Hamas at 20

By Khalid Amayreh in Ramallah

I am writing this piece as 300,000-500,000 people (according to Reuters) are converging at the Katiba Square in Central Gaza to mark the 20th anniversary of Hamas’s foundation.
Undoubtedly, the huge turn-out ( nearly one-third of the Gaza Strip’s total population) is an unmistakable proof that Hamas is still very popular among Palestinians despite the rabid American-led efforts to scuttle the movement, possibly in order to facilitate the appearance of a quisling-like Palestinian leadership that would succumb to Israeli hegemony and colonialist aspirations.
The massive attendance is also an eloquent refutation of a plethora of tendentious Fatah-financed or Fatah-inspired opinion survey which have suggested that Hamas’s popular standing has seriously plummeted especially since the mind-June events in Gaza .
These opinion polls are actually reminiscent of the numerous opinion polls preceding the 2006-legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which had predicted a massive victory by the Fatah organization over Hamas.
At 20, Hamas seems a young, viable, and aspiring movement, with hundreds of thousands of mostly young Palestinians indoctrinated in the moderate political ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.
This moderation, needless to say, will ensures Hamas’s continuity, growth and prosperity.
Hamas is not and will not be an al-Qaida-like organization, it will not wage Jihad on the whole world and will not classify the world into two camps- those who are with us, and those who are against us, as the al-Qaida organization.
Moreover, Hamas will not judge people’s religions and ideologies, and will continue to seek friendship on the basis of mutual respect and mutual interests. Indeed, despite erratic and stupid utterances by some ignoramuses who are members of Hamas, Hamas doesn’t actually consider Jews as enemies. In fact, Jews who support justice and true peace and who stand against oppression and occupation are Hamas’ partners for a better future for both Jews and Muslims in this tormented land.
More to the point, Hamas will continue to make a clear distinction between hostile states and citizens of these states and will never seek to target the urban centers of countries whose governments are hostile to the Palestinian cause, such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
And Hamas will continue to confine its legitimate struggle and resistance against the Israeli occupation to the Palestinian-Israeli theatre. This has always been Hamas’s policy, and it will continue to be.
At 20, Hamas has been through it all, from creation to destruction. The movement endured every conceivable act of savagery and criminality on the hands of the Nazi-like Israeli regime.
The leaders of the movement, and in many cases their families as well, were deported, imprisoned, assassinated and massacred. Today, as many as 4000 Hamas leaders and activists languish in Israeli concentration camps, many of them without charge or trial. Even Hamas’s democratically-elected MPs and cabinet ministers have been summarily abducted from their homes and offices for no reason other than “the Hamas mantra,” a mantra whose invocations justify every Israeli savagery, brutality and atrocity.
Indeed, the vindictiveness with which Israel treats these innocent people has a few parallels in the history of mankind. The recent bloody repression by crack Israeli army units of the Kitziot prison inmates in the heart of the Negev desert is a clarion testimony, if one were needed, to the blatant barbarianism of the occupation.
Twenty years are not a long period in the history of nations and their struggle for freedom and independence. However, looking back at what Hamas has achieved, one can safely claim that Hamas has been a valuable asset for the enduring Palestinian struggle.
To begin with, from the very inception, Hamas offered an authentic alternative to the corrupt of the PLO which par excellance encapsulated and continues to encapsulate the meaning of corruption, despotism, dictatorship, nepotism, favoritism and even treason.
It is true, Hamas has not succeeded in liberating Palestine from the colonialist Israeli occupation.
However, Hamas has succeeded in reinstituting and prominently featuring the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees as the most paramount cause that can be neither compromised nor ignored nor circumvented.
