MUSLIM PERSECUTION

  Precursors to the Genocide Such a climate of fear and uncertainty, by April 1947, non-Muslims from the violence in the Rawalpindi division were arriving in other parts of the Punjab and the Kashmir region, expecting to return after the violence ceased. Within a week of the killings,  'a large flock'  of the Hindus and Sikhs from Rawalpindi division started migrating to the neighbouring Kashmir region. The embittered Sikh and Hindu refugees' tales of violence raised animosities wherever they settled. They planned revenge and produced and circulated wildly inflammatory pamphlets and brochures. At the time also the Dogra Hindu Maharaja Hari Singh's own preference was that the State should remain independent or accede to India, knowing that the majority of the State's populace was inclined to link its future with Pakistan. In order to maintain his stranglehold, the Maharaja had initiated a systematic, tyrannical campaign against the  'dissenters'  as early as ...

  ‘The voices of our dead have not faded away’: the fight for the memory of genocide in Srebrenica. Three decades on, as leaders deny what happened, remains of the thousands killed continue to be identified and buried. Three decades after genocide was committed in the middle of  Europe , memories in the rest of world are beginning to fade, helped along by a relentless effort by the perpetrators and their allies to cover up evidence. But the sprawling murder scene in the hills and fields around Srebrenica continues to cough up its bones. In the town of Bratunac, 6 miles (10km) north of Srebrenica town, a group burial was performed recently of victims’ remains that had been identified over the course of the preceding year. Imams gathered from across the country to pray before a line of six coffins draped in the blue and gold Bosnian flag. A crowd of about a thousand Bosnian Muslims gathered in the surrounding graveyard, where a backhoe had carved out six new holes, one of them ...