thedailybeast--2019-03-31--When They Want War India and Pakistan Will Always Have Kashmir

When They Want War, India and Pakistan Will Always Have Kashmir

When this series was first published in The Daily Beast last December, I had no idea that Kashmir was about to explode—quite literally—into the headlines again.  There had been numerous developments in the region between my visit and the series’ publication, but none were quite as important, or as troubling, as those that came to pass in February and March. In light of these more recent developments, a preamble is in order.  On February 14, an Indian-born Kashmiri named Adil Ahmad Dar drove 300 kilograms of explosives into a convoy of Indian military vehicles in Pulwama, a district of Indian-administered Kashmir. In addition to himself, Dar killed 40 Indian soldiers, rendering the attack the deadliest in decades. A Pakistan-based militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, claimed responsibility for his actions, and the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quick to allege Pakistani involvement. Pakistan denied the charge.  A quickly escalating game of tit-for-tat followed. Indian jets crossed the infamous Line of Control and, according to official statements, bombed a terrorist training camp on Pakistani soil. Pakistan denied this, too, saying the planes hadn’t destroyed much of anything and certainly hadn’t killed any terrorists.  Meanwhile, Pakistan sent its own planes across the LoC in response. For the first time since the 1971 war that led to the creation of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan engaged in dogfights over Kashmir. When an Indian plane was shot down on the Pakistani side of the LoC, its pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman, was captured. He was returned to India on the first day of March in a move that Pakistan described as a “gesture of peace.” The stand-off has largely been limited to cross-border shooting and shelling since. A number of Kashmiris on both sides of the LoC have been killed.  Bill Clinton once described Kashmir as “the most dangerous place in the world.” Christopher Hitchens once described the LoC—from a vantage point on the Pakistani side—as “the near-certain flash point of a coming war that could well become an Asian Armageddon.”  For the moment, that war appears to have been averted. Cross-border shelling is business as usual in this part of the world.  But Hitchens would have been surprised to learn that it was Pakistan, rather than India, that came out looking like the adult on this occasion. Then again, Hitchens, who wrote his dispatch in 2007, had long been convinced that the U.S. alliance with Pakistan was a form of geopolitical self-harm, and Hitchens died before Modi came to power in India in 2014. He did not foresee the rise of an Islamophobic nationalist government in Delhi and couldn’t have guessed at the manner in which that government would wind up radicalizing a whole generation of Indian Kashmiris through its militarization of the region and the brutality it would inflict on its citizens there.  The essentially violent nature of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, has now been laid bare by events. Countless Kashmiris in other parts of India spent most of late February avoiding lynch mobs—many of them helped by activists like Shehla Rashid, who you will hear from later in this series. Many gruesome scenes that recalled the 2002 Gujarat riots, which left countless people, mostly Muslims, dead.  The Indian media, up to and including ostensibly liberal journalists like Barkha Dutt, devolved in the wake of the Pulwama attack into an unthinking, bloodthirsty rabble. Bollywood actors, who have only ever played at war, became all-too-willing mongers for it.  Hindutva Twitter—which has long made MAGA Twitter look quaint—seethed with denunciations of “traitors” and “Pakapologists” and writhed with demands for ever greater violence. The extent to which Modi’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has entered the Indian mainstream—its bloodstream—seemed scarily absolute.  That Modi faces re-election in April obviously influenced his actions. (Indeed, his numbers went up immediately after he sent planes across the LoC, and a number of his colleagues have callously wondered aloud in the press how many seats the violence will net them.) But it’s the ideological bent of the nation he leads—which is to say, the ideological bent of the man himself—that strikes me as most important here. It is difficult to imagine a world in which Modi, heading to the polls or otherwise, didn’t respond to Pulwama this way.  This is more than a little concerning.  I have amended the postscript to this series slightly, adding some thoughts about what the recent stand-off means for Indian governments going forward—the country’s reluctance to confront its own culpability for the radicalization of Kashmiri youth means we are likely to see more attacks—and about Pakistan’s long-misplaced faith in the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence.  I have left the rest of the series more or less as it was published. Consider it a 13,000-word primer on a situation—older than the Arab-Israeli conflict, older than the Tibet debate, as intractable as either and arguably more important than both—that this year brought us closer to midnight than we have been in quite some time.  In the end, I was probably lucky that the dog bite was the worst thing that happened to me. Not that I felt very lucky at the time. What I felt at the time was a pain in my leg. When I looked down, there was a stray hanging onto it. “Get off,” I said, which it eventually did.  I spent the next couple of weeks in and out of Indian hospitals on a crash course of rabies shots. I had to be convinced to go. My initial response was to stagger into a coffee shop and order a cup of something strong. I checked my jeans, which had been punctured, and my leg, which, at first, didn’t seem to have been. The dog’s teeth had clearly made a mark, but it took some probing before it started to bleed. There was only a speck, but the waiter seemed concerned. I thought he was overreacting and said so. The day before, I’d been dodging bullets. He wrote down the address of the hospital anyway. He seemed amazed when I sat there and finished my drink, not realizing that I was testing to make sure I could still swallow.  The doctors told me that the waiter had been right. I shouldn’t be so blasé about these things, they said. They gave me a tetanus shot in one of my butt cheeks and a rabies shot in each shoulder, and wrote down the name of the vaccine they had used so I could show it at the next hospital, in the next town.  Perhaps it was karma, or a reminder of my mortality. Perhaps I’d simply walked too close to a pissed-off, pregnant dog. Whatever the case, it was certainly fitting: a mildly bloody end to an especially bloody week.  I arrived in Kashmir 10 days earlier, at dawn on the first Friday of Ramadan, the streets empty but for the few auto-rickshaw drivers who had come out to meet the overnight bus from Jammu. It was an emptiness to which I would become accustomed over the course of my first 48 hours in town. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was due in Srinagar the following day and he wasn’t taking any chances. The roads into the city had been heavily militarized, with checkpoints reducing traffic to a trickle.  Compounding one’s sense of a city under siege, a total shutdown had been announced by the Joint Resistance Leadership, a triumvirate of Kashmiri separatists that commands a great deal of respect in these parts. At the time, the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was ostensibly in power in the state, having formed a coalition with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014. Largely as a result of this alliance, it was considered by many to be Delhi’s puppet, only serving to strengthen the triumvirate’s hand, the sureness of its grip.  A light rain fell on Dal Lake as the man commanding my shikara navigated canals lined with colonial-era houseboats, an entire floating neighbourhood of them, to the place where I was staying.  Kashmiris don’t like the houseboats, he said, which are a reminder of the British and only patronised by Westerners and Indians up on holiday from the south. The view from my room recalled the Louisiana bayou, all lily pads and corrugated iron lean-tos, with only the rolling, snow-capped peaks beyond them to remind the visitor that, far from America’s Deep South, he was in fact in India’s Far North.  Not that the vast majority of Kashmiris consider this India. Since 1947, when British India was partitioned to create India and Pakistan, Kashmir has remained a point of contention. The whole point of partition—“our crowning failure,” as one of the British characters in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet memorably put it—was to create two religiously homogenous states. But the rulers of British India’s princely states, which included Kashmir, were given a choice as to which fledgling nation they would join.  By a quirk of history, Muslim-majority Kashmir was at that time ruled by a Hindu, Maharaja Hari Singh, who decided upon independence until Pakistan tribesmen came knocking with other ideas. The Maharaja fled to India, seeking military assistance, the cost of which was ceding the region to Delhi. War ensued, and ensued, and ensued. India today controls a little over 40 percent of Kashmir’s territory (and 70 percent of its population) and Pakistan a little under the same amount. (Never one to miss an opportunity, China controls the remaining twenty.)  In the late 1980s, vote-rigging in the Indian part of the region, designed to benefit Delhi’s preferred candidate, gave rise to a separatist insurgency, which has waged a low-intensity conflict ever since. India accuses Pakistan of bankrolling the insurgents. Pakistan, which has previously admitted to doing so, claims that the region—the “k” in its acronymous name—should belong to a Muslim nation like, say, Pakistan.  On the ground, arguments vary. In the time I was there, I heard them made in favor of everything from joining Pakistan, to greater autonomy within India, to outright independence.  Around midday, as I sat drinking coffee at the stern of the houseboat, the muezzins could be heard calling the faithful to prayer from unseen mosques in near every direction. The houseboat’s owner, Firdous, was visiting his home village, called away by the untimely death of an uncle, and his right-hand man, Younis, said it would not be possible for me to go into town: all the shikara men were off praying. I spent my first full day in Srinagar confined to Dal Lake, unconscious but for Twitter updates of the clashes unfolding outside the city’s central mosque, the Jamia Masjid. Those clashes would be repeated with bloody regularity until the advent of Eid al-Fitr.  It said much about the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir at the time that Narendra Modi’s visit on May 19 should have been so furtive. The BJP leader was scheduled to fly in from Ladakh in the east, lay the foundation stones on various construction projects, and then fly out again almost immediately to Jammu in the south. There were to be no parades, no public rallies, the likes of which he has staged in the region before. It all rather belied his claims that the situation was under control, and called into question his own belief in the efficacy of the conditional Ramadan ceasefire he had announced only a few days earlier.  According to Kashmiri journalist Sameer Yasir, it was going to be all but impossible to see the prime minister while he was in town. He suggested that we catch up instead, and at least discuss the visit. We met outside the Ahdoos Hotel, sneaking under a half-closed roller shutter to take our seats in a working men’s coffee house, which was half-defying the shutdown order in order to serve its regulars.  These days, unless a bureau chief is up from Delhi for a few nights, or an Australian freelancer swings though on an ill-advised 10-day tour, Kashmir’s story is largely being told by Kashmiris themselves. Yasir is one of the most prolific journalists in the region, though he never intentionally set out to become one. When he returned to Srinagar in 2010, after getting a degree in international relations and working in Singapore, he decided to head out to the India-Pakistan Line of Control and wound up writing about his experiences there.  After a few days spent dodging mortars and living in bomb shelters, he returned with a story that he sold to the New York Times. It was a hell of a way to find his feet as a stringer, but it paid a small fortune in local terms, and the paper wanted more from him. By virtue of history and geography, his homeland was of interest to readers elsewhere, compelling him to take up the pen. Plenty of others have done the same and have something that we foreigners—parachute journalists and bureau chiefs alike—rarely do: an innate understanding of what’s going on here, of what stories really matter, and why.  