The same can be said about other Palestinian national constants and red lines which the often happy-go-lucky Fatah negotiators viewed as “unsacred” and even “expendable.”
Actually, thanks to the political culture that Hamas helped foster and consolidate among Palestinians, there is no dignified Palestinian politician, even from Fatah, who would publicly express a readiness to give in on such red- lines like East Jerusalem, the refugees and the totality of any prospective Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories.
It is actually because of its consistent refusal to succumb to Israeli hegemony and bullying that Israel and her guardian ally, the United States, and their poodles, and puppets and allies have been boycotting and blockading Hamas in the hope that another Palestinian entity, e.g. Fatah, would do Israel’s and the West’s bidding by finally surrendering to Israeli colonialism, probably through a “peace settlement” that has all the marks of a capitulation .
Non the less, Hamas not only has assets, has liabilities as well. Following the death of Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yasin, who was brutally assassinated by Israel in 2004, a new generation of Hamas leaders didn’t really understand the timeless golden adage that “it is not enough to be right, one has to be wise, as well.”
Yasin and his lieutenants understood and translated this golden maxim into tangible political wisdom that helped Hamas overcome or at least circumvent the treacherous minefields of the Oslo years.
It is perfectly true that most of the blame for the mid-June events in Gaza falls on Fatah, not on Hamas. After all, it was clear to all and sundry that Fatah leaders, especially in the Gaza Strip, accepted willingly to play the role of quislings on behalf of the US and Israel, thus forcing Hamas to take a preemptive action to prevent the occurrence of a longer and bloodier civil war that would have claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
We all remember how Israel reacted to the Sabra and Shatilla massacres in 1982, when then Prime Minister Menachem Begin remarked that “we have nothing to do with what happened …It is Arabs killing Arabs.”
Had Keith Dayton and Muhammed Dahlan and their cohorts succeeded in their conspiracy, God forbid, we would have had Ehud Olmert make the same argument, saying “we have nothing to do with what happened in Gaza ; it is Palestinians killing Palestinians.!” Non the less Hamas is not completely blameless.
In these difficult days, when our people in Gaza are facing a brutal and merciless blockade at the hands of the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust, and when most nations prefer to play blind, deaf and dumb and look the other way, we need to utilize every shred of wisdom at our disposal.
Yes, we must do the right thing, but it is also true that we must choose the right time for doing the right thing. Doing the right thing at the wrong time causes disaster and unnecessary bloodshed. It also undermines our ability to withstand the brutality of our enemy.
Hamas is undoubtedly right in refusing to recognize Israel ’s right to exist. Israel, a country whose very existence was made possible only thanks to the destruction and near obliteration of another people, the Palestinian people, has no moral legitimacy and has no moral right to exist.
Non the less, Israel does exist and has moral and international legitimacy, and Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian people should be able to relate to this existence in pragmatic terms, but without giving it any moral legitimacy, because then we would all embrace the Zionist narrative and become de facto Zionists.
Hence, it is advisable that Hamas should reformulate the Hudna concept, at least in order to show the world that the movement is not nihilistic, e.g. like al-Qaida.
Similarly, Hamas and other Palestinian organizations should be able and willing to stop the firing of al-Qassam projectiles onto Israeli territory if and when Israel shows a genuine willingness to lift the criminal blockade and terminate its aggression against the people of Gaza .
Yes, resistance to a sinister and wicked military occupation is a legitimate and secret right that no one can deny.
However, how to exercise this right in a way that would limit one’s losses is always a matter of discretion and reasoning.
In short, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups should start thinking with their brains, not with their hearts.

