[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E409-E411]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF TUNISIAN INDEPENDENCE

______

HON. BENJAMIN A. GILMAN

of new york

in the house of representatives

Wednesday, March 20, 1996

Mr. GILMAN. Mr. Speaker, today is the 40th anniversary of
independence of the Republic of Tunisia. With increasingly strong ties
between our two governments, the American people congratulate today the
people of Tunisia on this historic anniversary. For the last 40 years,
Tunisia has been a model of economic growth and the advancement of
women in society.
It may be difficult for many Americans to appreciate Tunisia's
situation. Its only two neighbors are Algeria, which has been racked by
civil war for several years, and Libya, whose dictator has supported
the most nefarious and subversive kinds of terrorism. Mr. Speaker, this
is not a good neighborhood.
Nevertheless, Tunisia has maintained internal stability--not without
its own controversies--in the face of external chaos. At the same time,
years of hard work have produced one of the highest standards of living
in the region. Tunisia is one of the few countries to graduate
successfully from development assistance and join the developed world.
For these accomplishments, Tunisia should be applauded and supported.
In addition, Tunisia has taken positive, cautious steps in the
diplomatic realm, particularly in the Arab-Israel peace process. In
January of this year, Tunisia and Israel announced the planned opening
of interest sections in each country, to be completed by April 15. This
development will be a welcome realization of forward progress in
Israel-Tunisia relations. We were also extremely pleased to learn from
the Tunisian Foreign Minister that Tunisia plans to establish full
diplomatic relations with Israel by the end of 1996.
The United States and Tunisia have also moved closer over the years.
Yesterday, officials from our Department of Defense concluded a meeting
of the Joint Military Commission with Tunisian officials, evidence of
our ongoing visible support of strong United States-Tunisian relations.
Mr. Speaker, on this special day for Tunisia, I urge my colleagues
reflect on our strong commitment to our friend in North Africa.

[[Page E410]]

VIDEO EXPOSES INDIA'S TORTURE, RAPE, AND MURDER OF SIKH NATION

______

HON. DAN BURTON

of indiana

in the house of representatives

Wednesday, March 20, 1996

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recommend to my
colleagues the outstanding new video ``Disappearances in Punjab.'' This
video was produced by Ram Narayan Kumar, a Hindu human rights activist,
and Lorenz Skerjanz, an ethnologist from Austria. It paints a graphic
picture of India's state terrorism against the Sikh Nation in Punjab,
Khalistan. I thank Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh, president of the Council of
Khalistan, for sending it to me.
This video highlights the abduction of Jaswant Singh Khalra, the
general secretary of the Human Rights Wing (Shiromani Akali Dal), by
the Indian regime. Mr. Khalra reported that more than 25,000 young Sikh
men had been abducted, tortured, and killed by the regime. Then the
regime tried to hide this fact by listing the bodies as unidentified
and cremating them. For this he was silenced. According to several
other human rights activists, including Inderjit Singh Jaijee, Colonel
Partap Singh, Justice Ajit Singh Bains, and General Narinder Singh,
over 100,000 Sikhs have disappeared at the hands of the Indian regime.
But the Khalra case is only part of a pattern of repression of the
Sikh nation by an Indian regime the New York Times described on
February 25 as ``a rotten, corrupt, repressive, and anti-people
system.'' This documentary video also exposes other cases of Indian
repression. It shows witnesses to the repression talking about what
they have seen. This is important new evidence of India's brutal
record. After watching the video, the viewer will conclude that India
is the kind of police state that America spent many years and billions
of dollars fighting.
It is time for the U.S. Government to speak out against this
tyrannical regime. Only our pressure will cause India to begin acting
like the democracy it proclaims itself to be. The time has come for the
United States to cut off its aid to India until human rights are
respected, as the Human Rights in India Act provides.
This video shows the bloody, violent repression which fuels the drive
of Sikhs, Kashmiris, and other minority groups to be independent. I
recommend it to all my colleagues and anyone else who is interested in
promoting and expanding freedom.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to introduce the transcript of this video
into the Record.

