PAK agencies masterminded massacre — Chittisinghpora villagers

But no fingers are being pointed at these agencies following the counsel of some of India’s leading Sikhs, the report said, adding: “They (Sikh leaders) believe that if their people were to stay in the Kashmir Valley, good relations had to be maintained with the surrounding Muslim majority which (while exhausted by the endless violence) was largely sympathetic to the militants.”

“One month before the massacre,” the elderly Sikh said, “there were militants who spent time in our village. They were from Pakistan. They made friends with us. And this is how we were thanked — with a barbaric act.”

The report said while such stop-overs were hardly uncommon, these guerrillas were exceptional in their casualness. “They had even strung their rifles on trees once and watched a game of cricket,” the villager said.

Now, most villagers feel that they were only scouting the village as a suitable target.

A few widows said they had recognised the voices of the men at their doors who led their husbands to their death. “The marauders seemed to know where people lived and had even called out some names,” the villagers told the New York Times correspondent.

The report said the Sikh leaders considered unwavering neutrality as clearly preferable to what New Delhi was proposing. The Government had proposed arming the villagers to form Village Defence Committees. The article said the villagers considered this neutrality as a matter of survival as there were fears of a second raid. People who gave their versions of the massacre didn’t want to be named until the conversation changed to the matter of compensation.

Donors, public and private, had given US$ 20,000 to each family which lost men in the massacre but villagers said everyone had suffered and so every family should be compensated.

They also mentioned that the killings would have never occurred if Clinton had not visited India, and therefore, Americans had a bigger responsibility towards mitigating their sufferings.