Brussels, May 27 (KMS): The Kashmir Centre EU organized a massive demonstration in front of the European Union offices in Brussels on Tuesday on the shocking discovery of nameless and mass graves in occupied Kashmir.

Carrying the banners and raising slogans, the protestors voiced their anguish and anger at the merciless killing of innocent Kashmiris. They called for India to pull out her forces from Jammu and Kashmir immediately.

In a powerful address to the demonstrators, Barrister A. Majid Tramboo, Chair & Executive Director of ICHR Kashmir Centre EU expressed his horror and disbelief stating, since 1989 when mass resistance against Indian occupation in Kashmir erupted an estimated 8-10,000 persons have become victims of Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. In vast majority of these cases, people were detained during cordon and search operations locally called crackdown.

Barrister Tramboo said, during the crackdown operations primarily male Kashmiris were arrested. The army, SOG and the Indian sponsored gunmen working with military and paramilitary forces have also been abducting Kashmiris whose whereabouts remain unknown to this day. He maintained that there are cases where non-combatant Kashmiris after detention have been killed in fake encounters at different places and then labeled as foreign militants. The wide spread phenomenon of graves with no-name or unmarked graves has emerged as a result of tireless efforts made by nearly two hundred thousand relatives of disappeared persons.

These places, he added, where graves have been found are: Zandifaran, Budmulla, Fatehgarh, Kichama, Gondabal Peerniyan, Chehal Bimyar, Boniyar, Trikanjan, Banali, Parro- Gagarhill, Chottali, NHPC Road, Brigade Head quarters Rampore, Gingal, Bijhama, Lachipora, Dashewara, Mayan, Charkote and Hatlonga LoC.

Barrister Tramboo pointed out that most of these graveyards, according to the local community, were constituted by the inhabitants of these villages on the orders of Jammu and Kashmir Police. The total number of such graves according the survey in three Tehsils of the frontier district Baramulla of J&K comes to 940. Most of the persons buried in such graves are local Kashmiris.

Undoubtedly, these unidentified graves may after all contain remains of thousand of missing civilians of Kashmir, Tramboo added.

He declared that he has written a letter to Mr. Javier Solana, Secretary General of the Council of the European Union urging them to express his concern in public to the government of India at the discovery and seek its cooperation to investigate all matters in relation to disappeared persons and unidentified graves, to direct the EU Delegation at New Delhi to visit Srinagar and prepare its findings, to influence the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament to send a fact finding mission to Jammu & Kashmir on this matter, to insist the Chairman of the Human Rights Sub-Committee of the European Parliament to conduct a hearing on this issue exclusively; and to stress the International Commission on Missing Persons to go to Jammu & Kashmir and undertake identifying the disappeared persons through the process of excavation of nameless graves and mass graves and forensic investigation.