Pakistan is for hire

We expect to be paid 100 billion US dollars for the dirty work U(S) are asking of us. Only 100 billion dollars and it will all be done, no problems. Actually, whoever pays our prices takes our services. So if U(S) can’t pay us, we might actually make it as bad as hell for ya..

Well, you know the drill, U(..S) have paid crooks in the past, under the table ofcourse, now we are just asking for our price out and clear!! and make it quick for if you don’t, Pakistan will come crashing down in a few days time. and there is no way I, Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, will ever let that happen. I will just take my price from someone else. I will be waiting for the check..

Partitioning India over lunch

BBC reports some facts about the partition of the Indian subcontinent from the memoirs of a British civil servant who was directly involved in the Indo-Pak Boundary Commission:
Memoirs of a British civil servant never published until now show how much the partition of India was decided by just two men, the BBC’s Alastair Lawson reports.

Christopher Beaumont was not an admirer of Mountbatten

In a quiet village in the northern English county of Yorkshire, Robert Beaumont rifles through his father’s archives.

The various and somewhat tatty pieces of paper he unearths are no ordinary collection of paternal memoirs.

They are the thoughts and reflections of his father, Christopher Beaumont, who played a central role in the partition of India in 1947, which resulted in arguably the largest mass migration of peoples the world has ever seen.

After the death in 1989 of Mountbatten’s Private Secretary, Sir George Abell, Beaumont was probably not exaggerating when he claimed to be the only person left who “knew the truth about partition”.

‘Bending the border’

It is estimated that around 14.5 million people moved to Pakistan from India or travelled in the opposite direction from Pakistan to India.

It was a time of mass migration, uncertainty and bloodshed

In 1947, Beaumont was private secretary to the senior British judge, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who was chairman of the Indo-Pakistan Boundary Commission.

Radcliffe was responsible for dividing the vast territories of British India into India and Pakistan, separating 400 million people along religious lines.

The family documents show that Beaumont had a stark assessment of the role played by Britain in the last days of the Raj.

“The viceroy, Mountbatten, must take the blame – though not the sole blame – for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished,” he writes.

“The handover of power was done too quickly.”

The central theme ever present in Beaumont’s historic paperwork is that Mountbatten not only bent the rules when it came to partition – he also bent the border in India’s favour.

The documents repeatedly allege that Mountbatten put pressure on Radcliffe to alter the boundary in India’s favour.

On one occasion, he complains that he was “deftly excluded” from a lunch between the pair in which a substantial tract of Muslim-majority territory – which should have gone to Pakistan – was instead ceded to India.

Beaumont’s papers say that the incident brought “grave discredit on both men”.

Punjab ‘disaster’

But Beaumont – who later in life was a circuit judge in the UK – is most scathing about how partition affected the Punjab, which was split between India and Pakistan.

Audio: Mountbatten’s address

“The Punjab partition was a disaster,” he writes.

“Geography, canals, railways and roads all argued against dismemberment.

“The trouble was that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were an integrated population so that it was impossible to make a frontier without widespread dislocation.

“Thousands of people died or were uprooted from their homes in what was in effect a civil war.

“By the end of 1947 there were virtually no Hindus or Sikhs living in west Punjab – now part of Pakistan – and no Muslims in the Indian east.

“The British government and Mountbatten must bear a large part of the blame for this tragedy.”

Personality clash

Beaumont goes on to argue that it was “irresponsible” of Lord Mountbatten to insist that Beaumont complete the boundary within a six-week deadline – despite his protests.

Robert Beaumont collected his father’s papers after his death

On Kashmir, Beaumont argues that it would have been “far more sensible” to have made the flash-point territory a separate country.

According to Beaumont, the “formidably intelligent” Radcliffe “did not get on well” with Mountbatten.

“They could not have been more different,” he writes.

“Mountbatten was very good-looking and had a well-deserved history of personal bravery but, to put it mildly, he had few literary tastes.

“Radcliffe… was very quietly civilised. It was a relationship so like chalk and cheese that Lady Mountbatten had to use all her adroitness to keep conversation between them on an even keel.”

Beaumont died in 2002 but his son Robert remembers his father with great affection.

“He was also a man of supreme honesty, who spoke out on numerous occasions against the official British version of events surrounding partition without in any way being disloyal to his country,” Robert Beaumont recalls.

