"The recent attacks on Hindus in Kashmir are a reminder of the continued failure by all parties to protect civilian non-combatants," said Sidney Jones, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division. "Just as we have condemned abuses against civilians at the hands of the Indian security forces, we oppose violations of international humanitarian law by militant groups." The Geneva Conventions, she noted, prohibit acts of violence against civilians who are not taking an active part in hostilities in internal armed conflicts.
On Saturday night, a group of men armed with assault rifles entered two houses in the village of Ind, located 10 km north of the town of Gool in Udhampur district. According to press reports, they opened fire on the occupants, killing three elderly men and a teenage boy, and critically injuring two others. Two nights earlier, another group of gunmen had raided several Hindu homes in the village of Kot Dara, about 10km from the town of Rajouri, and fired upon the residents. Six persons were killed in that attack, and six others injured. In a separate incident on Sunday, a gunman shot a member of the Kashmir Valley's dwindling Hindu minority at a long-distance dialing kiosk that he operated in Qazi Gund, near the town of Anantnag. The victim, Prithvi Nath, was hospitalized with injuries sustained in the attack.
The slayings this weekend follow the mass killings of Hindus in different parts of the state earlier this month. On August 1 and 2, gunmen killed a total of nearly ninety persons in separate attacks on Hindu pilgrims at Pahalgam in the Kashmir Valley; predominantly Hindu migrant laborers at a brick-kiln factory in Qazi Gund and in a neighboring village; and local Hindus in Doda, immediately south of the Valley. Although the massacres were condemned by most major separatist political parties and armed groups active in Kashmir, they are believed to have been carried out by militant factions opposed to peace talks then underway between Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Kashmir's largest armed guerilla group, and the Indian government.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks this past weekend. Although in each case local Hindu residents were selectively targeted, local observers and media have speculated that there may have been different motives for the different incidents. Some of the persons killed in the attack on homes in Kot Dara were reported to have been members of the local Village Defense Committee (VDC), an institution established by the state government in the hill districts. The VDCs, ostensibly set up to guarantee the safety of all of the region's inhabitants, have recruited their members almost exclusively from local Hindu communities and are seen by militants as adjuncts to the Indian security forces. The attempted killing in Qazi Gund came two days after the state cabinet approved a controversial proposal for the resettlement of displaced Hindus, most of whom had fled their homes in the Kashmir Valley in 1990, into three new "safe" zones in the Valley.