44 days ago.) Lassa, who paddles Butt's visitors around Dal Lake in
a shikara, told me that "Months go by and we see nobody. It's very lonely.
And very hard for a poor man like me to survive."
Now Butt and his colleagues have
yet another destabilizing factor to worry about: the U.S.-led attacks on
Afghanistan and the spillover effect across the Islamic world. On Monday
morning, hours after the first strikes against Taliban targets in Kabul
and Kandahar, I drove to the edge of Srinagar's old city to measure reaction
on the streets. It was just after 8:30 a.m., and the mood was turning ugly.
Young toughs swaggered through the alleys, smashing long wooden sticks
against the metal shutters of shops to intimidate their owners into closing
up. They also threw rocks at several vehicles. By 9 a.m. about 50 policemen
had taken up positions at a square beside the centuries-old Jamia Mosque,
the chief enclave of the fundamentalists and a frequent flash point for
Islamic rage. Burning tires set up as barricades by the mobs sent acrid
smoke into the crisp mountain air. From the distance, the boys began taunting
the police with cries of "Death to America," "Long Live Pakistan," and
"Long Live the Taliban." (They were evidently oblivious to the fact that
Pakistan had joined the antiterror coalition against their former Afghan
allies.)
The police dove for cover before
a fusillade of bricks and stones, answering back with round after round
of tear gas and stun grenades. The boys surged forward, screaming obscenities,
advancing toward the police along three streets that converged on the square.
Shopkeepers and pedestrians caught in the epicenter cowered in doorways;
the cops fired more tear gas, called for reinforcements and then, screaming
like banshees, charged en masse toward the mob, sending them fleeing into
the warrens of the old city. "We have these incidents almost every Friday,
but this one is hotter than usual," said Lt. Mohsin Gadin, washing tear
gas out of his eyes at a public water tap. "They've never come at us from
all sides before. I'm afraid it's going to get uglier."
The street battles died down after
two hours without any fatalities. But more violence erupted this week,
when two Indian soldiers and four members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e
Taiba were killed in a 30-hour gun battle that began in a house south of
Srinagar on Wednesday. Nor did anybody I spoke to doubt that the situation
would remain highly volatile-and that frustrated young Kashmiris would
continue to use the Afghan war to vent their anger. "It's like the Palestinian
intifada, a culture of boys going out, and most of them don't even know
what they're fighting against," said Muzamil Jaleel, the Kashmir correspondent
for The Indian Express, who joined me on Monday's expedition.
But some groups in Kashmir do have
a clear focus. One of the most vocal such groups in Srinagar is the Daughters
of Brotherhood, a clutch of burqa-wearing women who support the Taliban
and have called for the imposition of Sharia (Islamic religious law) in
the valley. Their views are highly unpopular in Srinagar-the group is widely
disparaged by local women as "the Daughters of Degradation," a pun in the
Kashmiri language-yet they are finding support from violent Islamic fundamentalists.
Six weeks ago, a previously unknown Islamic group calling itself Lashkar-e
Jabbar ordered all women to wear the all-enveloping burqa robe and threatened
to attack those who refused. Shortly afterward, three young women, including
a 14-year-old girl, were splashed in the face with acid. The next day,
nearly half a million burqas were sold to terrified women in Srinagar.
(Some in Srinagar suspect that the Islamic group was in league with-or
an invention of-local merchants, who made a quick fortune from the rush
to buy the garments.)
In the last few weeks those fears
have subsided, but the fundamentalists are no less vocal. "Osama bin Laden
is our hero," proclaimed Asiya Andrabi, the leader of the Daughters of
Brotherhood, sitting on the floor alongside a half dozen other members
of her group, all of whom were encased in black. As she condemned the American
"terrorism" in Afghanistan, I asked her repeatedly whether she supported
the murder of those at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. She stared
back sullenly. As the press conference broke up, Jaleel, the Indian Express
reporter, told me that I had pushed her too hard; these were not people
to be trifled with, he warned.
Jaleel's fears were confirmed later
that evening. When I arrived back at Butt's Houseboats in the darkness,
six grim-faced police officers met me at the gate. Word had spread through
Srinagar of my encounter with the "Taliban women," the chief told me, and
he was providing me with armed guards to guarantee my safety. "These are
dangerous times," the chief said. "We have to take every precaution." Those
precautions ultimately required me to leave the houseboat a half hour later,
after the police decided that they couldn't protect me from a militant
attack in this isolated region of Dal Lake. With reluctance, I said goodbye
to Gulam Butt and was escorted to the down-at-the-heels Broadway Hotel
in a secure neighborhood of central Srinagar. To the piped-in music of
Abba, I ate a depressing dinner in the empty dining room.
In spite of the violence that bedevils
Srinagar, there are moments when the tension drops away. One evening, Lassa
took me out for a cruise at sunset. We paddled through thick clumps of
lotuses to the center of Dal Lake, where the incantatory rumble of worshipers
chanting in the white-domed Sufi mosque on the lake shore drifted through
the chill mountain air. Kingfishers cartwheeled overhead, then dropped
like stones into the water, emerging with thrashing carp ensnared in their
sharp probosci. A flock of crows took off from nearby rice fields, a dense
black cloud sweeping across the cobalt-blue sky. As we paddled closer to
shore, I heard female voices singing and noticed the orange light of many
small fires. It was a Kashmiri wedding, Lassa told me. A dozen cooks were
preparing the mutton-heavy traditional marriage feast, known as the wazwan.
We drifted past the cooking fires and the gaily singing girls, as the serrated
mountains that loom above the lake faded into the shadows. A quarter moon
rose above the valley, a Kashmiri family paddled toward home across the
glassy lake, and for a brief moment, Srinagar felt like paradise on earth.