Who killed Yasser Arafat?

By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

Who killed Yasser Arafat? This is the question that has been boggling many people’s minds ever since the late Palestinian leader’s mysterious death in November, 2004.
Then, many people, politicians and ordinary citizens alike, even Arafat’s own physician, Dr. Ashraf al-Kurdi, seemed convinced that Arafat didn’t die a natural death and that he was actually killed as a result of a certain poisonous substance injected into his body probably by agents of the Israeli Mossad.
This writer spoke to Sakhr Habash, a close former aide to Yasser Arafat shortly after Arafat’s death. Habash, now ill as a result of a stroke, said that Arafat was killed by “ Israel ’s agents.”
I remember him telling me “they killed him, they killed him.” And when I asked him who he was alluding to, Habash said “he was referring to Arafat’s opponents within the Fatah organization.”
Habash gave no names, but anyone could conjure up some of the people he had in mind.
The PLO and the Palestinian Authority formed a commission of inquiry to look into the matter of Arafat’s death. However, the commission went into dormancy as soon as it was formed as all cues led to a dead-end or to inaccessible figures or sovereign foreign governments, e.g. France, that wouldn’t cooperate.
Nearly two weeks ago, Bassam Abu Sharif, another former aide to Yasser Arafat, held a surprise news conference in Ramallah, marking Arafat’s 78th birthday, in which he pointed out that Arafat did die of poison and that he possessed credible evidence proving his hypothesis.
Abu Sharif appealed to former French president Jacques Chirac to disclose the cause of Arafat’s death, or more specifically, to reveal the type of poison that killed the late Palestinian leader.
Meanwhile, it was reported recently that the Tunisian government decided to withdraw the Tunisian citizenship from Arafat’s widow Suha Tawil who reportedly moved to Malta where she is now living.
Neither the Tunisian government nor Arafat’s widow elaborated on the matter as some pan-Arab newspapers speculated that the Tunisian measure was prompted by a business dispute between the former Mrs. Arafat and her Tunisian partner.
However, there have been allegations and rumors that Suha Tawil possessed “hard information” about Yasser Arafat’s death and that she received a legal undertaking from the French authorities to keep “Arafat’s medical records confidential.”
Moreover, there have been consistent reports circulating in the occupied Palestinian territories alleging that Suha Tawil had reached a “deal” with the top Fatah leadership in the West Bank whereby she received millions of dollars in return for “keeping her mouth shut.”
And it seems that both sides to the deal have kept their part of the bargain. However, it is obvious that the alleged deal between Palestine’s First Lady, as some pliant Palestinian newspapers used to refer to Suha al Tawil, and the top Fatah leadership, has failed to bury the Arafat’s death affair in the grave of history once and for all.
This week, Ashraf al Kurdi revealed in an interview with the pan-Arab Al Jazeera TV that HIV antibodies were found in Arafat’s blood. When Kurdi uttered these words, the station immediately halted the interview.
Al Jazeera officials didn’t say why they stopped the interview with Dr. al Kurdi, a noted cardiologist and former Jordanian Minister of Health, but journalists working for the satellite station in the Occupied Palestinian territories intimated that the famous station probably was worried that Kurdi’s revelations might put it in a difficult situation vis-à-vis the Palestinian Authority, especially the Fatah group, who might harm al-Jazeera’s correspondents and workers in Palestine.
Al-Kurdi, undeterred by Al-Jazeera’s nervous reflexes, clarified the matter further during an interview with the Jordanian Ammon website this week. He said he believed that Arafat was deliberately infected with the AIDS virus in order to obscure the real cause of his death and also in order to tarnish his name, e.g. by creating the impression that Arafat may have been gay, a disgraceful trait in traditional Arab society.
Al-Kurdi, who was Arafat’s personal physician for 18 years, didn’t say how he was able to know that HIV viruses were found in Arafat’s blood and why he thought that the actual cause of his death was poison, not AIDS.
Al Kurdi left many questions unanswered when he pointed out that he was prevented from seeing the late Palestinian leader when his life was really deteriorating.
“They used to call me whenever he had a simple common cold, but when his life started to deteriorate , his wife, Suha, wouldn’t allow me to travel with him to the hospital in Paris; no doctor at the French military hospital contacted me for details about his health, and after he died, the current Palestinian Chairman didn’t allow Arafat’s grave to be reopened in order to determine the cause of his death.”
Interestingly, al Kurdi’s revelation that Arafat’s blood contained the HIV virus was previously unknown and certainly unconfirmed. This writer interviewed al-Kurdi on Arafat’s death nearly two years ago, and he made no reference to the infectious disease. Hence, one is prompted to ask what is the source of al-Kurdi’s revelations? And who has a vested interest in making these revelations at this time? And is there a certain “insider” trying to blackmail or expose the culprits for money or political concessions or both?
Moreover, why did Suha Arafat prevent Ashraf al-Kurdi from seeing her husband after he was transferred to the military hospital in Paris? Also, does her expulsion from Tunis have anything to do with some undeclared revelations about her possible complicity or culpability in Arafat’s death.?
These and other questions are awaiting satisfactory answers.

