Month: March 2024

SRINAGAR, India — Thousands of people in the remote region of Ladakh have been protesting for over two weeks in freezing temperatures, demanding constitutional provisions from the Indian government to protect their territory’s fragile ecology and to have autonomy over land and agriculture decisions. 

Situated between India, Pakistan and China, Ladakh has faced territorial disputes and suffered the effects of climate change. Shifting weather patterns in the sparsely populated villages altered people’s lives through floods, landslides and droughts. 

Top climate activist Sonam Wangchuk is taking part in the demonstrations in the town of Leh. He has been on a fast since the protests started on March 6, in the open in subzero temperatures and surviving only on salt and water. 

Wangchuk, also an engineer working on solutions for sustainability at his Himalayan Institute of Alternative Ladakh, has called his protest a “climate fast.” 

“We’re already facing climate disaster and these glaciers and mountains will be destroyed if there is not a check on unbridled industrial development and military maneuvers” in the region, Wangchuk told The Associated Press on Sunday. 

Ladakh’s thousands of glaciers, which helped dub the rugged region one of the “water towers of the world,” are receding at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply of millions of people. The melting has been exacerbated by an increase in local pollution that has worsened because of the region’s militarization, further intensified by the deadly military standoff between India and China since 2020. 

He also said Ladakh critically needs ecological protection because “it’s not just a local disaster in [the] making but an international one as these mountains are part of [the] Greater Himalayas intricately linked to over 2 billion people and multiple countries.” 

Wangchuk said the Ladakh nomads were also losing prime pastureland to huge Indian industrial plans and Chinese encroachment. The region’s shepherds complain that Chinese soldiers have captured multiple pasturelands and restricted them from grazing their herds. 

Locals and nomadic tribes will march to the border with China on April 7 to highlight what they say has been the loss of land to Chinese encroachment and corporate interests, Wangchuk said. Local shepherds allege that China has taken over some of their grazing land and earlier this year some shepherds clashed with a Chinese army patrolling unit. 

In August 2019, Ladakh was split from Indian-controlled Kashmir after New Delhi stripped the disputed region of its statehood and semiautonomy. 

The federal interior ministry, Ladakh lieutenant governor’s office and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party did not immediately respond to requests for comment, Reuters reported. 

Talks on March 4 between the federal interior ministry and regional leaders about the local demands failed. 

While restive Kashmir has largely been silenced through a crackdown on any form of dissent and slew of new laws, demands for political rights in Ladakh have intensified with demands of statehood with a local legislature to frame its own laws on land and agriculture. The region’s representatives have held several rounds of talks with Indian officials, including with the powerful Home Minister Amit Shah earlier this month, without any results. 

“This government likes to call India the ‘Mother of Democracy,’ ” Wangchuk recently posted on X, formerly Twitter. “But if India denies democratic rights to people of Ladakh & continues to keep it under bureaucrats controlled from New Delhi then it could only be called a Stepmother of Democracy as far as Ladakh is concerned.” 

Some information for this report came from Reuters. 
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YEREVAN — Three armed men attempted to storm a police station in the Armenian capital of Yerevan on Sunday detonating hand grenades that injured two of the attackers. 

The injured assailants were hospitalized with shrapnel wounds from the blast in Yerevan’s northern Nor-Nork district. A third man was detained by police after a brief standoff, Narek Sargsyan, spokesperson for Armenia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, told journalists. There were no other reported injuries. 

The men had hoped to free members of the Combat Brotherhood organization, who were being held at the station after being detained earlier Sunday, Armenian media outlets reported. 

The group opposes the planned transfer of several villages in Armenia’s Tavush region to neighboring Azerbaijan. 

Last year, Azerbaijan waged a lightning military campaign to reclaim the Karabakh region, ending three decades of ethnic Armenian separatist rule there. 

