FEDERATION OF SIKH ORGANISATIONS, UK
MARCH AND RALLY OF FREEDOM AND REMEMBERANCE
In Trafalgar Square, London 2.30 pm to 4.30 pm Sunday 7th June 2009
A MILESTONE AND A TIME TO ADDRESS GENOCIDE
This week marks the 25th anniversary of the infamous Indian army attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar as well a 37 major Sikh shrines in Punjab. Thousands of innocent Sikhs were brutally killed while the Red Cross, human rights bodies and the media were banned from the region. The holy Akal Takht Sahib – the seat of Sikh temporal power – was reduced to rubble by tanks and artillery and the Sikh Reference Library containing thousands of artifacts and original manuscripts of the scriptures was deliberately looted and then burned down.
Those horrific events were followed by the genocide of the November 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms in Delhi and other Indian cities, after Indira Gandhi was assassinated, in which organised gangs butchered over 20,000 Sikhs whilst the police looked on. The ensuing years saw systematic abuse of human rights with the enactment of ‘black laws’, extra-judicial killings, disappearances and secret cremations, and the routine use of torture on a massive scale. In all, some 200,000 Sikhs were killed in the conflict from 1984 to 1995.
A quarter of a century later none of the guilty have been been brought before any domestic or international court. The reality is that the perpetrators have been given legal immunity by Indian authorities, with many of them continuing to hold high political office. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and others have condemned this impunity and it now falls to the international community to act.
After 25 years of deliberate inaction from India’s political and judicial establishment, Sikhs are calling for an international court to take up the challenge, similar to the UN established courts dealing with genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Darfur.
At the same time we honour the memory of those who have lost their lives under the brutal state terrorism of the Indian state. In their cherished name we pledge to secure justice and redress.
FREEDOM: INDEPENDENCE AND DIGNITY OF THE SIKH NATION
The Sikh Nation, a proud and distinctive people which made huge sacrifices in both World Wars for the freedoms and dignity of others is today living under occupation a hegemonic Indian state since the departure of the British in 1947. Having been denied its own freedom and suffered massive losses in the Partition process, the Sikhs were then denied recognition as a nation and even declared to be “Hindus “for the purposes of India’s constitution.
Systematically they were denied civil and political rights in their own homeland in Indian-controlled Punjab. The precious natural resources of the Punjab have been appropriated by an increasingly centralised unitary state which continues to be governed by ruling elite which has also denied the region crucial investment, leaving its economy in ruins. 75% of Punjab’s river waters have been taken by other Indian states for decades, in contravention of riparian law and without compensation, leaving experts to predict it will become a desert by 2010.
The Sikhs have, as a freedom loving people, tried to secure recognition and autonomy within India since 1947 but their numerous peaceful agitations were rejected out of hand; instead India resorted to state terrorism on a massive scale to suppress the legitimate demands of a defenceless people comprising just 2% of the population. In 1984 the level of state violence reached genocidal proportions, starting with the with the attack on the Golden Temple in June 1984 in a full scale deployment of the military to crush the Sikhs.
In 1986 the Sarbat Khalsa (national gathering of the Sikhs) resolved, in an historic decision responding to Indian aggression, to sever ties with India and establish a sovereign independent state of Khalistan to secure its territory, people and destiny. That peaceable and democratic exercise was met with further aggression as India refused to even recognise the need for a political settlement of any kind. Today that intransigence means no resolution of the conflict has been allowed to emerge.
The Sikhs of Punjab are committed to resolve the conflict in a manner which respects their right of self-determination, in accordance with international law. Their political leaders are however even now still being criminalised (19 were charged with sedition last month) simply for peacefully and democratically voicing that commitment.
“All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”
- Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
The march and rally in London on Sunday 7th June 2009 is intended to highlight the cause of Sikh independence which along with the resolution of India’s other conflicts, such as in Kashmir, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and Bodoland and elsewhere will bring justice and the rule of law to what has become the graveyard of freedom and theatre of state terror in South Asia.
FEDERATION OF SIKH ORGANISATIONS, UK