|
Terrorism, Lies and Video Tapes
Khalra anniversary marked with video of his last speech
WSN News
 Anniversaries come and anniversaries
go. Some of course the
regimes will do all they can to forget.
Or to make you forget. Jaswant
Singh Khalra, a name synonymous
with human rights, was abducted
on September 6, 1995. Eleven whole
years have passed by, and successive
governments have done little
except paying lip service.
The Punjab Police stands indicted
in the eyes of justice-loving people
anywhere for abducting, torturing,
murdering human rights
defender Jaswant Singh Khalra
who died because he
exposed the disappearances
and killings of
thousands of Sikhs by
the Punjab police.
In order to perpetuate
his memory, his last
speech made to a
Canadian audience has
now been released with
subtitles by Ensaaf.
Khalra discusses his
investigations into the
disappearances and his
readiness to die to expose the truth
about these crimes. This video
includes clips from his speech
made at the Dixie Gurdwara in
Toronto, Canada in April 1995, at a
conference organized by the radio
station Ankhila Punjab.
The video opens as Khalra
begins his speech with a moving
fable about the struggle of truth
and light against expanding darkness.
He describes the emotions of
thousands of mothers whose sons
have been disappeared by the
Punjab police, and poses the question
that motivated his investigations:
“A mother’s heart is such
that even if she sees her
son’s dead body, she does not
accept that her son has left her,”
says Khalra.
“And those mothers who have
not even seen their children’s dead
bodies, they were asking us: at
least find out, is our son alive or
not?” In this speech, Khalra
describes how he traced the fate of
many disappeared Sikhs to
Amritsar’s municipal cremation
grounds. Through government
records obtained from these
municipalities, Khalra exposed a
detailed history of systematic
human rights violations in which
security forces abducted, murdered,
and secretly cremated an
estimated 6,017 Sikhs in Amritsar
district alone—then one of 13 districts
in Punjab—from 1984 to 1995.
In November 2005, six Punjab
police officers were held accountable
for Khalra’s abduction and
murder. The architect of this
crime, however, remains free. In
his speech, Khalra pinpoints
KPS Gill, then
Director General of
Punjab police, as the person
in charge of the systematic
abuses perpetrated
by the Punjab police,
and discusses the standard
responses made by
Gill to cover-up the mass
secret cremations.
Khalra further describes
his struggle before the
Punjab and Haryana
High Court for accountability for
these mass state crimes. During
the Khalra trial in February 2005,
Special Police Officer (SPO) Kuldip
Singh testified that he witnessed
KPS Gill interrogate Khalra in illegal
detention several days prior to
his murder. SPO Kuldip Singh also
testified that Khalra had been tortured.
Despite this testimony, the
Indian government has not investigated
or charged KPS Gill for his
role in murdering Khalra. India’s
obligations under international
law require it to fully investigate
human rights violations and
identify and prosecute all perpetrators.
The government cannot fulfill its
legal obligations until it ends Gill’s
impunity for his role in Khalra’s
abduction, illegal detention, torture,
and murder.
Readers may visit the
http://www.ensaaf.org/khalra.htm for more.
6 September 2006
|
Read Also