The Shalit tale is yet to end

By Khalid Amayreh


Last week, when Israel received from Hamas via the Egyptian mediators a list of the names of Palestinian political and resistance prisoners the movement is demanding their release in return for freeing an Israeli prisoner, many people voiced the hope that a prisoner swap was imminent.
However, these hopes were soon dashed when Israeli Prime Minister and other officials rejected the list, on the ground that it contained too many names, including key political leaders Israel is holding as bargaining chips to be used in any prospective negotiations with the Palestinians.
More to the point, Israel is worried that freeing that many Palestinian prisoners would boost the morale of the Palestinian society and strengthen the Palestinian national unity government as well as the Hamas movement.
But Israel is also facing a predicament. The Israeli soldier taken prisoner by Palestinian guerillas nearly ten months ago will not be released alive (or even dead) unless and until Israel releases Palestinian prisoners.
The Palestinian factions holding the soldier, Gilad Shalit who has become a household name thanks to Israeli hasbara efforts, are emulating Hizbullah’s tough bargaining tactics vis-à-vis Israel whereby no piece of information, not even a tangible proof that Shalit is alive, will be given for free. Hence, all Israeli efforts to know the whereabouts of Shalit have failed.
The Palestinian stand on the Shalit affair is actually vindicated by Israel’s apparent ill-will and condescending posturing with regard to the Shalit affair.
Initially, Israel sought to free Shalit by force by carrying out deadly incursions into Gaza population centers, causing the death of hundreds of innocent civilians, including many children, and utterly destroying much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.
When that failed to liberate Shalit, the Israeli army resorted to taking dozens of Palestinian officials, including cabinet ministers and lawmakers as hostages to be used as bargaining chips to bring about Shalit’s release.
And when this tactic also failed, the Israeli government resorted to the characteristic tactics of deception and equivocation by rounding up hundreds if not thousands of mostly innocent Palestinians citizens from the West Bank and dumping them in Israeli detention camps without charge or trial, with the clear aim of bullying the Palestinians to free Shalit.
At one point, Israel went as far as suggesting unfreezing hundreds of millions of dollars of Palestinian tax money withheld by the Jewish state since last year in exchange for releasing Shalit from Palestinian custody.
Those who are holding Shalit seem to have been unimpressed by all these tactics and are actually showing sophistication as well as a high degree of patience.
Indeed, at one point, Hamas openly criticized the Egyptian mediators for giving Israel the impression that the Palestinians would settle for less, in terms of the number and “the quality” of prisoners whose release is demanded.
It is not difficult to analyze the Israeli posture with regard to Shalit.
Israel, as a matter of principle, is committed to repatriate any Israeli soldier taken prisoner by the enemy, irrespective of the price to be paid.
This has always been part and parcel of the Israeli doctrine, which views Jewish lives as superior than non-Jewish lives and Jewish blood as redder than non-Jewish blood.
However, the price Israel is demanded to pay this time seems to be too high, at least from the point of view of the Shin Beth, Israel’s main domestic security agency. Hence the dilemma.
The Shin Beth believes that releasing 1300-1400 Palestinians, many of them veteran leaders of the Palestinian national movement, would, using the words of Uri Avnery, release an outburst of joy all over the occupied Palestinian territories, as there is hardly a Palestinian family that doesn’t have a relative in Israeli jails.
Moreover, there is always the argument that releasing “terrorists” would encourage Palestinians to carry out more “kidnappings” of Israelis to use them as hostages and bargaining chips to force Israel to free Palestinian prisoners.
Well, this is a spurious argument. In the first place the vast bulk of Palestinians released from Israeli jails since the Olso Agreement have been leading a quiet life and are busy building their lives and raising their children.
More to the point, it is clear that most of the former prisoners are politically moderate and advocate a dignified and just compromise between Israel and the Palestinian people pursuant UN resolutions and the land-for-peace formula. In fact, many symbols of the Palestinian leadership happen to be former prisoners released either before or after the conclusion of the Oslo Agreement.
Second, it is amply clear that it is Israel that forces the Palestinians to resort to desperate tactics, such as kidnapping soldiers, to force Israel to do what it should have done a long time ago, namely releasing Palestinian political prisoners, especially those who have spent many years in prison.
But the most mendacious and often-cited mantra against freeing Palestinian prisoners is the manifestly racist argument that Palestinians are “terrorists” not prisoners of war and that they have “Jewish blood” on their hands, as if the hands of tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers, officers and even politicians didn’t have tons of blood (Palestinian blood) on their hands.
Well, It is obvious that Israelis in general don’t like to discuss this matter since doing so would expose their racism and moral duplicity.
Needless to say, these condescending attitudes emanate from the overall Israeli perception of Palestinians as lesser human beings with lesser rights and whose lives are expendable, or at least incomparable to the paramount Jewish lives.
Israel needs to discard this arrogant attitude toward its neighbors and victims. Otherwise, the possibility of true peace in this region will never materialize.