A perspective on Kashmir

While Kashmir continues to see phases of war and those of silence for 60 years now, I came across a different perspective of the situation in Kashmir in this news article below. A similar survey of people could now also be carried out in the Pakistani part of Kashmir. Post traumatic stress is even more common in the earthquake-struck areas.

India/Pakistan: Legacy of terror

By Alistair Scrutton

PANZU, India, May 21 (Reuters) – Six months have passed since masked gunmen knocked on the door one night and shot Sarwa’s husband, a Muslim faith healer, six times in the chest at point-blank range.

The Kashmiri villager still can’t shake off the despair. She complained of sleeplessness, mysterious pains, flashbacks, and nightmares. Her children sat near her in a courtyard of her house. They were quiet, unsmiling, with suspicious eyes.

They are the survivors of Kashmir’s 18-year-old separatist war against Indian rule — and have the mental scars to show it.

“I’d commit suicide but I’m just living for my children,” said the middle-aged woman, her dark eyes often staring into space.

“I feel very sad all the time, thinking of my husband,”

Officials say more than 42,000 people have been killed since the revolt. Rights groups put the toll at about 60,000 dead.

But behind those headlines, stories from survivors like Sarwa are repeated across Kashmir where doctors say thousands of people — witnesses to killings, rape and torture by both sides in the dispute — suffer traumas. Violence has subsided since a tentative peace process started in 2004, with only three deaths a day on average last year compared with ten a day a few years ago.

But there is little evidence the impact of war has diminished.

“Wherever you look in Kashmir, you’ll find the mental scars of war,” said Arjimand Hussain Talib, project manager for Actionaid, which runs a counselling service for people suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other mental problems.

A survey in rural Kashmir published last year by medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres showed one in six respondents had been detained by security forces. Of these, more than three-quarters said they were tortured.

The survey, based on interviews with 510 people, showed one in ten respondents had lost one or more members of their nuclear family. A third said they had lost one or more of their extended family members.

LIFE UNDER CONSTANT THREAT

Chats with Kashmiris quickly throw up stories of the war — accounts of relatives killed or tortured, of near misses in bomb attacks and of life under constant threat from anonymous phone calls.

Trauma does not spare the troops either, and many of the 500,000 soldiers stationed in Kashmir face psychological problems.

“Lots of security officers come here, there are lots of suicide attempts,” said Abinah Syed, a doctor at Srinagar’s run-down psychiatry hospital said.

“They miss their families, they fear attacks. Many have seen a colleague dying.”

Sarwa, who did not want to give her full name, said she did not know who killed her husband. But she talked about how he was “martyred” — a way of saying in Kashmir that troops had killed him.

“My eldest son is much quieter since his father died,” Sarwa added. “And my neighbour also suffers from the same symptoms as me, sleeplessness, headaches.”

In the nearby town of Pulwama, Actionaid has some 1,200 cases on its counselling files. Most are women.

“The violence may go down, but it is shocking to see there is no fall in the people coming for help,” said Saudia Qutab, who works on the counselling project.

Qutab recently faced a mother suffering from uncontrolled weeping, sleeplessness and outbursts of aggression. Her 16-year-old son went to school seven years ago. He never returned, one of an estimated 10,000 “disappearances” in Kashmir.

“It is the disappeared cases that are often worse, because families have no closure,” Qutab said.

LIVING WITH TRAUMA

In the psychiatric hospital in Srinagar, doctors had registered 63,000 patients last year, compared with 1,500 patients in 1989.

Despite the stigma in Kashmir of entering a “mental hospital”, many villagers had travelled miles.

Most recount nothing. They just ask for medicine.

“The fear of authority is so great, traumas often don’t even come out in the chamber of the doctor,” said Dr. Arshad Hussain, a consultant at the hospital.

“There is no trust for anybody. There is a community paranoia,” he said, the door to his office constantly opened by patients pleading for his signature.

Some leaders worry how the trauma will affect the next generation.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Kashmir’s chief cleric and head of the moderate separatist alliance All Parties Hurriyat Conference, said he saw at his Friday prayer meetings that more younger people were drawn to radical Islam.

“The psychological trauma has made people a lot angrier,” said Farooq, whose father was killed by unknown gunmen.

“With politics, we are seeing more radical approaches, linked to the trauma of 18 years of violence. We preach to an audience that has a lot of anger. That makes our job more difficult”.