The hostages: seated left to right, Keith Mangan (UK), Dirk Hasert (Germany), Hans Christian Ostroe (Norway), Paul Wells (UK) and Donald Hutchings (USA), in a picture released by the Kashmiri militants.
The hostages: seated left to right, Keith Mangan (UK), Dirk Hasert (Germany), Hans Christian Ostroe (Norway), Paul Wells (UK) and Donald Hutchings (USA), in a picture released by the Kashmiri militants.

Held Hostage

The murky events of Kashmir’s 1995 hostage crisis are well-documented in a new book, but still defy closure.
The hostages: seated left to right, Keith Mangan (UK), Dirk Hasert (Germany), Hans Christian Ostroe (Norway), Paul Wells (UK) and Donald Hutchings (USA), in a picture released by the Kashmiri militants.
The hostages: seated left to right, Keith Mangan (UK), Dirk Hasert (Germany), Hans Christian Ostroe (Norway), Paul Wells (UK) and Donald Hutchings (USA), in a picture released by the Kashmiri militants.

 One of the satisfying things about being a reporter is the idea that once you have filed your story, you are free. No more wasted afternoons waiting for call-backs, no more re-writing intros, no more fretting over nuance and meaning. Push the send button, and it's done. Move on. 

That's the theory anyway. As it turns out, there are stories that defy closure.

One of those, for me, involves the events described in The Meadow: Kashmir, Where the Terror Began by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, which deals with the kidnapping of six Western tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir.

 A quick recap for those not burdened with my obsessions: The tourists – two Britons, two Americans, a Norwegian and a German – were taken hostage by a then-unknown Kashmiri militant group in July 1995. The kidnapping was claimed by a group called al-Faran, but that name turned out to be an alias adopted for this particular mission. Al-Faran, it turns out, was an offshoot of Harkat-ul-Ansar. The Islamist militant group was based in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, and had bases in Afghanistan, but its main focus and area of operation was the Kashmir valley, inside Indian-administered Kashmir. Some of those involved in the kidnapping in the name of al-Faran had also been involved in the kidnapping of two Western tourists a year earlier. But in that instance the Westerners were released, unharmed, within a matter of days.

In the Kashmir kidnapping most of the hostages were not so lucky. One American escaped and – it seems as improbable to me now as it did then – was personally rescued by the governor's security advisor, who just happened to be in the area in his helicopter. The Norwegian was brutally executed, trussed up like an animal and then beheaded. The other four are presumed dead. Their bodies were never discovered.

Aside from John Childs – the American engineer who escaped – the hostages were not particularly worldly people, nor were they well-connected. The other American, Don Hutchings, was well-travelled. He and his wife, Jane Schelly, lived for exotic trekking adventures. But the two Britons, Keith Mangan and Paul Wells, were working-class men who had never been abroad. Dirk Hasert, the German, came from a similarly modest background. Hans-Christian Ostro, the Norwegian who died such a horrific death, had turned wanderer and seeker after his share of personal troubles, including divorce.

Lack of urgency
I was a newly arrived correspondent for the Guardian in Delhi when the hostages were taken. It was my first big story, and for a time it was a huge story for British and American news outlets. I am mentioned in The Meadow – kindly – but I don't know the authors and I had nothing to do with the writing of this book.

 What we as reporters did not know then was that this hostage taking from the outset was a much more dangerous enterprise than earlier kidnappings in Kashmir, which had ended with the safe return of the captives. After years of violence in Kashmir, the kidnapping brought something new: adding the al-Qaida brand of extremism to a conflict that had revolved around self-determination and India-Pakistan rivalry.

<em>The Meadow, Kashmir: Where the Terror Began, By Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clarke, Penguin 2012</em>
The Meadow, Kashmir: Where the Terror Began, By Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clarke, Penguin 2012

Levy and Scott-Clark deserve a lot of credit for recognising the kidnapping, by now a   half-forgotten episode in Kashmir's long history of violence, as the start of that new chapter. 

In the coming years, the names of some of the same militants linked to the kidnapping would crop up in connection with a succession of other violent acts – from the hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet-liner on a flight from Kathmandu in 1999, to the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, to the co-ordinated suicide bombings of the London transport system in July 2005.

 Another thing reporters did not know for sure at the time, but strongly suspected, was the extent to which complacency and sheer cynicism guided the Indian authorities' response to the kidnapping. Put simply: the kidnapping of the Western backpackers was good PR for the Indian government. Delhi at that point had not been able to fully persuade Western governments to its view that the armed insurgency in Kashmir had been hijacked by the Pakistani intelligence services. But those connections grew clearer when the kidnappers demanded the release of Masood Azhar, a Pakistani militant who had been in contact with al-Qaida. What better way to keep the focus on Islamabad's sponsorship of Islamist militants than to have the hostage crisis drag on?

 That strange lack of urgency remains one of my most vivid memories of the whole hostage story, and the most troubling. I can remember a conversation with an intelligence source in Srinagar who summed up the Indian strategy in two words: Buy time. What was never clear to me then was whether the Indian authorities genuinely believed their strategy would wear down the kidnappers and lead to the hostages' safe release. Which leads to the alternative: did the various Indian agencies, the police, army, intelligence service, and politicians make a calculated decision to manipulate the hostage drama, risk the backpackers' safety, and ultimately destroy their lives and those of their families, in the interests of that bigger game? 

 That is where Levy and Scott-Clark jump right in, and to my mind, produce some first-rate reporting on the ambiguous nature of the Indian authorities' response to the kidnapping. The authors managed to get a number of the key players to talk. We learn how the authorities bundled the escaped hostage, John Childs, out of Kashmir and back to America, rejecting his offer to help lead security forces back to the spot where the other backpackers were held. We learn about the leaks which arrived just in time to blow up deals for the hostages' release. The authors also raise a question which should have occurred to reporters at the time: what were the travellers doing in the middle of such a dangerous conflict in the first place? I wish, though, that the authors had more detail on how much influence was exerted by Western governments to try to win the hostages' release. One of the last calls by the kidnappers to the outside world before executing the hostages was to the British embassy to demand a ransom payment, although the book doesn't get into that. 

Loading content, please wait...
Himal Southasian
www.himalmag.com