What is a Jewish state?

From Khalid Amayreh in Occupied West Jerusalem

Seeking to perpetuate institutionalized racism and systematic discrimination against its non-Jewish citizens, the apartheid Israeli state has been incessantly trying to blackmail the weak and vulnerable Palestinian Authority (PA) into recognizing the Zionist state as “an exclusively Jewish state.” Some Israeli officials have used terms such as “a state of the Jews, for the Jews, and by the Jews.” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been quoted as saying that Israel wouldn’t recognize a prospective Palestinian state on the West Bank unless the PA recognized Israel as “a state of the Jews.” Israeli leaders are reluctant to tell the world what they exactly mean by “a state of the Jews,” ostensibly to save themselves the embarrassment of the implied racism inherent in the concept. However, the implications in such a recognition are abundantly clear for those who have even rudimentary knowledge of the Israeli mentality. To make a long story short, “Jewish state” means that Israel has an inherent right to discriminate against its non-Jewish citizens, especially the sizeable Palestinian minority, and, if need be, expel them from the country in order to preserve the “Jewishness” of Israel. In other words, Israel simply wants to obtain from the Palestinian leadership a recognition that it has a legal and moral right to carry out ethnic cleansing of its Christian and Muslim citizens on the ground that Israel is and must always remain a Jewish state. Of course, Israel is deliberately evasive and vague about its manifestly fascistic designs regarding its non-Jewish citizens. Israeli leaders and apologists claim ad nauseam that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. But this is a defensive reflex at best and is as mendacious as claiming that apartheid is compatible with democracy. The truth, however, is that Israel can’t be Talmudic and democratic at the same time. Hence “Jewish” and “democratic” are an eternal oxymoron that should never be used in the presence of an honest audience. The reason for that is amply clear. Ask any Jew in Israel or abroad which comes first “Jewish” or “democratic” and he or she wouldn’t to tell you that “Jewish” always overrides “democratic.” Which really shows that “democratic” is no more than a cosmetic façade that is meant to blur or conceal the brutal ugliness of the fascist nature of the “Jewish state.” Another important, even paramount, aspect of this issue is the Israeli insistence on obtaining recognition as Jewish state in order to permanently bar millions of Palestinian refugees deported from their homeland from time immemorial from repatriation. In other words, Israel wants to legalize and legitimize ethnic cleansing by getting the victims, or at least their supposed representatives, to bless the greatest act of theft in the history of mankind. Thus, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would be tantamount to a double national suicide of immense catastrophic proportions for the Palestinian people. First, it implies that Israel has the right to expel all or most of its Arab citizens or at least check their demographic growth by all means necessary to maintain Israel as a Jewish state. And, second, it implies that Israel has the right to prevent Palestinian refugees uprooted from their ancestral homeland from returning to their homes and villages in what is now Israel. In other words, Israel wants to make sure that ethnic cleansing will win at last. In light, one is prompted to ask: Can there be a greater national suicide for the Palestinian people? In addition, there are a number of other practical implications which a recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would entail. These include the following: 1- That only “Jews” can be considered complete citizens of Israel, and that if an incomplete citizen, e.g. a non-Jew, wanted to be “complete” he or she would have to convert to Judaism. This is very much like the situation many Jews in mediaeval Europe faced, forcing them to convert to Christianity in order to enjoy equality and find acceptance in their contemporary societies. 2- That the Israeli citizenship per se is ultimately inconsequential and doesn’t guarantee holders all rights and privileges, since Israel is defined as “state of the Jews.” Hence, in order to enjoy full and complete and permanent citizenship, one has to be Jewish. 3- That whenever there is the slightest disharmony between the Jewish and democratic aspects of Israel, the Jewish aspect will override and take priority over the democratic aspect. 4- That Jews all over the world, including potential converts to Judaism, are citizens of Israel and may well be allowed the right to vote in national elections, especially if non-Jewish citizens, gain political influence in Israeli politics. More to the point, recognizing Israel as a Jewish state also implies a recognition of the moral legitimacy of Israel’s criminal history, particularly the genocidal ethnic cleansing of the bulk of the indigenous Palestinian people from their ancestral homeland. In other words, a recognition as such by the PA would also imply that the Palestinians would effectively though compulsively embrace and accept the Zionist narrative in its entirety. This would mean that the victims of Zionist supremacy and racism would have to transform themselves into a sort of Arab Zionists, very much like Christian Zionists. It is for these reasons that no dignified Palestinian under the sun will be able to recognize Israel as a Jewish state since such a recognition would be incompatible with basic morality and fundamental human decency. Indeed, even if such a recognition were to be arrogated through blackmail and coercion, it would be utterly rejected by the vast bulk of Palestinians, and treated like a marriage under duress, which is no less than an act of rape.

