Kashmir

On a cold winters day in early February 2010 16-year old Zahid Farooq was shot to death by a member of the Indian Armed Forces on the outskirts of Srinagar in the Indian administered part of Kashmir. He was playing Cricket close to a popular tourist hub. Still today his parents are fighting in court to prove what had already been looking obvious for a long time: The attack was unprovoked, their son innocent and the suspected officer acting off-duty while on his way back from a medical check-up. While the rest of the world believes this conflict is merely about the two nuclear super-powers India and Pakistan, human rights violations like this remain a regular part of the life of the ordinary people. Still, more than 22 years after the latest uprising in the Kashmir Valley more than 70.000 Indian troops are stationed in Kashmir fighting only a few hundred militants. These are expected to cross the border from Pakistan every year during the warm months. But yet it is the Kashmiris who pay the highest price in the ongoing struggle: More than 77.000 people, most of them innocent, were killed while and additional more than 3000 disappeared since the inception of militancy. For their relatives, only the memory remains.