[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 40 (Thursday, March 21, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E409-E411]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF TUNISIAN INDEPENDENCE

                                 ______


                        HON. BENJAMIN A. GILMAN

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, March 20, 1996

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

[[Page E410]]



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

                                 ______


                            HON. DAN BURTON

                               of indiana

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, March 20, 1996

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

                        Disappearances in Punjab

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


          historical background of the sikh separatist unrest

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


                      evidence of state atrocities

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


                    the case of jaswant singh khalra

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

[[Page E411]]

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

                          ____________________