Digger of Unmarked Graves

Gravedigger Atta Muhammad Khan, 73, who buried more than 200 unknown persons in unmarked graves  in his village Boniyar  died on Sunday. Khan had helped in the identification and documentation of these graves, leading to compilation of the 2008 report on mass graves by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). This was before  State Human Rights Commission probe later confirmed the existence of the 2156 unmarked graves in four districts of the Valley. Following this, Government came out with a figure of 2080 more unmarked graves in Poonch and Rajouri districts of Jammu province. Khan was an important witness to a part of this tragedy. He had seen it all:  corpses  in all their  forms – charred, disfigured, headless,  bullet riddled or just heaps of bare bones. He remembered them vividly and the stories associated with them. The  wounds, torture marks on the bodies he buried were still afresh in his mind. He remembered how sometimes kin of the disappeared visited the graveyard and cried while looking at the burial place. They asked him how the bodies looked like when he buried them. They even asked whether they were hit by bullets or had any marks of torture on their bodies.  Khan would narrate these stories and more. He had only studied upto primary classes and thus couldn’t read or write. But he had seen the conflict from very close quarters. The most horrifying period, according to him, lasted from 2003 till 2006. And during this time, he had buried between one to three bodies a day. And  on some days, he had buried even six.

However, while Khan is gone, the horrors that he helped reveal have still not been accounted for. We are yet to know the identity of the people buried in these graves. Government, on its part, has chosen not to do anything. In his time as Chief Minister Omar Abdullah  had flatly denied that the government will take any steps to find out who were buried in the graves. In a long speech in the Assembly, Omar had said that the unmarked graves didn’t mean mass graves and that nobody knew  who were buried in the graves or the circumstances of their death. He had also apportioned the blame for these killings among a wide array of the agents of death in Kashmir: the encounters on the border during infiltration or people losing their lives in the course of arms training and killings by the militants. What Omar didn’t talk about was what Kashmiris wanted to hear: the role of the security agencies, custodial deaths and the fake encounters. He put the onus of unearthing the truth on the families of the hundreds of disappeared people who alleged that their loved ones could be buried in these graves. He asked them to get in touch with the government, “give the possible address of the graves where the missing members of their families could be buried” and then the government will then help in the DNA identification.

This was a ridiculous demand. For, if the government whose agencies had helped set up  these graveyards didn’t know the identity of the buried, how would the families of the missing who didn’t even know their whereabouts. It was clear that Omar was only trying to hide an ugly truth – albeit unconvincingly. Government was and remains the accused, when it comes to the issue of unmarked graveyards in the state. More so, after testimonies of the grave-diggers in these areas have revealed that bodies were mostly brought by the police and security personnel. Khan was one such conscientious gravedigger.  He didn’t know the identity of the buried but he had duly identified those who brought the bodies. 

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