It was while we were drinking coffee that Modi made the few fleeting remarks that quickly made headlines across the region. “Neither abuses nor bullets will resolve problems,” he told an audience at the Sher-e-Kashmir International Convention Centre. “But hugging every Kashmiri will.”  The comments were cynically paternalistic and, like the ceasefire before them, difficult to take seriously. According to Yasir, the ceasefire had already been broken, with a number of militants killed. According to the government and its cheerleaders in the Indian press, the militants had fired first—having never agreed to the ceasefire in the first place—and the terms of the arrangement allowed the security forces to retaliate. “But there’s no way of knowing who shot first,” Yasir said. “It’s a very convenient loophole.”  We finished our coffees and went for a walk. The neighborhood of Lal Chowk was dead. On Residency Road, the ghanta ghar, or clocktower, showed one o’clock, and Indian military types sat eyeing us from the roadblocks leading up to it. On the walls of a building in the Press Colony neighbourhood, where the city’s various news outlets are quartered, a strapping young photojournalist, Kamran Yousuf, appeared in his Press vest on a banner reading: “Kamran Yousuf is a Journalist Not a Stone Pelter.”  Yousuf is a freelance photojournalist who was imprisoned between September 2017 and March 2018 on charges of sedition, criminal conspiracy, and attempting to wage war against India. Delhi claimed that he wasn’t a real journalist on the grounds that he never received formal training in the trade. He was released on bail—against the wishes of the National Investigative Agency—after the Committee to Protect Journalists and others called for his release.  Kashmir’s most famous “stone pelter”—a term given to the young people who face off against the Indian security forces armed with little more than rocks—is arguably Afshan Ashiq. In April 2017, the 23-year-old soccer star, who captains Kashmir’s girls’ squad and also plays for a team in Mumbai, was escorting a group of female players to training when she clashed with police. A photo of her in that moment throwing a rock in a blue flowing salwar-kameez made her a sensation. Ashiq was asked to meet then-chief minister Mehbooba Mufti; the sports academy where she coached saw a 100 per cent increase in female enrolments; and a Bollywood movie about her life was rushed into the works.  Sitting across from me in the home of PDP youth president and spokesman Waheed Rehman Para, Ashiq was difficult to imagine as a riotous stone-pelter. She also seemed a little bored to be rehashing the incident yet again.  “It’s all anyone ever wants to talk about,” she told me. “It’s the first question they ask in every interview.”  “It was very unfortunate,” she said. “A police officer used abusive language towards us and then slapped one of my players. I couldn’t help it.”  Para was keen to have me write a story about Kashmiri girls’ sports. The J&K Sports Council was his baby, he told me, the means by which he hopes to create opportunities for young Kashmiris while also engendering a kind of state identity that isn’t reliant on the usual communal and religious frameworks. It bothered him, he said, that the stories about Kashmir should always be so negative.  But he was also clear-eyed about the region’s reality, and gave it to me straight when I asked him about it, even though we were still on the record and I was still recording the conversation.  “The situation is very bad here,” he said. “It is probably the worst it has been in years. There is a tension in the air. You can feel it. We are closer to war than we have been in a long time.”  The houseboat’s owner, Firdous, appeared that night, his familial duties having been discharged. He was a thin man, well-hidden within the folds of his phiran, and he sipped slowly at a large bottle of Kingfisher beer—“I am not a very good Muslim,” he said, a refrain I would come to know well—as I made my way through another pot of weak coffee.  The houseboat was his heritage, he said. His father had run the hotel before him, and his grandfather before that. It was a tough time to be in the tourist trade, he said. The word itself puts people off: Kashmir, with all its baggage, its echo, even for those who don’t know its history, of conflict. I was the only guest scheduled to stay that week, and those who were coming after me, on their ways to or from Ladakh, the trekking capital of the north, would only stay for one or two nights before continuing on their way.  “It is a shame,” he said, “because Kashmir should have thousands of tourists. We have the mountains, the Kashmiri crafts, the natural beauty. You should see our Kashmiri crafts.” He took down a papier-mâché duck from a mantle above the fridge and showed off its quality. “Even if you don’t buy anything, you can’t help but admire it,” he said.  I decided to tell him why I was here, that it wasn’t to play the tourist. He came over excitably conspiratorial and immediately began making plans. I needed to meet his friends, he told me, such as Mr. Nazir, a fellow houseboat owner from around the corner, who might be able to help me out.  “I cannot read or write,” Firdous said—our entire correspondence prior to my arrival had been conducted, on his end, with the aid of a speech-to-text app on his phone—“and I don’t know much about politics. But Mr. Nazir knows a lot and sometimes comes over to read me the newspapers.”  It was not out of kindness that I extended my stay on Firdous’ houseboat, though it pleased me to think it might do him some good. It was rather that I had decided, at some point that day, during Modi’s visit, that I wanted to attend the next Friday prayers. I wanted, I said, to see the stone-pelters at work.  The young man standing in the doorway nodded, apprehensively it seemed to me, rather than with pride or braggadocio.  “We were bored,” he said. “Me and my friends. We got into fights with the police for something to do. But then I got arrested and was in prison for 10 days.”  Younis nodded again, recalling the memory reluctantly. “I didn’t do it again after that. I didn’t think it was worth it.”  Across the darkening water, the muezzins began calling, one after the other, never quite in time, or in quite the same key. Their prayers would continue well into the evening, a near-constant drone of all-male voices, not unlike that produced by Tibetan throat-singers, rumbling on until well after midnight and then starting again long before dawn.  That night, everyone seemed to assume, the ceasefire would be broken again.  The day after Narendra Modi’s visit to Srinagar, the city remained in a state of suspended animation. It was the anniversary of Molvi Farooq’s assassination, the one-time Mirwaiz of Kashmir and separatist leader having been murdered 18 years earlier. A march had been scheduled, as it is every year, and would have wended its way through the old city that afternoon. But the powers that be had decided that no such march should take place, citing security concerns, and the city was brought to a standstill for the second day in a row by the mutually reinforcing pressures of the military’s lock-down and the separatists’ shutdown.  It was, Yasir told me, as good a day as any to get out of the city and into the militant heartland.  Our driver was a veteran fixer of the insurgency’s 1990s heyday and claimed to have ferried around everyone from CNN to the Washington Post . Despite his bona fides, he still had to stop and ask directions on occasion, so deep into the boondocks were we going. It occurred to me that we could have followed the signs. Not the road signs, of which there were none, but rather those scrawled on the sides of houses and the roller doors of shuttered shop fronts: “We want free.” “We want peace.” “We will become Pakistani.”  If it was difficult to find the village of Heff—a mealy string of concrete buildings along a rocky, unsealed street in the district of Shopian—it was easy to find the home of Bilal Ahmad Mohand, a militant also known as Bilal Molvi who had been killed in a shootout with Indian security forces only two weeks earlier. One only had to look for the signs of martyrdom and mourning, with which the facade of the building was festooned.  Above the front door, fixed to the awning, photographic enlargements of Bilal had been erected that showed him posing with various weapons, his children, and his comrades-in-arms. He had been a large man, a leader of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen separatist group, and sported a beard that brought immediately to mind those of other militants—terrorists, we could call them in the West—the world over. His father, Muhammad Yousuf, met us at the door and quickly ushered us upstairs.  It was only now that I became aware of a misunderstanding that existed between Yasir and myself. As we settled in against the cushions that lined the walls of the otherwise bare room, he asked me what I wanted to know. I had assumed he was here to report a story of his own, where in fact he had brought me to help me with mine. That I hadn’t a story in mind yet was a problem. Indeed, I had spent most of the morning’s commute marvelling at the poppy plantations on the side of the road—private paddocks of potential heroin—rather than coming up with questions. I asked, a little pathetically, how Muhammad Yousuf was feeling.  He cocked an eyebrow, almost bemused. “My son just died,” he said in Koshur, which sounded to me a little like Urdu, not that I understand Urdu, either. “How does he think I’m feeling?”  He continued talking, primarily to Yasir, as though to save me the embarrassment.  “My son was prepared to die this way,” he said. “We have always known that this is how it would end.”  He said the family’s primary concern was now Bilal’s wife, whom he said had been diagnosed with a “tumor”—meaning cancer—and his two school-aged children.  “We cannot be concerned for Bilal, who is in paradise,” he said. “He died a martyr, as Allah wished it. But now there is no one to care for his family. This is what we must focus on.”  I was better prepared at the next house, the home of Saddam Hussain Paddar, who was killed in the same altercation as Bilal. Paddar’s mother, Feroza Bano, came to join us on the porch, a large woman in a pink floral headscarf, and we settled in again on the cushions provided.  In May 2018, Bano became something of an internet sensation when footage of her at Paddar’s funeral went viral. In the video, which is available on YouTube, Bano stands atop the roof of the house with a group of militants and fires an AK47 into the air. The video was a gift to both sides. In south Kashmir, separatists rallied around it. In the Hindu heartland—and in the Indian press—it was seized upon as yet another example of how such separatists are ultimately all terrorists.  “I did what I did because I loved my son and was pleased when he became a martyr,” she said. “We need more martyrs, more boys like my son. It is Allah’s wish.”  Speaking to both Yousuf and Bano, I was struck, not by their sense of pride in their sons, which, commingled with their inevitable grief, seemed befitting of the families of fallen soldiers, nor indeed by their fatalism, which befitted their situation. There are between 150 and 200 militants in Kashmir at any given time, roughly split between locals and Pakistani infiltrators, with more than half a million Indian security forces ranged against them. Given the odds, I’d be fatalistic, too.  No, what I was struck by was their rhetoric. They spoke, not in terms of national liberation, but in those of Islamic fundamentalism. While these are by no means exclusive registers, the complete absence of nationalist feeling in what they were saying did seem somewhat curious. Yasir had noticed it, too, he told me: something did appear to be shifting in the narrative.  “This is why I wanted you to meet Paddar’s mother,” he told me. “I had never seen anything like [her behaviour at the funeral] before.”  We were standing at the gate to Heff’s “Martyr’s Graveyard,” a grassy knoll in which the militants had been recently interred. Their headstones dutifully faced Mecca, which at that moment meant into the early afternoon sun.  Militant funerals have become all too common in this part of the world, often drawing thousands of mourners. The February 2018 funeral of 19-year-old Ubaid Shafi Malla, who dropped out of college to join the Hizb, as the group is sometimes known, was representative of their tone and tenor.  