WE WILL NOT GO DOWN

WE WILL NOT GO DOWN
Song for Gaza
(Composed by Michael Heart)
Copyright 2009


A blinding flash of white light
Lit up the sky over Gaza tonight
People running for cover
Not knowing whether they're dead or alive

They came with their tanks and their planes
With ravaging fiery flames
And nothing remains
Just a voice rising up in the smoky haze

We will not go down
In the night, without a fight
You can burn up our mosques and our homes and our schools
But our spirit will never die
We will not go down
In Gaza tonight

Women and children alike
Murdered and massacred night after night
While the so-called leaders of countries afar
Debated on who's wrong or right

But their powerless words were in vain
And the bombs fell down like acid rain
But through the tears and the blood and the pain
You can still hear that voice through the smoky haze

We will not go down
In the night, without a fight
You can burn up our mosques and our homes and our schools
But our spirit will never die
We will not go down
In Gaza tonight

Mumbai suspect said to be police officer

Arrest stirs up tension in Indian Kashmir
Aijaz Hussain ASSOCIATED PRESSSunday, December 7, 2008
washington_ti859:http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/dec/07/mumbai-suspect-said-to-be-undercover-officer/associated press
A man identified as Mukhtar Ahmed appears at a court in Calcutta, India, accused of illegally buying mobile-phone cards used by gunmen in the Mumbai attacks. But police in Indian Kashmir say Mr. Ahmed is one of their undercover officers.

