Barack Obama finally wins and is now officially, the Democrat nominee for this year’s Presidential elections. Mr. Obama’s triumph closed a 16-month primary campaign that, as the New York Times reports, “broke records on several fronts: the number of voters who participated, the amount of money raised and spent and the sheer length of the fight. The campaign, infused by tensions over race and gender, provided unexpected twists to the end as Mr. Obama ultimately prevailed over Mrs. Clinton, who just a year ago appeared headed toward becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major party.”

The New York Times also published an interesting photo feature titled ‘Who is Barack Obama?‘ which gives some insight to the man who might well be, the next president of the United States.

I am the wife of Mohammad Afzal, the man accused of conspiring to attack the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001. Afzal has been condemned to death by the Sessions Court Judge, S N Dhingra and his death sentence has been confirmed by the Hon’ble High Court of Delhi. Now the case has come up before the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India.

All over India people have condemned the attack on Parliament. And I agree that it was a terrorist attack and must be condemned. However, it is also important that the people accused of such a serious crime be given a fair trial and their story be fully heard before they are punished. I believe that no one has heard my husband’s story and he has so far never been represented in the court properly.

I appeal to you to hear our story and then decide for yourselves whether justice has been done. Afzal and my story is the story of many young Kashmiri couples. Our story represents the tragedy facing our people.

In 1990 Afzal was attracted to the movement led by the JKLF, like thousands of other youth. He went to Pakistan for training and stayed there for a little while. However, he was disillusioned by the differences between different groups and he did not support pro-Pakistani groups. He stayed there only three months without getting any training. Afzal returned to Kashmir and he went to Delhi to pursue his studies. He always wanted to study and before he joined the movement he was doing his MBBS.

My husband wanted to return to normal life and with that intention he surrendered to the BSF. The BSF Commandant refused to give him his certificate till he had motivated two others to surrender. And Afzal motivated two other militants to surrender. He was given a certificate stating that he was a surrendered militant. You will not perhaps realise that it is very difficult to live as a surrendered militant in Kashmir but he decided to live with his family in Kashmir. In 1997 he started a small business of medicines and surgical instruments in Kashmir. The next year we were married. He was 28 years old and I was 18 years.

Throughout the period that we lived in Kashmir the Indian security forces continuously harassed Afzal and told him to spy on people they suspected of being militants. One Major Ram Mohan Roy of 22 Rashtriya Rifles tortured Afzal and gave him electric shocks in his private parts. He was humiliated and abused.

The Indian security forces used to regularly take Afzal to their camps and torture him. They wanted to extract information from him. One night the Indian security forces came to our home and abused all of us and took away Afzal to their camp; another time he was taken to the STF (State Task Force) camp Palhalan Pattan.

Some days later they took him to the Humhama STF camp. In that camp the officers, DSP Vinay Gupta and DSP Darinder Singh demanded Rs one lakh. We are not a rich family and we had to sell everything, including the little gold I got on my marriage to save Afzal from the torture.

Afzal was kept in freezing water and petrol was put into his anus. One officer Shanti Singh hanged my husband upside down for hours naked and in the cold. They gave electric shocks in his penis and he had to have treatment for days.

You will think that Afzal must be involved in some militant activities that is why the security forces were torturing him to extract information. But you must understand the situation in Kashmir, every man, woman and child has some information on the movement even if they are not involved. By making people into informers they turn brother against brother, wife against husband and children against parents. Afzal wanted to live quietly with his family but the STF would not allow him.

You should also know that the STF force is notorious in Kashmir for extorting money from the people and they have become so infamous that when Mufti Sayed became the Chief Minister he promised in his election manifesto to disband the entire force. The STF is known for human rights violations including killing people in their custody and brutal, senseless, inhuman torture.

It was under these conditions that forced Afzal to leave his home, family and settle in Delhi. He struggled hard to earn a living and he had decided to bring me and our four-year old son, Ghalib, to Delhi. Like any other family we dreamed of living together peacefully and bringing up our children, giving them a good education and seeing them grow up to be good human beings. That dream was cut short when once again the STF got hold of my husband in Delhi.

The STF told my husband to bring one man Mohammad to Delhi from Kashmir. He met Mohammad and one other man Tariq there at the STF camp. He did not know anything about the men and he had no idea why he was being asked to do the job. He has told all this to the court but the court chose to believe half his statement about bringing Mohammad but not the bit that he was told to do so by the STF.

There was no one to represent Afzal in the lower court. The court appointed a lawyer who never took instructions from Afzal, or cross examined the prosecution witnesses. That lawyer was communal and showed his hatred for my husband. When my husband told Judge Dhingra that he did not want that lawyer the judge ignored him. In fact my husband went totally undefended in the trial court. When ever my husband wished to say something the judge would not hear him out and the judge showed his communal bias in open court.

