Human Rights Watch says Gujarat riots 'orchestrated'
Dharam Shourie (Press Trust of India) Posted online: Tuesday, April 30, 2002 at 2141 hours IST
New York, April 30: Charging Gujarat government with complicity in the attacks in which "hundreds" of Muslims were killed, a US-based human rights group has asked international community to put "pressure" on the Indian government to end violence against minorities.
The Human Rights Watch said the government should "comply with international human rights and Indian constitutional law" to end the "orchestrated violence".
In a report released on Tuesday, it also urged the Indian government to "actively seek the assistance of international agencies and to invite UN human rights experts to investigate state and police participation in the violence in Gujarat."
In the highly critical report, the human rights watch alleged that state officials in Gujarat were directly involved in the killings of "hundreds of Muslims" since February 27 and were engineering a massive cover-up.
What happened, it says, was not a "spontaneous uprising." It was a "carefully orchestrated" attack against Muslims planned in advance and organised with "extensive participation of police and state officials."
The 75-page report directly implicates police officials in all the incidents it documents. It alleges police personnel as telling Muslims that they have no order to save them and in many incidents even leading "murderous mobs", aiming and firing at Muslims.
"Under the guise of offering assistance," the report alleges, "some police officers led the victims directly into the hands of their killers."
"Panicked phone calls made to the police, fire brigades, and even ambulance services generally proved futile."
The report says its representatives visited Ahmedabad three weeks after the initial attacks and spoke to both Hindu and Muslims survivors of the attacks.
The report also records testimony of witnesses on retaliatory attacks against Hindus, and it says that it "strongly condemned" them.
According to the report, three days of "retaliatory killing spree" by Hindus following attack on a train in Godhra left "hundreds dead and tens of thousands homeless and dispossessed."
"The looting and burning of Muslim homes, businesses, and places of worship was also widespread. Muslim girls and women were brutally raped. Mass graves have been dug throughout the state," it says.
The report quotes grave diggers as telling its representatives that bodies keep arriving, "burnt and mutilated beyond recognition."
Between February 28 and March 2, it adds, thousands of attackers "descended on Muslim neighborhoods, clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of RSS, and armed with swords, sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders."
They were, it alleged, guided by voter lists and printouts of addresses of Muslim-owned properties-information obtained from the local municipality.
"In the weeks following the attacks, Hindu homes and businesses were also destroyed in retaliatory attacks by Muslims," it added.
The report alleges that the groups most directly involved in the violence against Muslims include the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party that heads the Gujarat government.
The Gujarat state administration, the report charges, has been engaged in a massive cover-up of the state's role in the massacres and that of the Sangh Parivar.