According to Yasir’s BBC report of the event, Malla’s mother addressed the crowd:  “Would you like to become a police officer?” she began, to which the angry crowd chanted back “No, we won’t!”  “Would you like to become a militant?” she continued.  “Yes, we will,” the crowd roared in response.  “Would you like to become Tiger?” she said, pointing to a nearby village where a famous Kashmiri militant Sameer Bhat, also known as Sameer Tiger, was killed the previous week.  “Yes, we want to!” the crowd responded.  “Then say it loudly,” she shouted.  “This is what killing militants does,” Yasir told me. “It creates martyrs and brings their families honor—and, as a result, it creates more militants.”  We had a sneaky bite to eat nearby—neither Yasir nor the driver were observing Ramadan—before continuing onto Beighpora Awantipora in the district of Pulwama. Here, bathed in soft afternoon light and the pollen floating visibly on it, we found the house of Hizb commander Riyaz Naikoo, who styles himself as Mohammad Bin Qasim, and asked after the man’s father.  It had again been easy to find the place: the otherwise candy-colored building had been desecrated with black graffiti and its windows broken and patched up with cardboard. Naikoo’s father Assadullah told us it was the work of the Indian security forces, which have allegedly been harassing the family since his son became a militant.  “They have treated us like dogs for six years,” Assadullah said. “They have raided our house more than 30 times, often beating us up. They think we know where Riyaz Saab is.”  A former math teacher, Riyaz Naikoo is representative of what the Hindustan Times has labelled Kashmir’s “new breed of militant”: educated, middle-class, and social media savvy. “The [militants’ social media] videos are affecting the psychology of Kashmiri youth, who spend hours watching videos uploaded by local militants and by Islamic State,” Pulwama’s Superintendent of Police, Tejinder Singh, told the newspaper last year. “Their only role models are militants with guns. ... We haven’t been able to provide them with alternative role models."  Naikoo’s family spends hours watching such videos as well. They have only seen Riyaz twice since he went underground in 2012, Assadullah told us, and await his Facebook sermons eagerly: his digital dispatches are the only way they have of knowing that he’s still alive.  “Why would he tell us where he is when he knows the Indian military is hounding us?” Assadullah said. “We wait for him to make his statements like everybody else does.”  I asked about the graffiti outside: the name “Musa” was clearly discernible on the walls. This, I was told, was a reference to Zakir Musa, a militant who split with the Hizb in 2017 after it refused to back his calls for Kashmiri separatists to join the wider struggle for an Islamic caliphate. In April that year, a group of unidentified militants addressed a gathering in Pulwama. “We love Pakistan only because it was created in the name of Islam,” News18 reported them as saying after obtaining an audio recording of the meeting. “But there is no Islam in today’s Pakistan. We have to do jihad in Pakistan, just like in India.”  “[The] Taliban wants an Islamic system in Pakistan. We should love [the] Taliban,” they said.  This was not the opinion of others in the Hizb, and Musa broke away from them to form the Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind. “The Indians wanted us to think that we were being harassed by Musa’s supporters,” Asadullah said of the graffiti. “But we know the truth.”  Naikoo’s family were hesitant to discuss the internal politics of the Hizb with me, though Indian intelligence agents have credited Naikoo with holding the group together in the wake of Musa’s defection. (Indeed, some estimate that the Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind may have as few as ten members.) They were far more keen to discuss the way that Indian security forces have made their lives a living hell.  Wearing an olive-green sweater vest and sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the family’s front room, Naikoo’s uncle, Ghulam Qadir, said he had been held for six months under the Public Safety Act in 2016, a year before Naikoo ascended to the leadership of the Hizb.  “I kept asking why they had arrested me when I hadn’t done anything wrong,” he said. “They beat me regularly to make me answer their questions. It was a terrible time. This is why young men like Riyaz Saab want to fight them and become martyrs.”  By now, the matter of the families’ rhetoric—the constant references to martyrdom and Allah—had become my overriding obsession, and I put it to Naikoo’s family plainly. To what extent was their struggle for independence? To what extent was it religious in nature?  They didn’t seem to understand the question.  “Riyaz Saab and others like him are fighting for the Kashmiri people,” Assadullah said. “Our country and our religion are the same to us, you understand?”  I did, of course, but only intellectually. I couldn’t understand it in my bones. This is what separates me from them, and indeed, in large part, the West from so many of our professed enemies. Until we understand the interpenetration of these seemingly contradictory motives—which continue to define conflicts from the Caucasus to southern Thailand—we will continue to flail aimlessly, making as many militants as we kill, ensuring yet more forever wars.  At Ghat 7 on Dal Lake, where my shikara man was waiting for me, a large family of Indian tourists were piling their suitcases onto boats. I made a bee-line through them to my own ride and asked that I be taken home. On the boulevard that traced the lake, a man sat at a pedal-powered grindstone, and went about sharpening the locals’ knives.  A few months later, in August 2018, Assadullah Naikoo would be among eight people detained in a series of raids in south Kashmir. He was released after “questioning” two days later. The security services had once again made their point.  The worst thing I ever did on Twitter was follow Shehla Rashid. From the moment I did so—or at least from the moment she first retweeted me—I have had a front-row seat at the shitshow that is Hindu nationalist social media, especially when it’s out for blood. I have been accused of being a Pakistani spy, a Communist, and a terrorist sympathizer. I have been charged with overlooking the plight of Kashmiri Pandits—the region’s Hindu minority, which according to some has faced ethnic cleansing at the hands of its Muslim majority—and of slandering the Indian nation.  Rashid and I are friends on Facebook as well, though the level of abuse there is comparatively muted: her account on that particular platform is private, and has been since the rape threats she received there became too numerous, too credible.  It was amazing to think that the young woman I found myself sitting across from at Srinagar’s Chai Jaai Tea Room, reading a secondhand copy of Nandita Haksar’s The Many Faces of Kashmiri Nationalism when I arrived and quick to order us a round of salty pink noon chai once I had, can inspire such insurmountable hatred. (“People don't hate me,” she once told me on Twitter. “Only Twitter trolls.” “I hate you,” responded a Twitter troll immediately.)  But then Rashid represents a unique threat as far as India’s right wing is concerned: not only is she a proud Kashmiri Muslim, she’s also a socialist and, perhaps worse, an outspoken woman as well. The only thing I found disturbing about her was how quickly she could turn from laughter to righteous indignation.  “On the ground, people feel that we are being targeted for our faith,” she told me at one point during our conversation. (We had spoken for an hour before she said: “Right. We can start the interview now.” I had already been recording it. All her quotes come from the second hour.)  “Forget international relations, the larger geopolitical situation. People here feel that we’re being targeted because we’re Muslims. That’s a very powerful narrative here, and the national government is doing very little to suggest that it’s untrue.”  In south Kashmir, I had been struck by the Islamist rhetoric of the militants’ families. But it remains true that a secular, non-violent separatist movement also exists in this part of the world. It coexists uneasily with its militant counterpart, but remains inevitably bound to it. That tends to happen when movements that differ on means, and even occasionally on ends, share at least an enemy in common. But those differences nonetheless exist.  “There is obviously a question about what exactly it is that we’re fighting for here,” Rashid said. ”Some people talk about an Islamic system, something closer to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. I don’t think there is much agreement or clarity on that front.”  “For the insurgents, the struggle may not necessarily be one to establish a separate nation,” she said. “Jihad is a fight against injustice. You simply fight against an unjust system, without being bothered about questions like the viability of a new nation-state. But there is certainly a growing consensus in Kashmiri society that we’re being targeted because of our faith, and as a result that we can and should take strength from it.”  She nevertheless finds certain aspects of the militants’ narrative disturbing.  “Many people now feel that they can find liberty in death, or dignity in death,” she said. “People don’t surrender now. They’d rather now die than surrender. In that respect, Kashmir has become a society with a death wish.”  She mentioned Saddam Hussein Paddar’s mother, Feroza Bano, and the gun salute that Bano performed at her son’s funeral a few weeks earlier. That was a seminal moment, she said, even a kind of tipping point.  “That was quite shocking. I had never seen anything like that. This is the kind of celebration of death that is now common in our society. It can only be explained as a lack of faith in government and democracy, and I don’t know how the government, or those of us who believe in a political solution to the conflict, can convince people to come back from that.”  “The government will have to do something really revolutionary to make any political headway now. There was a time when it seemed possible. There was a time when autonomy was a demand that had great currency here, but you won’t hear people talking about it today. The government doesn’t seem very interested in it, either. It is very difficult to see a way forward when this is the case.”  “The army and the security agents don’t seem to want it,” she said. “Among other things, the military-industrial complex here is a huge source of employment. If militant funerals create more militants, that can only be a good thing for them.”  As ever, Narendra Modi loomed large in our conversation. “Hate has been normalised under this government,” Rashid told me. “It is totally acceptable now to talk about killing Muslims in mainstream conversation. The number of beef lynchings [mob murders of people accused of selling beef] has increased exponentially every year of Modi’s prime ministership and he is aiding and abetting this.”  “His supporters have tasted blood, in a sense, and they’re not going to back down any time soon. If anything, they want him to be more violent towards Muslims.”  This sort of thing has affected Rashid directly, she said. It is not, it turns out, an easy thing to play a role like hers in a country like this.  “I remember the day that Modi became prime minister,” she said. “We went to the Student Union building.” That was at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, where Rashid first came to prominence as a student union leader, most notably after the union’s leaders were arrested in 2016 on charges of sedition.  “There was a television set in the room and we were watching the results on it. India is not a perfect country—what country is?—but I had hope and naïve optimism that Modi wouldn’t be victorious. The election had taken place following major protests against corruption, major protests against rape. I believed that the Aam Aadmi Party would win, an alternative to the two main parties, the [Indian National] Congress and the BJP.”  “My hope and optimism were shattered that day. It was the first time I had been explicitly aware of my identity as a Muslim. I knew immediately that things would be different for me now.”  “It was just so difficult to believe that it had happened,” she said. “We suddenly had to come to terms with the fact that the country had elected a man accused of the massacre of Muslims.”  In 2002, when he was chief minister of Gujarat, Modi oversaw, and was accused of implicitly encouraging, some of the worst religious violence since independence. Over three bloody days, between 790 and 2000 Muslims were killed, as well as roughly 250 Hindus, after a group of Hindu pilgrims died in a fire at Godhra railway station.  “I mean, I’m still an optimist,” she says. “But things have certainly been different since the election. They’ve been worse. I have been called a jidhadi on Twitter by a major newspaper editor. The same newspaper ran a graphic novel that depicted a character, which many commentators said was based on me, being raped and murdered. It is deeply reminiscent of anti-Semitic propaganda leading up to the Holocaust.  “But I’m not going to stop being an activist,” she says. “I don’t know that I could stop if I tried.”  The news never seemed to stop coming in Kashmir. Every day, there was something new on hand to outrage us. On May 21, Indian soldiers attempted to host an Iftar dinner in the village of Dred-Kalipora in Shopian. The locals rejected the olive branch. In the ensuing “scuffle”—an interesting example of journalistic euphemism, given that the soldiers opened fire—a number of girls wound up getting shot.  On May 23, Major Leetul Gogoi tried to enter a hotel with a Kashmiri woman, resulting in a flurry of articles attempting to besmirch the girl’s character. It was the second time in as many years that Gogoi had made headlines. In 2017, he tied a Kashmiri man to the front of his jeep and used the fellow as a human shield during protests in Srinagar. At the time, he was actually awarded for his efforts. In August 2018, a court of inquiry found Gogoi guilty of “fraternizing with a woman source against existing orders” and “leaving his unit post in an operational area without permission.” That the girl was initially reported to be underage—something that the army has since “disproved”—seemed to have been all too conveniently forgotten.  We were discussing the Gogoi affair among ourselves when Firdous’s neighbour, Mr. Nazir, made his first appearance on the houseboat. He was smartly dressed in collared shirt and slacks, his beard trimmed neat and close. He held his cigarettes with the remotest possible tips of his fingers.  The plan had been to line up a meeting with Syed Ali Geelani, arguably the most influential member of the Joint Resistance Leadership. But the 89-year-old leader of the separatist Tehreek-e-Hurriyat party was at that time under house arrest, as he has been, on and off, for years. The idea of a random Australian rocking up at his gate and announcing to the Indian guards that he sought an audience struck everyone as the fastest way to get myself kicked out of the country. Firdous and Mr. Nazir had come up instead with the second-fastest way: an interview with human rights activist Khurram Parvez of the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society.  Firdous had decided that he wanted to come with me. He was keen to meet the man, he said, about whom Mr. Nazir had told him a lot, though I wondered whether that was really the case. Part of me thought, and continues to think, that he was a little worried about me, too — about having a guest, who was by now also a friend, wind up on the government’s radar.  We certainly took a circuitous route to Parvez’s office, ducking down alleyways and darting up questionable looking staircases before entering a sun-dappled room overlooking the Jhelum River, where Parvez sat looking over the final draft of a report that the JKCCS was about to release. He apologized for not standing to welcome us: with only one leg, it was easier to remain seated.  He lost that leg in 2004, when an IED took out the car in which he was traveling. One of his colleagues, Asiya Jeelani, and their driver, Ghulam Nabi, were killed in the same blast.  “We were deliberately targeted,” Parvez said. “We were monitoring the general elections. There had been claims of fraud, of people being forced to vote a certain way.”  Before Firdous and Mr. Nazir had conspired to get me in the room with Parvez, I had made the mistake of emailing the JKCCS about lining up an interview with him myself.  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” Parvez told me. “You know they’re probably following you, yes? That they might have seen you here already?” He was talking about the Indian security services, about their communications dragnet. “Luckily, we haven't spoken on the phone, and I don’t think we ever responded to your email,” he said.  “We know that we’re being surveilled,” he continued. “We try to use our transparency as a weapon. But you know, the Indian government puts Nazi Germany to shame as far as their surveillance capabilities are concerned.”  When Shehla Rashid evoked the Holocaust, I had written it off as hyperbole. I had been reminded of Godwin’s law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” I was reminded, too, of one of that law’s corollaries: whoever mentions Hitler first immediately loses the argument. But Mike Godwin doesn’t live in Modi’s India. Mike Godwin still has both his legs.  “It is a very difficult line of work,” Parvez said of Kashmiri activism. “It’s not just our organization, either. All activists in Kashmir are at risk. Lawyers have been killed, people’s houses have been targeted, unidentified gunmen have shot at people associated with us and other groups. It’s a very militarized environment, you know?” I said it hadn’t escaped my attention.  The report that Parvez had been reading was about Kashmir’s disappeared, he said. More than 8,000 people have gone missing in the region since 1990.  “The real tragedy is that the Indian government has resolved to kill the Kashmiri people slowly,” he said. “They don’t want a Rwanda on their hands. They don’t want any international outcry.”  “As a result, they have invested very heavily in Islamophobia. They have changed the national discussion around Islam so that people don’t pay attention to what’s happening here. They say that this is an Islamic insurgency, that it’s about al-Qaeda and ISIS and groups like that. This makes what they’re doing here acceptable to the people they’re trying to convince. But 8,000 disappeared people? It’s what we might call a slow genocide.”  I was again reminded of Bano and her gun salute and brought it up in the conversation now.  “Look, there’s no doubt that Islam plays a role in what’s happening here,” he said. “The Islamization we’ve seen in recent years is real and is a direct response to the hopelessness many people are feeling.”  “But say you went to Ireland and talked to people there,” he added. “What would their discourse be? Would it be secular, or would it be couched in religious terms? The language you speak is the language you’re brought up with. People here are raised on Islam. Religion is always going to be part of how Kashmiris’ frame the situation, especially given that the Indian government has decided to frame it that way as well.”  “What people here aren’t so good at is finding ways to frame the conflict in a way that is palatable to the international community,” he said. “The international community doesn’t want to hear about gun salutes and martyrs. It is able to justify its negligence in this region, able to justify its staunchly pro-Indian stance, precisely because of this religious framing.”  Parvez said that this is where groups like the JKCSS come in. By framing the conflict in other terms—in the language of International Humanitarian Law and human rights, in drily secular reports about the disappeared—Parvez and others like him are hoping to move the conversation to a place where the international community will not be able to ignore it.  “Of course, other issues will remain,” he said. “India has important trade agreements, especially arms deals, with countries all over the world, which people don’t want to jeopardize. The Indian and Pakistani governments want the conflict to continue because it energizes their bases and helps their electoral chances. But changing the way we talk about Kashmir is at least a start.”  Activism has never been the most pleasant of vocations, the easiest of callings to answer. But it’s also been getting increasingly harder. The internet promised a lot more than it delivered to people trying to fight for their rights. It has in fact become a great boon to governments, and not only Modi’s, that wish to crack down on and curtail those rights.  It occurs to me now, with the benefit of hindsight, that I was more at-risk in Kashmir than I pretended to myself at the time. It also occurs to me that I put others at risk. Rashid and Parvez didn’t have to speak to me. They chose to, knowing full well that their words, the vast majority of them incendiary, would wind up in front of an international audience. I am lucky enough not to live in India. But India—or at least Indian-administered Kashmir—is and remains their home. I was able to leave at a time of my choosing, and they, quite obviously, cannot. They, they told me, have to keep fighting. On the other hand, of course, I don’t know that they could stop if they tried.  With my stay in Kashmir now approaching its end, I wandered down to the town’s rugby pitch, to see one of the beginners girls’ squads at practice. As Waheed Para had promised, it was a great story: a ray of light befitting the beauty of my surrounds.  The girls had only been playing for a week and seemed unwilling to get too violent with one another. “I saw a video online,” one girl told me excitedly. “They were smashing into each other like cars!” They admitted that passing the ball backwards had initially struck them as counter-intuitive. “Catching,” they said, made rugby somewhat difficult to master.  But then rugby, unlike cricket or soccer, doesn’t have an overly long history in Kashmir. When I took a photo of the girl’s coach, Irfan Aziz Botta, he pointed to the goal posts behind him.  “When these were first installed,” he told me, “people asked if they were some kind of artwork, or had some religious significance.”  The girls seemed very excited about the sport. Indeed, they seemed excited about sport in general. I would later speak with Irtiqa Ayoub, a 23-year-old who has become one of Kashmiri rugby’s leading lights. “In the town where I am from, it isn’t normal for a young woman to leave her home to learn how to play rugby,” she said. “I faced resistance from my parents, but as I began to have successes, winning some matches and getting some medals, they began to change their minds. Now they support me fully.”  But I also wondered whether the girls weren’t censoring themselves. With Botta there, coaching their answers as well as the play, they seemed not to be telling me everything.  After practice and my interviews were over, and a hundred thousand selfies had been taken, the girls retired to the nearby change rooms, from which they gradually emerged transformed. Gone were the J&K Rugby Academy Jerseys, the shin pads and spiked boots. In their place, highly conservative salwar-kameezes had appeared, much like the one that Ashiq, the soccer star, had been wearing when she had her famous run-in with the police. Most of them were fully veiled, and indeed, later, when they started adding me on Instagram in their droves, I noted that none of them ever posted a selfie that didn’t start below the neck. A generation of girls, I would find myself thinking, playing a sport best-known for causing brain injuries, walking around with online profiles that caused one to think that none of them had heads at all.  As I struck out along MA Road, in the direction of Dal Lake, two of them sidled up to me nervously, falling in step, wanting to walk me home—and, it became immediately apparent, to ask me some questions of their own.  At first, these were mostly innocuous. What is Australia like? Do you have a photo of your wife? Do all Australian women have such beautiful eyes? Do any of them wear the veil?  But the questions quickly took on a more political bent. What, they wanted to know, did I think of Modi? What did I think of his visit to Srinagar?  Obviously, I knew what I thought, but wanted to turn the question back on them. What did they think of India’s prime minister?  “I hate him,” one of them said matter-of-factly. (I have withheld their names for obvious reasons.) She was a slip of a thing, eighteen-years-old but far younger-looking, even though I could only see her eyes. There was something in them, and in her voice, that spoke to an anger much larger than her frame seemed capable of containing.  “He’s no good,” the other said. “But you don’t hate him.”  “No,” the first girl said. “I hate him. He hates Kashmiris. Why shouldn’t I hate him?”  I asked her what she thought of Ashiq.  “Oh, I love her ,” she said. “She is very inspirational.” She nodded sagely. I liked her very much.  “Both,” she said. “But mostly because she’s a stone-pelter. I would be a stone-pelter if I could. But my brothers won’t let me. They don’t think girls should be stone-pelters.” They probably didn’t think she should be playing rugby, either.  Her brothers were stone-pelters themselves, it turned out, and she thought their position very hypocritical.  “I would like to throw a stone at Modi,” she said as we approached the end of the road. “I would like to throw a stone in his face.”  We were nearing the Dalgate footbridge, where our paths were set to diverge. The other girl shook her head and said: “You shouldn’t listen to her. She’s showing off.”  I said I understood her anger. “That will help you with your rugby,” I said. The girls laughed.  Within twenty-four hours, I would see such anger unleashed. Stone-pelting wouldn’t be the half of it.  But first I had to meet Yasin Malik, the only member of the Joint Resistance Leadership it seemed possible for me to interview without alerting the Indian security services to my presence. Of course, I had arranged to meet him by email, which, as I had learned from my interview with Parvez, meant they had probably already been alerted to it.  Malik is the chairman of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front, which once advocated for armed struggle against the Indian occupation, but now favours a political solution. He also doesn’t favour joining Pakistan, a view that helps to differentiate him from many of the pro-Pakistani militants in the region. He believes that Kashmir deserves outright independence, and has been agitating for it, in various ways, since the beginning of the 1980s.  I was planning to attend Friday prayers the next day, I told him. What did he make of the young people who took up, not arms, but rather stones against the military?  “What else are they meant to do?” he asked me. We were sitting in his office beneath a map of the region. It was quite a thing to behold. The cartographer behind it, driven by idealism, the commission, or both, had included Kashmir’s Indian, Pakistani and Chinese territories within a single, much hoped-for border. It was this border that Malik wanted to make a reality, ideally by non-violent means.  “These children have grown up surrounded by conflict,” he said. “They have lived with the occupation, and the militancy, their whole lives. We cannot tell them no. They have taken the fight into their own hands. We should at least give them credit for that.”  My conversation with Malik was to remain fixed—and indeed would eventually flounder—on this contentious point. Although he has preached non-violence since 1994, following entreaties from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other European powers to do so, he could not bring himself to condemn, or even to describe as counterproductive, those among his countrymen who remain committed to armed struggle.  “My heart remains committed to the ideals of a non-violent democratic movement,” he told me. “But over the past four years, whatever little political space was available to us here, in which we could express our dissent, has been restricted even further. They’re not allowing us to march. They’re not allowing us to think.”  He asked me to think about that a moment.  “In the land of Gandhi, a nation state that claims Gandhi as its father—the man who gave these ideals to the whole world, to people like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela—in the very state that claims Gandhi as its father, we find no space for political dissent,” he said.  Malik was born in 1966 in a densely populated neighbourhood of Srinagar. In the early 1980s, he helped to form the Tala Party, which, among various other acts of civil disobedience, attempted to disrupt a 1983 cricket match between India and the West Indies. By the end of the decade, Indian print media were describing him as “the self-styled commander-in-chief” and “most effective strategist” of the then-outlawed JKLF, and, no longer content with disrupting the cricket, he famously helped to kidnap the daughter of the Indian Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in 1989.  He was arrested in 1990 and spent “many years” in solitary confinement. After his release on bail in 1994, he declared an indefinite ceasefire. The JKLF became very good at circulating petitions. (He claims that one of these, calling for political talks between India and Pakistan on the question of Kashmir, received more than five million signatures.)  “But at least six hundred people, including many of my colleagues, were killed by the Indian state after that,” he told me. “The only ceasefire that can work in Kashmir is one that all the stakeholders can agree to. In the past, India has not been opposed to this idea. But things have changed in recent years. It is now more content to kill us than to have a conversation.” Modi’s Ramadan ceasefire, he said, was little more than political theatre.  “This is why we have seen a transition back towards violence,” he said. “These boys”—I had asked about Molvi, Paddar and Naikoo—“believed in the non-violent movement once, too. But the space has been taken away from them. Harassment of their families has increased. They have seen their friends and families in body bags.”  “This is what radicalisation is ,” he said. “India is humiliating these people.”  What Malik refused to acknowledge, though, was the way the cycle of radicalisation and militant funerals ultimately plays into the Indian government’s hands.  “These boys have nothing to answer to,” he said. “The Indians are the ones you should be asking.”  “The United States, the British government. They all asked me to give up arms, and I did,” he said. “They said they would convince India to create a space for discussion. Where is that space now? Even the British Empire gave space to Gandhi and the Indian National Congress.”  “Didn’t that have something to do with the fact that the British Raj was on its last legs?” I asked. “India sees itself as a rising power these days.”  “The fact of the matter is that the space existed for a non-violent movement,” he said. “The British knew that sentiment was against them, but they still allowed for that space to be created, and for the exploration of India’s democratic voice. But here in Kashmir, India is not allowing that space.”  “And where is the international community?” He was yelling at me now, on a roll. He was probably wondering who, exactly, he had invited into his office. His eyes were trained on me, even his lazy one, which seemed a lot less lazy now that it had a target. “These people do business with India while India continues to kill us. My dear brother, I will tell you this one thing. Today, the international community is supporting India without any compunction. What is the role of the United States in Kashmir? And not only in Kashmir, but in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, too? If there is no agreement on Kashmir today, it is because the international community’s national security and business interests demand that there cannot be. Where are the voiceless people in all this? Where are we? That is the question you must ask, my dear brother.”  I tried one final time. “I understand all this,” I said. He was interrupting me even as I started to speak and I was interrupting his interruption. “I agree with what you’re saying,” I said.  “I’ve been to a lot of these places you’re talking about. But doesn’t the rise in radicalisation make your work harder for you here? Doesn’t it allow the Indian government to claim that it’s right about Kashmir and to make it even harder for you to secure a political solution to the conflict?” More than 200 militants were killed in 2018, the highest number in a decade, yet the number of active fighters remains more or less stable.  Malik smiled and quietly said: “When I was their age, I was like they are now. You will not get me to condemn them.”  I said I wasn’t trying to. But then, by this point, it was also true that I didn’t know what I was trying to do. “I have to admit,” I eventually said, our half hour together finally coming to an end. “It almost sounds like you miss the armed struggle and have more faith in it today than you do in non-violence.”  He leaned back in his chair and considered the question. He held his hands in his lap as he spoke.  “I hope and believe in non-violence,” he said. “I will remain in the non-violent democratic movement until I die. I do believe this is how we will win.”  “But when you are fighting for a just cause, your conscience never questions your methods. This, you understand, my dear brother, is how countries are made . If King or Mandela had given up on their struggles—had people given up in other places—there wouldn’t be a single country in the world.”  Our time was up. Malik had meetings to attend. He extended his hand and looked me in the eye. “I am proud to say that I have played my part,” he said.  Friday prayers began at half-past twelve. There had already been a minor altercation. As I arrived, Indian security forces on Nowhatta Chowk, a square on the Srinagar-Leh Highway, where a fountain tinkled prettily, were attempting to prevent a group of young men from approaching the Jamia Masjid. I decided to get the lay of the land and walked around the burnt-brick building, built in 1394 in the Persian style, several times, sticking my head down the souks for a look, taking in the street art and graffiti. “8 lakh [800,000] uniformed terrorists versus defenceless Kashmiris,” someone had scrawled across one of the walls.  Latecomers to prayer watched me sitting on the steps outside the mosque, reading George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Mountain of Light, in which Gulab Singh, the first Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, plays a key role. They watched with a combination of wariness and concern, the latter apparently for my well-being, before performing their ablutions and hastening inside.  By the time the mirwaiz, Umar Farooq, leader of the separatist Hurriyat Conference and the third and final member of the Joint Resistance Leadership, began leading the Qunut, the building was overflowing with people, the aforementioned latecomers almost praying on the street. There was a hint of something metallic on the air, and behind me, near the fountain, the numbers of Indian military personnel were growing steadily.  The Kashmiri faithful had come prepared. No sooner were they out on the street than they were adorning themselves with facemasks, keffiyehs, and bandannas, and the shopkeepers directly opposite the mosque on its southern side started shuttering their properties. A press photographer standing nearby donned a gas mask and began flitting about like something out of Cronenberg.  There was a momentary, wholly abortive attempt at something like a peaceful protest, a group of young men arranging themselves behind a banner and walking with it towards the iron gates that gave onto the road. But this was mostly pretense. Behind the bannermen, their masked equivalent seethed, and as the first stone soared out in an arc from their midst, so, too, was the first report of gunfire to be heard.  The security forces, at this point, were showing something akin to restraint, wary of advancing too far beyond the gate. But as more rocks began to land among them, mostly falling short or flying too far, a second group, hidden before now, descended down a second, unseen set of stairs and began advancing along the shuttered shop-fronts. The protesters now faced their opponents directly to their front, and on their right flank, and began a hasty retreat into the mosque, which loomed above them on their left. Not for the last time, and without intending to do so, I found myself on the other side of the front-line, watching as men in fatigues fired tear gas canisters and live ammunition directly into the building.  I know it was live because, at this moment, taking advantage of a momentary lull, I came out from under the awning into the street, where the photographer in the gas mask was fingering a cartridge from a pellet-firing shotgun. He gave it to me and said I could keep it. It was labelled: “Indian Ordnance Factories.” I later left it in a bathroom cubicle at Indira Gandhi International Airport.  In a few short minutes, the scene had changed completely, the ground now littered with stones and pieces of brick. The military men were falling back to the gate in anticipation of the second wave. It came, but not immediately, or at least not in a form that one might have expected. A huddle of men emerged from the mosque, holding a bleeding body aloft. A man, a shopkeeper, had been shot in the chaos: the whites of his eyes, as the men passed me, were red, his arms streaked similarly crimson.  The soldiers fell back further, to the fountain, where I had seen them denying men access earlier, and a two-door hatchback sped up, an improvised ambulance. I was now among the protesters again, and the second wave could really begin. It did so with a fury, compounded by the sight of the injured man, that dwarfed that of the first. By falling back to make way for the car, the security services had ceded their advantage, and young men poured through the gat