Disappearances in Punjab

On 31 August 1995, Punjab's Chief Minister Beant Singh was
assassinated in a suicide mission of bombing carried out by a
Sikh militant organization at the State government's
Secretariat in Chandigarh. Beant Singh of the Congress party
has taken office in early 1992 after winning the elections to
the State Legislative Assembly, which the main Sikh political
groups had boycotted to pursue their decade long agitation
for a radical measure of autonomy for Punjab. As the Sikh
electorate, constituting the majority of Punjab's population
stayed away from the polling, the Congress party won the
elections, without a real contest. But the government formed
by the Congress party under Beant Singh's leadership
projected the election results as the democratic mandate to
stamp out the Sikh agitation, promising to implement the
mandate by all possible means. Reports of human rights
violations became widespread.
The leaders of Hindu public opinion in Punjab argued that
the due process of law was a luxury, which Indian could not
afford while fighting the secessionist terrorism:
[Interview with Vijay Chopra, publisher and editor of Hind
Samachar group of newspapers, who brings out the three most
popular language dailies in northern India.]
Only the human rights groups and the individuals, with
little influence on the working of the government, expressed
indignation against the reports of police atrocities.
[Interview with Satish Jain, Professor of Economics at
Jawarharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.]
Many inside observers of Indian politics, including the
former President of India Zail Singh, admitted that the
highhanded methods of the security forces, instigated the
separatist terrorism.
[Interview with Zail Singh.]

historical background of the sikh separatist unrest

Approximately twenty million Sikhs of India form less than
2 per cent of the country's population, but constitute
majority in the agriculturally prosperous Northwestern
province of Punjab, which had been divided between India and
Pakistan in 1947. Prosperous Jat Sikh farmers dominate the
Akali Dal, the main political party of the orthodox Sikhs,
that launched the agitation of the radical measure of
autonomy for the State in early 1982. Jarnail Singh
Bhindranwale, a charismatic religious preacher, who had
already emerged on the scene as the messiah of ``true
Sikhs'', rallied the discontented sections of the Sikhs,
particularly the unemployed youth, to the Akali agitation.
The Union government projected the agitation as a
secessionist movement, and refused to negotiate
decentralization of political power. The next two years of
virulent violence, which also witnessed the rise of Sikh
terrorism in the real sense, came to a head in June of 1984
when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the military to
flush out Bhindranwale and his armed followers from the
Golden Temple of Amritsar in which they had taken shelter.
When the operation was over, hundreds of Sikh militants,
including Bhindranwale, and a larger number of Sikh pilgrims,
were dead. The Akal Takht, an important shrine inside the
temple complex regarded as the seat of political authority
within the Sikh historical tradition, was rubble. For devout
Sikhs, Bhindranwale and his followers, who had died fighting
the Indian military, became the martyrs of the faith. A
section of Bhindranwale's followers now began to talk of an
independent Sikh state.
The Parliamentary elections held at the end of 1989,
returned many extremist candidates under the leadership of
Simranjit Singh Mann, former police officer turned separatist
politician. The results showed that the separatist cause now
possessed a measure of popular support. Alienation of the
Sikhs of Punjab from India's political system again became
manifest when the overwhelming majority of them stayed away
from the polling in early 1992, keeping with the call given
by the main Akali groups to boycott the elections. The
boycott helped the Congress party, under Beant Singh, to form
its government in the State, and to embark on a highhanded
policy to suppress the Sikh agitation without caring for the
limits of the law. Many officials involved in the security
operations privately admit that excesses, including custodial
killings, do take place. But they argue that they have no
other way to demoralize a secessionist movement, which enjoys
a measure of sympathy in Punjab's countryside.

evidence of state atrocities

Interviews with Inderjit Singh Jaijee, Chairman, Movement
Against State Repression, and Jaspal Singh Dhillon, Chairman,
Shiromani Akali Dal's Human Rights Wing. [Photographic
evidence of custodial torture and killings.]
[Interview with Ranjan Lakhanpal, a lawyer who fights
generally losing legal battles to enforce the rule of law,
against the working of the Punjab police. Lakhanpal
introduces two women victims of custodial rape.]
Our own investigations in the Amritsar region reveal that
the dealings of the security forces with the relatives of
separatist militants, themselves unconnected with crime, are
not only routinely illegal but also brutal. Apparently, the
idea is to set an example of harshness that would discourage
the rural folk from sympathizing with the extremist cause.
[Interview with Arjun Singh, grandfather of a known
militant Paramjit Singh Panjwad, tortured in the police
custody. Panjwad's mother was killed in custody.]
Many Sikh officers of the Punjab police privately
corroborate these reports of police atrocities.
[Interview with one woman police officer, on the condition
of anonymity: She told us about her experience of custodial
torture, rape and murders at an interrogation center she was
attached to. Photographic evidence of custodial torture and
murders.]
Champions of human rights in Punjab are themselves
vulnerable to persecution. Many have suffered long periods of
illegal detention, torture in custody and even elimination.
Sometimes their relatives become victims of police wrath. On
29 March 1995, lawyer Ranjan Lakhanpal's ten year old son
Ashish was run over by a police vehicle. The vehicle belonged
to an officer whom Ranjan has accused of murdering a detainee
in custody.