In the High Court one human rights lawyer offered to represent Afzal and my husband accepted. But instead of defending Afzal the lawyer began by asking the court not to hang Afzal but to kill him by a lethal injection. My husband never expressed any desire to die. He has maintained that he has been entrapped by the STF. My husband was shocked but he had no way of changing his lawyer while being locked up in the high security jail. It was only after the High Court judgement was pronounced he got to know about the way the lawyer had represented him. Afzal refused to accept the same lawyer for his appeal in the Supreme Court. I had no way of getting Afzal a lawyer. I do not know anyone in Delhi. Finally Afzal wrote to the Defence Committee set up for Mr Geelani. I am annexing his letter. And the Defence Committee helped Afzal to get a senior lawyer, Mr Sushil Kumar. However, the Supreme Court cannot go into the evidence and so I do not know what will happen.

I appeal to you to ensure that my husband is not condemned to death and he is ensured a fair trial. Surely your conscience will not allow you to be a party to the death of a fellow human being who has not been represented in the court and who has not had a chance to tell his story? The police have made him falsely confess before the media even before the trial started. They humiliated him, beat him, tortured him and even urinated in his mouth. I feel deep shame to talk about these things in public but circumstances have forced me. It has taken a lot of courage for me to put all this on paper but I do so for the sake of my child who is now six years old.

Will you speak out at the injustice my husband has faced? Will you speak out on my behalf? I am of course fighting for my husband’s life, for the life of my son’s father. But I also speak as a Kashmiri woman who is losing faith in Indian democracy and its ability to be fair to Kashmiri Muslims.

Tabassum

Its been over 5 years since the “terrorist attack” on the World Trade Centre in New York. The US govt. was quick to point, without supporting evidence, the people/organization responsible for it.

The US govt had gone to war with 2 nations on the pretext of “war against terror”. First the war on Afghanistan to oust the ruling Taliban regime and find the Sept 11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden and then with Iraq claiming them to possess ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ which they miserably failed to locate. Osama had repeatedly denied his involvement in the attacks. But the US govt insisted and were successful in convincing its people and heads of other nations behind its rationale in going to war with Afghanistan and Iraq.

Loose Change (( The video is available as torrents online. You can also watch it on You Tube and Google video. Incase you want a copy, get in touch )) is a documentary that provides an alternative explanation of events during the September 11 attacks. Dylan Avery (( Watch the interview with Dylan Avery, Director – Loose Change )), one of the producers of the video, had originally been planning to make a fictional story about a possible conspiracy related to the attacks of 9/11. Avery claims that he began to believe that there was an actual cover up over the 9/11 attacks during research for this film, and that the genre switched to a documentary after discussing the events with his childhood friend Korey Rowe, a soldier who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and now one of the producers of that video.

One of the highlights of the video was analysing the fall of the twin towers. According to Physics911.net, had the fall been real, it would have resulted in pancaking effect leaving chunks of concrete on the ground below. But what was observed was fine pulverized concrete dust after the building collapsed in a virtual freefall. This is only possible in a controlled demolition, where each floor of a building is destroyed at just the moment the floor above is about to strike it. This method has indeed given near-freefall speed to demolitions of buildings all over the world in the past few decades (( Compare and contrast the results of controlled demolition and other forces. )). Now the question arises – who planted these detonators in the WTC? Was the plane hijacking a coverup for something more sinister than we were actually made to believe?

When I watched the video, I felt goosebumps all over my body. I knew something was amiss with the initial investigations when they claimed to have found the passport of one of the hijackers amidst the debris but failed to reveal the contents of the FDRs on the airplanes.

My uncle once made an interesting observation. He said, whenever the popularity ratings of Bush or Blair begins to hit a low, a terrorist plot will surprisingly surface from some part of the world. Take the recent transantlantic aircraft plot successfully foiled by British authorities, which would have otherwise resulted in “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. Prior to the “plot”, its interesting to note that Blair’s rating was at a 12-year low. Small wonder, why the successful thwarting of the plot became such a media spectacle.

I dont blame Bush or Blair for all the unfortunate things thats happening in the world today. They are mere puppets in the hands of few, who are masterminding all of this. People for whom power and wealth is more than anything they can bargain and for whom this very power that they are after, will one day backlash.

I’ve cast my first vote ever for the 2006 State Assembly Elections in TamilNadu.

This has been a first not only for me but also for my family. Its only recently that we’ve moved back to India (all of us) and I’m pretty happy that we exercised our franchise. We set out early this morning and were pleasantly surprised by the security arrangements made for the voters. My only gripe is that the entire list on the electronic polling machine was in Tamil – a language that I unfortunately cannot read or write. It would be better if they had English in addition to Tamil as it would help a significant section of the population in casting their votes. I did, however, know the symbol of the party I wanted to elect and that helped. Nonetheless, it was a good experience and there is a sense of pride somewhere.