theduran--2019-07-29--Moscow protests aim to destabilize Putin government Video

Moscow protests aim to destabilize Putin government (Video)

The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss this weekends protests organized by liberal Russian opposition figures, demanding places on the ballot ahead of September’s Moscow city council elections. The protests blocked traffic along major Moscow streets, eventually ending in clashes with police.  The Saturday march was one of the largest unsanctioned rallies Moscow has seen in years, with estimates placing the number of participants at roughly 3,500 people, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Ministry claims that 700 people in attendance were working as journalists. Various independent Russian media outlets estimate the protestors to have been over 5,000. Moscow police detained over 1,000 protesters, among them, professional provocateur Alexei Navalny.  In a recent turn of events, certain to embolden protestors, a Moscow doctor says Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny may have been poisoned while in prison.  Remember to Please Subscribe to The Duran’s YouTube Channel.  Moscow’s most prominent opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, has been moved from jail to a local hospital in the Russian capital after officials said the rogue politician may have been poisoned.  According to BBC, officials said Navalny – who has been detained for the second day on Monday – was in “satisfactory” condition, and that though he may have had an allergic reaction, Navalny’s doctors said they demanded “fundamentals” like the prospect of using “disproportionate” things like making. More than 1,400 people were detained while protesting Navalny’s detention.  Navalny had been sentenced to 30 days for provoking an unsanctioned protest with other lawmakers.  The EU slammed Russia over the “disproportionate” use of force against the protesters, claiming it undermined the “fundamental freedoms of expression, association and assembly.”  then again, Russia isn’t exactly known for its tolerance of political dissent.  According to the AP, access to Navalny is restricted, and Dr. Anastasiya Vasilyeva, Navalny’s physician, only managed to see him on Sunday afternoon. Doctors at the hospital initially said that Navalny was taken in after suffering a severe were region  At least 21 people, including Navalny’s supporters and journalists, “briefly detained outside the hospital Sunday evening. Still, hospital officials refused to run any additional tests on him.  Another Navalny ally, Leonid Volkov, said on Sunday that conditions at the prison were unsanitary.  Baton-wielding police on Saturday wrestled with protesters in arguably the largest unsanctioned protest in Russia in a decade.  Navalny has been the Kremlin’s most formidable foe since 2011, when Navalny led a massive wave of protests against Putin and his party. Since then, Navalny has been arrested many a times.


theguardian--2019-12-05--US government edict puts international film-makers in danger, lawsuit claims

Documentary film-makers operating in some of the most dangerous countries in the world are having their work disrupted and security compromised by a Trump administration edict that forces them to disclose their social media activities when applying to enter the US, a new lawsuit claims.  The US homeland security and state departments were sued in a federal court in Washington on Thursday over a rule change that the plaintiffs argue could put film-makers in personal peril. The suit concerns a registration requirement introduced in May that affects more than 14 million visa applicants each year, obliging them to disclose all social media behavior including the pseudonymous handles they use to protect their identity.  The legal action has been brought by two US-based documentary film organizations that collaborate with international directors and producers. The films created through these networks often deal with highly sensitive subjects such as political dissent and corruption.  “In many cases, our partners can be thought of as activists with cameras. Many work with various kinds of risk – physical, political or other forms of persecution,” said Oliver Rivers, a director of one of the plaintiff groups, Doc Society which is headquartered in New York and London.  Under the rule change, film-makers wanting to come to the US to work with Doc Society or its fellow plaintiff, the Los Angeles-based International Documentary Association (IDA), must fill out electronic visa application forms in which they are required to state which of 20 social media platforms they have used in the past five years. The platforms include Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube as well as several sites in China and other countries.  In each case, the applicant must divulge the social handle they post under, effectively forcing them to break their anonymity and hand the information over to the US government. The DHS and state department are known to store the data for up to 100 years after an applicant’s date of birth and are allowed to share the intelligence with other federal and state agencies as well as “international government agencies”.  In effect, the rule change permits the US government to hand over personal information on foreign film-makers to the very government bodies who they might be investigating in their documentary work. It also amounts to a massive new form of surveillance.  “The registration requirement is the linchpin of a far-reaching and unconstitutional surveillance regime that permits the government to monitor the online activities of millions of visa applicants, and to continue monitoring them even after they’ve entered the United States,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight Institute which along with the Brennan Center is legally representing the film groups.  The plaintiffs are petitioning the federal court to block the social media disclosure provision on grounds that it unlawfully infringes the free speech rights of the film-makers and subjects them to arbitrary and capricious government action. They argue that if the requirement is allowed to stand it will place a chill on the political activities and creativity of the artists.  “Our partners are telling us that they have already begun to censor themselves online or alternatively cancel their plans to come to the US, and both of those are extremely disturbing,” Rivers said.  At the time that the rule change was made, Twitter strongly opposed it. The platform said that it “could have a chilling effect on free speech and the willingness of people who use Twitter to engage in free expression and conversation”.  The lawsuit refers to an unnamed Turkish film-maker who belongs to IDA who has decided not to come to the US because he fears handing over his social media identifier. It cites another IDA member from Syria who is in particular danger because they use pseudonymous online accounts to share views on political and social issues.  Among those who are now reining in their social media speech is a film-maker who pseudonymously comments on the Trump administration, the lawsuit says.  The legal challenge lands at a time when international film-making is enjoying something of a golden era. This week For Sama, the documentary about life under siege in Aleppo at the heart of the Syrian war, swept the awards at the British independent film awards.  But the terrain remains challenging for many directors who rely on anonymity to mitigate the extreme risks they are taking. The lawsuit points out that in August the Burmese film-maker Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, founder of Myanmar’s Human Dignity Film Institute, was reportedly sentenced to a year’s hard labor for criticizing the country’s armed forces on Facebook.


theguardianuk--2019-02-24--The Guardian view on Egypt and Europe embracing authoritarianism Editorial