SRINAGAR, India One of the two Indian men arrested for illegally buying mobile-phone cards used by the gunmen in the Mumbai attacks was a counterinsurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission, security officials said Saturday, demanding his release.
The arrests, announced in the eastern city of Calcutta, were the first since the bloody siege ended. But what was touted as a rare success for India's beleaguered law enforcement agencies quickly turned sour as police in two Indian regions squared off against each another.
Senior police officers in Indian Kashmir, which has been at the heart of tensions between India and Pakistan, demanded the release of the officer, Mukhtar Ahmed, saying he was one of their own and had been involved in infiltrating Kashmiri militant groups.
Indian authorities said they believe that the banned Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has links to Kashmir, trained the gunmen and plotted the attacks that left 171 people dead after a three-day rampage through Mumbai that began Nov. 26.
The implications of Mr. Ahmed's involvement - that Indian agents may have been in touch with the militants and perhaps supplied the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards used in the attacks - added to the growing list of questions over India's ill-trained security forces, which have been widely criticized for failing to thwart the attacks.
Earlier Saturday, Calcutta police announced the arrests of Mr. Ahmed and Tauseef Rahman, who is said to have bought SIM cards by using fake documents, including identification cards of dead people. The cards allow users to switch their cellular service to phones other than their own.
Mr. Rahman, of West Bengal state, later sold them to Mr. Ahmed, said Rajeev Kumar, a senior Calcutta police officer.
Both men were arrested Friday and charged with fraud and criminal conspiracy, Mr. Kumar said, adding that police were still investigating how the 10 gunmen obtained the SIM cards.
But the announcement had police in Srinagar, the main city in Indian-controlled Kashmir, fuming.
We have told Calcutta police that Mr. Ahmed is "our man and it's now up to them how to facilitate his release," said one senior officer speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information. Other police officials in Kashmir supported his account.
The officer said Mr. Ahmed was a special police officer (SPO), part of a semiofficial counterinsurgency network whose members are usually drawn from former militants. The SPO is run on special funding from the federal Ministry of Home Affairs.
"Sometimes we use our men engaged in counterinsurgency ops to provide SIM cards to the [militant] outfits so that we track their plans down," the officer said.
Police said Mr. Ahmed was recruited to the force after his brother was killed five years ago, reportedly by Lashkar-e-Taiba militants for being a police informer.
About a dozen Islamic militant groups have been fighting in Kashmir since 1989, seeking independence from mainly Hindu India or a union with Muslim-majority Pakistan.
India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over the Himalayan region, which is divided between them and claimed by both in its entirety.
Calcutta police denied the claims from Srinagar. "This is not true," Mr. Kumar said.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/dec/07/mumbai-suspect-said-to-be-undercover-officer/

Nellie: India's forgotten massacre

HARSH MANDER
A weak and partisan State leaves each of its citizens weak and vulnerable, as the Mumbai attacks and the gruesome Nellie massacres demonstrate…
And so the stories flowed, like a deluge of muddied waters of grief — long unaddressed and denied — gushing from a breached dam.

((The burden of memories: From left, Noon Nahar Begum, Alekjaan Biwi and Hazara Khatun.
A lifetime is much too short to forget. ))

