NEW DELHI (AP) India's government has failed to fully investigate and prosecute officials who allegedly took part in thousands of killings and disappearances during a counterinsurgency campaign against separatists in northern India, rights groups said Thursday.

Throughout much of the 1980s and early 1990s, Sikh insurgents waged a brutal campaign to establish their own country in India's Punjab state, massacring civilians, bombing crowded markets and attacking Hindus. India's security forces responded by allegedly killing thousands - many of whom were suspected militants, many others later described as innocent. To this day, about 3,000 people remain missing, many after being detained by police.

In a report released Thursday, two rights groups, Human Rights Watch and Ensaaf, a Punjabi group, said India's government had failed to properly investigate the alleged killings and disappearances by the security forces.

The report highlights a long-running investigation by India's National Human Rights Commission into accusations that police killed thousands of people from 1985 to 1995 and secretly cremated the bodies.

The commission, which is investigating the cases at the request of India's Supreme Court, has examined evidence from just three of Punjab's thousands of crematoriums and is only seeking to identify the dead - not who killed them, the rights groups said.

Officials at the National Human Rights Commission were not immediately available for comment, and officials at the Home Ministry, which oversees India's domestic security forces, said they could not comment on the report because they had not yet seen it.

The allegations from Human Rights Watch, based in New York, and Ensaaf, based in Fremont, Calif., are the latest in a series of accusations against security forces in India, a democracy whose leaders say the rule of law prevails.

In Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim Himalayan region that has been wracked by an Islamic insurgency for nearly two decades, police this year began investigating five cases of allegedly staged shootouts in which security personnel are suspected of killing innocents and then claiming they were rebels to earn rewards and promotions.

On Tuesday, a court convicted 10 policemen of murder in the deaths of two businessmen slain in a hail of bullets in downtown New Delhi in 1997. The policemen claimed they had opened fire in self-defense, but the court found the shooting had been an unprovoked attack on a car that the officers believed was carrying a gangster.

There have also been a handful of prosecutions of police accused of excesses during the insurgency in Punjab. But most cases, in Punjab and elsewhere, have slowly faded away.

Sikhs make up just 2 percent of India's 1.1 billion people and are concentrated in Punjab. The insurgency left an estimated 25,000 people dead, including 1,700 police. Since it tapered off in the early 1990s, calls for a separate Sikh state have all but disappeared.

http://www.adn.com/24hour/world/story/3721671p-13169211c.html

Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi
Thursday October 18, 2007The Guardian

The families of thousands of civilians "disappeared" during the Indian government's violent suppression of a campaign for a Sikh homeland more than a decade ago are still waiting for perpetrators of the crimes to be brought to justice, human rights monitors have warned.

In a new report entitled Protecting the Killers, Human Rights Watch says the Indian government needs to "hold accountable members of its security forces who killed and tortured thousands of Sikhs" during counter-insurgency operations in Punjab that ended only in 1995.

By then the unrest, sparked by a call for Khalistan, or a Sikh nation, had lasted more than 10 years. Democracy was suspended as the Indian army occupied the state.

The security forces eventually crushed the Khalistani movement by adopting a "bullet-for-bullet" policy of extra-judicial killings in which more than 40,000 people died. The embers of resentment have not completely burned out: a bomb blast on Sunday in Punjab, which killed seven, was blamed on Sikh separatist groups.

One of the key cases highlighted by Human Rights Watch is that of the mass cremation of 2,097 bodies in Amritsar, the Sikh holy city. The country's human rights commission, civil rights groups say, has for more than a decade failed to investigate a single case of the "mass crematorium" and explicitly refuses to identify any responsible officials.

The scale of the deaths was uncovered by a local civil rights lawyer, Jaswant Singh Kalra, who was later murdered. Five policeman were convicted of abducting and killing Mr Kalra.

His widow, Paramjeet, is still campaigning for the "missing thousands". "It took a decade for these men to be found guilty," she said. "What about the thousands of others?"

Rajinder Bains, a civil rights lawyer in Amritsar, estimated that 25,000 people were "still missing".

"There were 35 police and officials charged but none were prosecuted," he said. "The charges were set aside by the supreme court on technical grounds. The state has the money and the power to protect its own."

Human Rights Watch says India is fostering a "culture of impunity" around its counter-insurgency operations, giving a free hand to its security services to act without supervision.

However, senior Indian officials dismissed the report, describing it as "propaganda worthy of Goebbels". KPS Gill, a former director of police in Punjab during the counter-insurgency, said the New York-based organisation was "ill informed and biased", asking: "Do these people think about the innocents killed by terrorists?"

Mr Gill, who Human Rights Watch claim has led "the attack against the pursuit of justice", said the bodies in the crematorium in Amritsar were those of "beggars, vagrants, possibly some Bangladeshi migrants. In India, unclaimed and unidentified bodies found by the police must, by law, be cremated."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,2193909,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12