In December, the two sides agreed to begin negotiations on a peace treaty. However, many residents of Armenia’s border regions have resisted the demarcation effort, seeing it as Azerbaijan’s encroachment on the areas they consider their own. 

Speaking to residents of the border village of Voskepar in the Tavush region Tuesday, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan warned that Armenia’s refusal to delineate the border could trigger a new confrontation. 

“It would mean that a war could erupt by the end of the week,” Pashinyan said. He said the border demarcation should be based on mutual recognition of territorial integrity of Armenia and Azerbaijan based on Soviet maps from 1991, when both were part of the Soviet Union. 
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Islamabad — The leader of Afghanistan’s fundamentalist Taliban government has said it is determined to enforce the Islamic criminal justice system, including the public stoning of women for adultery.

“Our mission is to enforce sharia and Allah’s Hudud [law],” said Hibatullah Akhundzada in an audio clip Taliban officials said was from his latest speech. They did not say where the reclusive leader spoke, but Akhundzada lives in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and rarely leaves what is known as the Taliban’s historical birthplace and political headquarters.

He primarily addressed Western critics of the Taliban government, which Akhundzada is effectively controlling from Kandahar, through edicts based on his strict interpretation of Islam.

“You may call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone or flog them for committing adultery because they conflict with your democratic principles,” said the Taliban chief.

“Just as you claim to be striving for the freedom of entire humanity, so do I. I represent Allah, and you represent Satan,” Akhundzada said.

He criticized Western human rights values and women’s freedoms, saying Taliban religious scholars would persistently resist the West and its form of democracy in Afghanistan. “Thanks to these scholars, such a democracy was evicted from this land,” the Taliban leader said.

The Taliban returned to power in August 2021, when the then-internationally backed government collapsed, and U.S.-led Western nations withdrew all their troops after nearly 20 years of involvement in the Afghan war.

Taliban authorities have since publicly flogged hundreds of Afghans, including women, for theft, robbery, and committing “moral crimes” in sports stadiums in the presence of thousands of onlookers. At least four men have also been publicly executed after having been convicted of murder by Taliban courts.

Akhundzada has suspended girls’ education in Afghanistan beyond the sixth grade and prohibited many women from public and private workplaces, including the United Nations and other aid organizations.

Women are not allowed to undertake long road and air trips unless accompanied by a male relative, and cannot visit public places, such as parks, gyms, and bathhouses.

The Taliban leader defends his governance, saying it is aligned with Afghan culture and Islam.

The new academic year started in Afghanistan last week, but girls above 12 were excluded for the third consecutive year.

The United Nations and the world at large have been urging the Taliban to reverse all sanctions on women and halt corporal punishments and public executions of convicts.

“It is heartbreaking to mark another year where school doors open without the participation of Afghan girls above the age of 12,” Rina Amiri, the U.S. special envoy for Afghan women and human rights, said Saturday on X, formerly known as Twitter.

She reiterated the U.S. call for the Taliban to reverse their “destructive decrees,” saying they are destroying the potential of more than 50% of Afghanistan’s population.

“The Taliban’s relentless, discriminatory edicts against women & girls are keeping Afghanistan poor & aid-dependent, & forcing Afghan families to leave. There is no substitute for all Afghans participating in the formal education system, which has existed for over 100 years,” Amiri wrote.

The international community has not granted formal recognition to the de facto Afghan authorities, citing human rights concerns, especially the harsh treatment of women.
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Kolkata, India — Rosy, who goes by her nickname, was 26 when she was married in Gudoo, a locality within one of the 50 hamlets or small villages bordering Dal Lake in the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir’s Srinagar city.

Deemed the “jewel” of Kashmir by the state government, the urban freshwater lake in the Himalayan region attracts tens of thousands of tourists every year from around the globe. It has been for decades the source of water, livelihood and food for the 50,000 locals who reside nearby.

But for those living in the Dal Lake hamlets, clean water is a luxury, waterborne diseases are common and brides for men of marriageable age are elusive.