The Guardian view on Egypt and Europe: embracing authoritarianism | Editorial

Days after Egypt executed men who said they were tortured into confessions of killing the country’s former top prosecutor, Europe’s heads of state are enjoying the hospitality of its president. The resort of Sharm el-Sheikh is hosting the inaugural summit of the European Union and the Arab League. Donald Tusk, president of the European council, is co-chairing with Abdel Fatah al-Sisi; Britain’s Theresa May is among the guests.  If the event itself is a first, the approach is familiar. As Mr Sisi entrenches his rule, presiding over what Human Rights Watch calls Egypt’s worst human rights crisis in decades, European countries murmur about their “quiet diplomacy” on such issues. Then they carry on building ties and providing the air of international legitimacy that he needs given his grim record since seizing power in 2013’s coup. Mr Sisi’s recent spate of executions is instructive: he must have felt confident there would be no repercussions for putting people to death so close to the summit – despite their blatantly unfair trials.  Political dissent is suppressed through disappearances, torture and arbitrary arrests. Sami Anan, the former military chief who tried to stand against Mr Sisi in last year’s sham election, has just been jailed. Human rights defenders and labour activists are harassed and prosecuted, journalists detained and barred, the work of NGOs drastically curbed. Constitutional changes now going through parliament would allow Mr Sisi to stay in power until 2034, grant new political powers to the military, and increase presidential control of the judiciary. Once approved by legislators, they will face a referendum that promises to be as free and fair as the polls which Mr Sisi swept last year with 97% of the vote.  But EU leaders see Mr Sisi’s regime as a rare source of stability in the region, even if his actions are feeding long-term pressures. Emmanuel Macron applauds Egypt as a bulwark against terrorism while reminding Mr Sisi, sotto voce, about the need for human rights to be respected. Migration is high on the agenda; though Egypt is not currently a major transit point, talks have begun on a deal that would see Cairo cut numbers in return for economic benefits – reflecting Europe’s broader willingness to have migrants trapped in squalid and dangerous conditions if it keeps them away from our shores.  France, Egypt’s main arms supplier, also has those sales to think about – and human rights are in any case dropping down the EU’s agenda. Egyptians deserve and expect better. The constitutional coup now under way removes even the “promise or veneer” of democratic rule, notes one Egyptian author. An increasingly autocratic ruler may well believe he does not need much support when he can coerce compliance. But his predecessors thought so, too. Corruption, inflation and unemployment as well as state brutality are fuelling frustrations. A more accurate assessment of Mr Sisi’s rule might be stability – for now. Bolstering his reign is foolish and wrong.


theguardianuk--2019-03-14--China hits back at US prejudice in human rights tit-for-tat row

China hits back at US 'prejudice' in human rights tit-for-tat row

China has hit back in unusually strong terms after the US state department singled out Beijing’s human rights record.  On Thursday China attacked the US for its record on gun deaths, racial discrimination and media freedom.  It came after the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, highlighted abuses in Iran, South Sudan, Nicaragua and China in the department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, but told reporters that China was “in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations”.  Michael Kozak, the head of the state department’s human rights and democracy bureau, said mistreatment of China’s Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region was like had not been seen “since the 1930s”, apparently referring to the policies of persecution of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.  The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, said the US report was filled with “ideological prejudice” and groundless accusations, and that China had lodged a complaint with Washington about it.  China fully safeguards human rights and it has made many achievements in this regard, he claimed. “We also advise that the United States take a hard look at its own domestic human rights record, and first take care of its own affairs,” he said.  China has rejected concern about its policies in Xinjiang, where rights groups said the government was operating internment camps holding a million or more Muslims. China said they are vocational training centres aimed at de-radicalisation.  The Chinese government on Thursday issued its annual rebuttal to criticism from Washington about China’s human rights record.  China’s state council, or cabinet, said the US was a self-styled “human rights defender” that has a human rights record which is “flawed and lackluster”.  It said: “The double standards of human rights it pursues are obvious.”  China’s report pointed to the high rate of gun deaths, racial discrimination and also what it said was a lack of media freedom in the US, despite China being ranked 176 last year on the world press freedom index of Reporters Without Borders, ahead of only Syria, Turkmenistan, Eritrea and North Korea.  “Press freedom has come under unprecedented attack,” it said, pointing to cases of reporters in the US being arrested and prevented from doing their jobs.  “The US government continues to publicly and fiercely accuse the media and journalists of creating ‘fake news’ and creating an atmosphere of intimidation and hostility,” the report said.  “Reporters’ legal right to report has been violated,” it added, pointing to cases of the White House stripping some reporters of press credentials.  There is no routine access to China’s presidential office and no presidential spokesperson. China’s president, Xi Jinping, only very rarely takes questions from any reporters, let alone foreign media.  Both foreign and Chinese journalists in China are frequently blocked from reporting freely. At least 48 journalists were jailed in China as of 2018, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The relatives and friends of overseas Uighur journalists reporting on the situation in Xinjiang have been detained, according to reports.  Human rights have long been a source of tension between the world’s two largest economies, especially since 1989, when the US imposed sanctions on China after a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.  China routinely rejects criticism of its human rights record and has pointed to its success at lifting millions out of poverty, and that nobody has the right to criticise its model of government.  But the ruling Communist party brooks no political dissent and Xi’s administration has overseen a sweeping crackdown on human rights lawyers and activists.


theindependent--2019-01-16--Womanaposs obituary says Trump aposhastened her deathapos but local paper refuses to run it

Woman's obituary says Trump 'hastened her death' but local paper refuses to run it

Frances Irene Finley Williams felt the same way about dress codes at funerals as she felt about politics: strongly.  So when she died just before Thanksgiving at the age of 87, her family thought they would make politics a part of her obituary too. It was only natural, said her daughter, Cathy Duff. Williams and her 92-year-old husband, Bruce, were the kind of couple who woke up with the Louisville Courier-Journal and USA Today and went to bed switching channels between CNN and the local news.  She was a bridge-playing, churchgoing, Elvis Presley and Willie Nelson loving political junkie who "did not take gladly to fools," a "very, very spirited woman" who sometimes said that her frustration about President Donald Trump was killing her - "contributing to her decline," as Ms Duff put it.  She didn't seem to be joking, Ms Duff told The Washington Post.  So at the end of her mother's obituary, just after the part about Williams's passion for making family photo albums, Ms Duff added this sentence: "Her passing was hastened by her continued frustration with the Trump administration."  "I just felt like, along with everything else that was in there, that was a vital part of her personality and something she expressed with me over the last few months - just like she expressed she felt strongly about a dress code for funerals," Ms Duff told The Post. "So I felt it was important to put it in there. We never gave it any more thought than that."  At least not until the Courier-Journal declined to publish it: They would have to remove the Trump quip, they were told, or their $1,684 obituary wouldn't run at all. Ms Duff and her brother, Art Williams, were shocked. "We didn't understand it," Ms Duff said.  Now, more than two weeks after Williams' memorial services, the Courier-Journal and Gannett, the paper's owner, are apologizing following backlash on social media, which circulated after Ms Duff's brother made their ordeal public earlier this month. It was a "mistake" to refuse to publish the political sentence, Laurie Bolle, the director of sales for Gannett's West Group, told the Courier-Journal in a column titled, "Obit blaming Trump for hastening woman's death should have been published."  "Mrs. Williams' obituary should have published as it was presented to our obits team and as requested by the family," Richard A Green, the Courier-Journal's editor, told the columnist.  "In this political climate we now find ourselves, partisanship should have no role in deciding what gets included in an obituary that captures a loved one's life - especially one as amazing as what Mrs. Williams led. I'm certain she is missed greatly by those who loved her. We send the family our deepest condolences and apologies."  Ms Duff said she first learned their obit was rejected when she got a phone call from her brother on 24 Decemeber. The Cremation Society of Kentucky, which had been handling Williams's obit, had received an email from a Gannett employee out of Wisconsin, who said the obit had been rejected because it contained "negative content."  "Per our policy, we are not able to publish the obituary as is due to the negative content within the obituary text," said the email, which was provided to The Post. "You are more than welcome to remove the negative content so we may move forward with publishing if you wish."  Ms Duff said she and her brother were too busy grieving and preparing for the services ― at which no one wore jeans or tennis shoes, as Mr Williams requested - to argue about the Trump line. And so they simply agreed to remove it.  On 5 January, however, they decided to make their displeasure known publicly. Art Williams wrote on Facebook:  "I was, and still am, dumbfounded, surprised, but most of all disappointed and aghast that a once historically courageous American newspaper that exists by reason of freedom of speech would so trivially move to abate the free speech that it seems, when convenient, to hypocritically champion."  "And over a relatively innocuous sentence. ... my mom would have been offended."  The comments on Ms Duff and Mr Williams's Facebook pages poured in.  "[Courier-Journal] decision makers should be ashamed and take a long leave of absence to discern what their jobs really are. Have we left the truth in the gutter completely? I am surprised they wouldn't run that," another woman said. "People who knew her would have understood and probably gotten a kick out of seeing it."  Williams said in another post 13 January that he and his father were waiting for an apology.  Ms Duff said Green called her father, Bruce, to apologise and inform him that the Courier-Journal would run the obituary in full. Mr Green could not be immediately reached late Tuesday to confirm.  It's far from the first time that obituaries have become a vessel for political dissent.  Obituaries invoking Mr Trump or, alternatively, Hillary Clinton, particularly blossomed during the 2016 presidential campaign, as the dead implored the living to vote for their favored candidates.  "Jeffrey would ask that in lieu of flowers, please do not vote for Donald Trump," the chiropractor Jeffrey Cohen's obituary read in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  "His only regret is NOT being able to vote against Hillary Clinton in the next presidential election," said one for E. Karl Kmentt in the Akron Beacon Journal.  Others, according to their family, just said forget it.  "Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the age of 68," began Noland's Richmond Times-Dispatch obit.  Ms Duff said her intent with the line that the Trump administration had "hastened" her mother's death was not necessarily meant to be funny, but to encapsulate the exasperation her mom truly felt.  Her mother had been suffering from coronary artery disease, and so Duff moved to Louisville a year ago to help her father care for her.  During the last year of her life, Ms Duff said, she tried to pick at her mom's brain to figure out why she seemed much more invested in politics than anyone else she knew.  She told her daughter it was perhaps because she grew up in the Great Depression, experiencing and witnessing poverty that she felt could have been prevented, and also because her husband was a World War II veteran. A member of Daughters of the American Revolution, she was in love with the country, Duff said, and so she cared a great deal about who was in charge of it.  "She just always, and consistently, kept saying, why don't people see what's going on?" Ms Duff said. "She would shake her head and say, 'I can't believe the country has come to this.'"  She would have hated to know about what Duff described as political censorship in her own obituary - but she might have been happy too, Ms Duff said.  "It's getting people talking about something that was really important to her," she said.