It was November 26, 2008, the day that was to become etched in India's history for the audacious and traumatic terrorist commando attack on the country's commercial capital Mumbai. I happened to be on that day at a location as distant as possible from Mumbai — psychologically, politically and socially — at Nellie in Assam, the site of one of free India's most brutal forgotten massacres in 1983. I had been invited by the survivors to sit with them as they recalled and commemorated the events that had unfolded in this distant impoverished corner of the country 25 years earlier.Journey into the past
We gathered in the soft sunshine of early winter in an open courtyard. A crowd quickly gathered: the older men with checked lungis and beards could easily be distinguished as people of East Bengali Muslim origin. The women and younger men dressed like anyone from an Assamese village. There were the initial courtesies of traditional welcome, as they offered us customary white Assamese scarves with exquisite red embroidery.
Senior officials of the State government who accompanied me had gently dissuaded me from the visit, questioning the wisdom of re-opening wounds of painful events of such a distant past. People have moved on long ago, they assured me. What purpose then would our visit serve? It would only revive memories that have long been buried. The same advice came from many non-official friends who worked in development organisations in the State. They added that the visit would stir issues that were too bitterly contested in the region. But the survivors persisted in their resolve that they wanted to be heard. It was impossible for me to refuse them.Enormous suffering
On February 18, 1983, in the genocidal massacre organised in Nellie, just 40 km from Guwahati , 2,191 Muslim settlers originally from Bangladesh were slaughtered, leaving 370 children orphaned and their homes in 16 villages destroyed. As the survivors spoke one by one before our gathering a quarter century later, all of us who heard them — including officials, academics, social workers — were completely stunned, and shamed, by the enormity and immediacy of their suffering today, which retained an urgency as though they had only very recently suffered the unspeakable cruelties that they gave words to, not 25 years earlier. The bodies of many were twisted and deformed by inadequately treated injuries from the assaults by machetes and daggers; others pulled back their clothes to expose frightening scars of the attacks of a generation earlier.
Hazara Khatun, with scars of a dagger attack on her face that she survived in 1983, sat on the ground before us and pointed to her empty lap. "I was cradling my child here", she said in a low voice. "They chopped him into two, down the middle". Another widow Alekjaan Biwi, was far less calm. Her body was twisted, and we could all see that she had lost her psychological equilibrium. Eleven members of her family were slaughtered in the massacre, and she acted out for us how the mob had attacked them, how she had cowered and hidden herself, how she was discovered and wounded, and how she survived even though scarred and deformed for life. "I have no one in the world," she concluded quietly.Deluge of grief
In his early thirties, Mohammed Monoruddin began to cry inconsolably as soon as he sat before us. "My brothers, sisters were all killed, hacked into pieces," he recalled. "I was seven years old then. I saw my parents slaughtered in front of me. I saw another woman being killed and her child snatched from her hands and thrown in fire. I wept in terror all day. The CRPF came in the evening and rescued me. Later we came to know that our house was torched. Nothing was left. All our belongings and stores of rice were gone in the fire. My elder brother, who was in Nagaon, brought me up. But I feel so lonely."
Many others spoke of their loneliness. Noon Nahar Begum was 10 years old, and when the killings started, she tried to run away but was attacked and badly wounded. She was hospitalised for two months, and her mother and four siblings were murdered. "They were butchered here in the place where we are standing today," she said, adding: "I have found no peace of mind for the last 25 years. I need justice for my peace. Justice is important because it was such a terrible crime. I feel lonely and miss my family…" Babool Ahmad, a tailor, was two years old when he lost his parents. He was brought up by his grandparents, whereas his sisters were raised in an SOS village.
And so the stories flowed, like a deluge of muddied waters of grief — long unaddressed and denied — gushing from a breached dam. The forgotten massacre in Nellie in 1983 established a bloody trail of open State complicity in repeated traumatic bouts of ethnic cleansing and massacres both in Assam and in India. It was followed by similar State-enabled carnages, in Delhi in 1984, Bhagalpur in 1989, Mumbai in 1993 and climaxed in Gujarat in 2002.Series of incidents
Assam in turn has seen a series of violent ethnic clashes between various oppressed communities, each bitterly and ferociously ranged against other ethnic groups which may be as dispossessed, if not more so. The accord brokered by government with militant Bodos in 1993 assured them autonomous control over regions where their population was in a majority. The government therefore itself laid the foundations for ethnic cleansing. Bengali Muslims were driven out of their settlements by murderous attacks and the torching of their homes in 1993, and this scenario was repeated for Santhal and Munda tribals (called Adivasis) — many of whom are descendants of tea garden labour imported by the British two centuries ago — in 1996. Thousands of them continue to languish today in camps, some for 15 years, as they are still terrified to return home. Assam remains a tinder box of ethnic hatred, with recent attacks on Bihari migrant labour, Jharkhand agitators in Guwahati, bomb explosions and recent clashes between Bodos and Bengali Muslims this year, which left many dead and thousands in camps seething with hate.
The worth of lives
The government gave the survivors of Nellie compensation for each death of as little as 5,000 rupees, contrasted for instance with Rs. 7 lakhs that have been paid to survivors of the Sikh carnage of a year later in 1984. Six hundred and eighty eight criminal cases were filed in connection with Nellie organised massacre and of these 310 cases were charge-sheeted. The remaining 378 cases were closed due to the police claim of "lack of evidence". But all the 310 charge-sheeted cases were dropped by the AGP government as a part of Assam Accord; therefore not a single person has even had to face trial for the gruesome massacre. Some lives are clearly deemed by the State of being of little worth compared to others.
The Mumbai terrorist attack of 2008 has witnessed an upsurge of understandable public anger, because a partisan and weak State leaves each of us unsafe. But States have long failed abjectly and shamefully to protect ordinary citizens and uphold justice. The lives lost in Mumbai's Taj Hotel are precious. But the lives extinguished in distant hamlets of Nellie — and indeed the streets of Delhi, Bhagalpur, Gujarat and Malegoan — are no less valuable. A day must come when our rage and our compassion responds equally to each of these tragedies. We can be safe only by standing — and caring — together.

web page: http://www.sccommissioners.org.