In 2017, a Right to Information request — an Indian constitutional right that allows citizens to request information under the control of a public authority — found that about 11 million gallons (41.6 million liters) of sewage was released into the lake from the city every day.

Rosy, now 29, told VOA that she “regrets” moving to the Dal Lake area.

“I keep going back to my parents’ house in a different area of Srinagar because there I can use as much water as I like for washing clothes and cooking. You won’t believe it — I can only take a bath once a week. When I need to wash clothes, I have to pick a day and visit my acquaintances in a separate area to use their water. It is torturous living here,” she said.

Farooque Ahmad, 55, who lives near Dal Lake, told VOA that in the past few months, three girls have rejected his son’s marriage proposal after initially accepting it.

“Whenever a girl’s family finds out that we have no water here, they reject the marriage proposal immediately. In fact, even matchmakers have stopped bringing any matches for boys here,” he said.

“Many feel that their daughters, if married here, will have to carry gallons of water to their houses every day. Who would want their child to marry in an area like this, especially in an age where most people have every facility reaching their doorstep in the blink of an eye?”

Water resources and environmental experts say that the water crisis in Kashmir’s Dal Lake region is largely caused by human activity.

Kashmir-based Shakil A. Romshoo, vice chancellor at Islamic University of Science and Technology, told VOA that contrary to popular misconceptions, Kashmir’s water supply has not been affected by climate change.

“Kashmir is sitting atop the water tower of Asia [the Himalayan region]. With almost 18,000 glaciers nourishing the water supply in the state, the problem is not the quantity of water but the quality of it.

“Around 80% of Srinagar gets its water supply from the Dal Lake. Yet, untreated wastewater from several sources — households, hotels on the periphery of the lake and toilets in the houseboats on the lake — goes directly into the lake untreated. This makes the water undrinkable due to the high chloroform count,” said Romshoo, a researcher specializing in glaciology and climate change.

A Jammu and Kashmir High Court-appointed committee of experts (CoE), formed two years ago, stated in its latest report that about 70% of the sewage generated in Srinagar city finds its way into Dal Lake.

The three sewage treatment plants — which are supposed to treat the wastewater making it safe for disposal before it goes into the lake — were called “heavily over-utilized,” “under-maintained” and “far below” the standards set by the Pollution Control Board of India.

Bashir Ahmad Bhat, vice chairman of the state’s Lake Conservation and Management Authority (LCMA), which is the sole authority responsible for “managing and conserving” Dal Lake, among other water bodies in Kashmir, said that the claims made by the CoE are “factually incorrect.”

“No sewage from catchments goes directly into the Dal. … There are systems in place to treat the remaining waste coming in from houseboats, of which 90% have already been connected to the system. The sewage from hamlets is taken up under the prime minister’s development package.

“All the five steps of treating 36 million liters [of wastewater] per day are done under the vigilance of an online monitoring system, all of which conform to the norms of the Pollution Control Committees,” he told VOA.

Climate activist and columnist Raja Muzaffar Bhat said that the water pollution problem in Kashmir is not limited to Dal Lake.

“The entirety of the Srinagar city’s liquid waste goes untreated into the Dal Lake, Jhelum and Doodh Ganga rivers, and other water bodies through drainage systems,” he told VOA.

Mushtaq Ahmad, president of the Gudoo locality where Rosy lives, said that more than 13 areas in Srinagar are affected by the water scarcity issue.

“Many of us have been paying out of our pockets to build trenches in our yards because of the lack of a drainage system in the area. But since not every household can afford it … the sewage waste flows directly into the Dal Lake. Sewage from houseboats also flows directly into the lake, damaging it beyond repair,” he told VOA.

“Our elders used to drink water directly from the Dal Lake. Now we can’t even think of washing our hands with this contaminated water — but sometimes due to our helplessness, we are forced to.”

Najmus Saqib contributed to this report from Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. 
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