Kashmir: Landmines disrupt village life

Gulzar Khan is a double amputee who lost his legs while taking his livestock for grazing in the lightly forested slopes rising behind his home in Warsun village. Four people in total from Warsun village have been injured by the mines laid here in the early 1990s by the Indian Army. Warsun village lies in the foothills of the PangiRange of the Himalayas, about 15 kilometers from the Line of Control (LoC) which separates the Pakistani and Indian controlled areas of Kashmir.

It is known that there are many landmines close to the LoC, but no one understands why the Indian Army laid these mines. The village has not suffered a human victim to the mines since 2003, but cattle and other animals have continued to be lost. A few months previous to the Landmine Monitor visit, Mehboob Khan, also of Warsun, lost a bull. He had also lost one the year before. "No official has offered me any compensations for my losses," he said.

The Indian Army had previously kept a military post in the village, but have since left. In the mid-90s, the villagers asked the Indian Army unit then stationed in the village to remove the mines due to the threat they posed to the community. The Army unit commander said he could not remove the mines since they did not have the maps, and did not know where they were laid. So the villagers have been left to absorb the cost of these abandoned landmines.

The cost is heavy and ongoing. Since the slopes have become dangerous, villagers have stopped collecting firewood or other forest products from them. With the loss of their firewood source, the villagers have cut the trees within the village itself. In former times, they kept the trees in their village and sold them for lumber, which added to their income, but have now been forced to burn them, losing that extra income.

Now villagers are afraid to pasture their livestock on the slopes since they may wander farther up to the mined area. This decreased availability of pasture has led some villagers to the decision that they must give up their livestock since they cannot afford to feed them. Despair is settling into the village as economic hardship, due to these losses, increases. While the slopes are not producing physical injuries in the village now, they are producing economic and psychological mine victims within the village.

An Indian government representative claimed at the 6th Meeting of States Parties in Croatia in 2005 that its "minefields are properly marked and fenced to prevent casualties to innocent civilians or grazing cattle" and that "there are no mined areas in any part of India's interiors. India has never resorted to the use of mines for maintenance of internal order or in counterterrorism operations..".

Today, however, the mines on the slopes outside Warsun village remain unfenced, as they always were. They are not marked in any way which the people of the village recognize or understand. All the villagers who met with the Landmine Monitor are illiterate. What they did understand was that something dangerous was there once they started to become victims of it.