theindependent--2019-02-02--UAE launches apostoleranceapos ministry days before papal visit despite reports of widespread hu

UAE launches 'tolerance' ministry days before papal visit despite reports of widespread human rights abuse

The United Arab Emirates has branded a bridge, a new ministry, a family day at the park and even the entire year of 2019 under the banner theme of “tolerance”, an elaborate effort that’s in overdrive as the country prepares to host Pope Francis starting Sunday in the first-ever papal visit to the Arabian Peninsula.  The state’s tolerance-themed project, however, has hard limits. While allowing churches and other places of worship to exist, and marking holidays such as Christmas, the Hindu Diwali and Chinese New Year with festivals and celebrations, the government has simultaneously stamped out critical political expression in the name of national security.  Human rights activists and Muslim Brotherhood sympathisers have been imprisoned, academic research deemed sensitive has been curtailed and human rights groups have been barred entry. Political parties are banned and local media are censored.  And while the law prohibits religious discrimination and guarantees the freedom to exercise religious worship, the state’s official religion of Islam is tightly monitored and controlled.  A permit is required to hold a Quran memorisation circle or lecture, collect donations or distribute books or audio in mosques. The law also prohibits mosque employees from preaching and teaching religious lessons outside of mosques.  Moreover, all imams receive their salaries from the government and – with the exception of the most senior imams – must follow official weekly guidance on the content of Friday sermons.  The UAE‘s Minister of Tolerance, Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, said the government is simply doing what “we think is right for our people and for the world”.  “We are trying to protect our religion,” he told the Associated Press in an interview last week. “We want to restore our real religion, which stems from our holy book the Quran, which believes in living together. It believes in the dignity of a human being.”  The UAE, a federation of seven constituent monarchies led by President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is known for its gleaming cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Modern skylines draw tourists from around the world, bars exist next to mosques, men and women dressed in traditional garb brush past foreigners, and tight security and surveillance ensures high levels of safety.  Government bodies, public relations firms and even banks have been busy promoting the state’s version of tolerance in preparation for the pope’s visit, which includes a meeting on Monday with Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s foremost religious institution, and a mass on Tuesday before 135,000 people in Abu Dhabi.  In a video message translated into English and Arabic ahead of his arrival, Pope Francis described the UAE as “a country that strives to be a model for coexistence and human fraternity, a meeting point of different civilisations and cultures. A place where people find a safe place to work, live freely and where differences are respected.”  The UAE has a Hindu temple in Dubai and a large one being built in Abu Dhabi on land donated by the country’s rulers to help accommodate the roughly 3.3 million Indians who live in the country. It is also home to around 1 million Catholics, including a sizeable Filipino community. In addition to several Catholic churches, there are numerous churches in the UAE of other Christian denominations, a Sikh temple and a space for Jewish worship.  Still, the US-based Freedom House notes that more than 85 per cent of the UAE’s population consists of foreign residents who lack political rights and electoral opportunities, including tens of thousands of stateless residents – known as Bidoon.  Freedom House says that since 2011, when Arab Spring protests rocked countries throughout the Middle East, the UAE has aggressively cracked down on opposition activists, particularly if they are suspected of belonging to Al-Islah, an Islamist group perceived as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The UAE has branded the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation, viewing it as a threat to the country’s system of hereditary rule.  “They’re certainly not tolerant of any form of political dissent,” Devin Kenney, researcher on the UAE for Amnesty International, said.  “I mean OK, sure, like bars exist and people of multiple faiths are allowed to practise their faith, so it’s not culturally totalitarian, but it’s clearly not a really tolerant place,” he added. Kenney said the Pope’s visit “seems like a fairly straightforward PR gesture”.  In recent years, the UAE named dozens of individuals and some 80 groups as “terrorist” – many for their alleged ties with the Brotherhood, which is not deemed a terrorist group in Europe or the US.  The list includes political dissenters and opposition voices, but also groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy and civil rights group in the US, as well as Islamic Relief Worldwide, a UK-based humanitarian aid organisation with operations around the world.  In a statement to the AP, Islamic Relief said it is not connected in any way to the Muslim Brotherhood and that the allegation has been “hugely damaging”. The group said it was never provided with any evidence by Emirati authorities to substantiate the assertion and has tried to contest it in UAE courts.  “All our attempts to get an open hearing in front of a judge have been rejected on procedural technicalities,” the group said.  The UAE is also one of four Arab countries that cut ties with Qatar in 2017, in part over its support of the Brotherhood throughout the region. The UAE banned the news operations of Al Jazeera inside the country, expelled Qatari residents, blocked websites affiliated with Qatar and warned residents that anyone who expressed sympathy for Qatar could face up to 15 years in prison.  “Nobody’s perfect in this world ... ,” Al Nahyan, the tolerance minister, said. “We’re proud of our acceptance, tolerance, respect for human dignity, having laws that protect everybody’s rights.”


theindependent--2019-02-04--Pope makes historic visit to Abu Dhabi in trip meant to bolster UAEaposs aposmoderateapos cred

Pope makes historic visit to Abu Dhabi in trip meant to bolster UAE's 'moderate' credentials

Pope Francis went to the United Arab Emirates on Monday in the first-ever visit by the head of the Vatican to the Arabian peninsula, birthplace of the Islamic faith as well as an incubator of a puritanical version of the religion that has inspired militant organisations.  The pontiff, widely seen as the most progressive figure to oversee the Catholic church in decades, has eagerly embraced outreach to the Muslim world, making pastoral visits to Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Palestine, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Albania since ascending to the papacy in 2013.  But some worried his latest trip, coinciding with a public relations blitz by Emirati officials, was being used to give a sheen of moderation to a UAE which is part of an axis of Arab nations increasingly intolerant of political dissent, independent journalism, and even certain religious minorities.  The trip comes amid a sharp philosophical disagreement, exacerbated during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. While human rights advocates and scholars in the region see extremism as a byproduct of state repression, reactionary powers such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt see state power as the best way to maintain tight control over society and prevent political violence.  The UAE and Saudi Arabia are also leading the war against the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen, a conflict seen as the worst ongoing humanitarian disaster on the planet, and many worry is sure to breed extremism in years to come.  “The population is exhausted by the long conflict and many, many children are suffering from hunger but they are not able to get to food deposits,” Pope Francis said of Yemen in his Sunday sermon, before heading to the UAE. “There are children who are hungry, they are thirsty, they don’t have medicine.”  Fighter jets in formation spewed yellow smoke as screeched across the sky over Abu Dhabi to welcome the pope on Monday.  “With gratitude for your warm welcome and hospitality, and with the assurance of a remembrance in my prayers, I invoke upon your highness and all the people of the United Arab Emirates the divine blessings of peace and fraternal solidarity,” Pope Francis wrote in the guestbook at the palace of UAE president Khalifa bin Zayed, ruler of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven emirates that make up the country.  “This is truly a historic visit of monumental significance,” Zaki Nusseibeh, UAE minister of state, told The Independent. “It is the first time that his holiness Pope Francis – the head of the Catholic church and moral leader of 1.4 billion Catholics and also a world moral leader – is coming to the Arabian peninsula.”  The meeting was organised by Mohammed bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, who also serves as a influence over Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman and has strong ties to the White House.  Unlike Egypt or Jordan, the UAE has few if any native Christians. But up to 15 per cent of the country’s largely expatriate population practises Christianity, including Arab, Philippine, Indian and European residents who make up a significant bulk of the country’s workforce and are relatively free to practise their religion. “We have over 200 nationalities of different religious backgrounds who are today residing in the Emirates,” said Mr Nusseibeh.  During his visit, the pope is scheduled to meet with Muslim scholars as part of an effort to foster “interfaith dialogue,” said Mr Nusseibeh. “We see around us the spread of intolerance, of hatred, of extremism, that feeds terrorism,” he said. “We see the break down of societies not only in own region but also abroad. We believe that extremism is one of the most serious challenges that mankind feeds today.”  But rights advocates say the UAE has backslid on tolerance of political and religious dissent. Once celebrated as bastions of free-wheeling free market capitalism, the UAE’s two wealthiest and most populous emirates, Abu Dhabi and Dubai in recent years launched campaigns to arrest and deport civil society activists, critics and members of the Shia faith considered potential agents of Iran. A court in Abu Dhabi last year sentenced UK researcher Matthew Hedges to life imprisonment on questionable national security charges before he was pardoned amid an international furore.  “Despite its assertions about tolerance, the UAE government has demonstrated no real interest in improving its human rights record,” Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “But the UAE has shown how sensitive it is to its image on the global stage, and Pope Francis should use his visit to press UAE leaders to meet their human rights obligations at home and abroad.”  The UAE has spent millions in the west to hire pricey public relations and lobbying firms but has been stumbling in efforts to burnish its image. Just days before the papal visit, the UAE raised eyebrows when Emirati football fans filling an Abu Dhabi stadium pelted players of the visiting team of Qatar with shoes and bottles whilst losing an Asia Cup semi-finals match 4-0.  Later UAE Arabic-language newspapers refused to mention Qatar’s name when it won the tournament, beating Japan 3-1 in the final.