the case of jaswant singh khalra

The more recent example comes from the case of Jaswant
Singh Khalra, General Secretary of the Shiromani Akali Dal's
Human Rights Wing, who got picked up by uniformed commandos
of Punjab police from the porch of his house in Amritsar on 6
September 1995, six days after Beant Singh's assassination.
Human Rights Wing has been focussing attention on unravelling
the mystery of what happens to the large number of people the
security forces illegally pick-up for interrogation. Jaswant
Singh Khalra was associated with the investigations that led
to the discovery that Punjab police have been cremating
thousands of dead Sikhs illegally, by mentioning them in the
registers at the cremation grounds as ``unclaimed'' and
``unidentified.'' The investigations also established that
these ``cremated'' Sikhs were largely those who had earlier
been picked up for interrogation.
[Interview with the attendant of the cremation ground at
Patti, a subdivisional town in Amritsar district.]
Equally incriminating evidence against the police comes
from the hospitals where the police sent some bodies so
cremated for postmortem.
[Interview with the Chief Medical Officer of the hospital
at Patti: This doctor told us that Sarabjit Singh was still
alive when the police first brought him for the postmortem.
On being discovered alive, Sarabjit Singh was taken away by
the police and brought back to the hospital the second time
when he

[[Page E411]]

was actually dead. The hospital gave the postmortem report
the police wanted. The Chief Medical Officer of the hospital
at Patti also offered us some astonishing information on how
he helped the police to get the postmortem reports they
legally needed in all circumstances before cremating the dead
bodies.]
Investigation carried out by the Human Rights Wing forms
the basis of a petition that the Committee for information
and Initiative on Punjab has filed before the Supreme Court
of India. The issue of illegal cremations by the Punjab
police is not being investigated by the Central Bureau of
Investigation, on the orders from the Supreme Court. However,
the order of the probe did not come before Jaswant Singh
Khalra himself ``disappeared.''
[Interview with Jaspal Singh Dhillon: ``Khalra was quite
clearly told that he can also become an unidentified body.
And today Khalra is not there.'']
The guilty officials of Punjab police knew that, without
Khalra's investigative resourcefulness in the Amritsar
district, the Human Rights Wing could not have so
conclusively exposed their ways of handling the Sikh unrest
in Punjab. Khalra had also been providing legal counselling
to victims of police atrocities, particularly the relatives
of the ``disappeared'', which encouraged them to approach the
courts to redress their grievances.
Khalra's whereabouts remain unknown. The chief of the
Punjab police has categorically denied Khalra's abduction by
the officers of his force. The Supreme Court of India has
ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the
``disappearance'' along with the issue of illegal cremations
by the Punjab police. In ordering the probe, the court has
neither extended protection to witness who might lead
evidence to establish the truth, nor has asked the CBI to
associate the human rights groups, directly involved in
exposing the police atrocities, with the inquiry. It is
evident that the Central Bureau of Investigation, as an
investigating agency under the Union Home Ministry, lacks the
necessary power and independence to determine the truth of
allegations of serious human rights crimes, made against
India's security forces.
Human right groups worldwide are seriously concerned about
the disappearance of Jaswant Singh Khalra, which is seen as a
warning to all those who are engaged in exposing police
atrocities in the State. The Sikh groups in Punjab are
agitating for Khalra's release. Many leaders of the Western
countries, including the President of the United States of
America have conveyed their concern about the case to the
government of India. However, the information percolating
from the police sources suggests that Khalra might already
have been eliminated. Despair dominants the mood of the Sikh
leaders in Punjab.

____________________