Sikhs Oppose Canadian Grant To Gill's Institute

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Vaheguru Jee Ka Khalsa, Vaheguru Jee Kee Fateh !

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Sikhs Oppose Canadian Grant to Gill's Institute

By SSNews

Jul 29, 2005, 09:07

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Vancouver: An Indian Institute run by a former Punjab Police Head, who led a brutal and controversial crackdown on Sikh Freedom Movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s is receiving Canadian foreign aid through Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

From the mid-1980s until 1995, Mr. Gill, who currently is president of the institute, led an Indian-government-sponsored campaign against Sikh Freedom Seekers which involved umpteen, widespread and blatant violations of Human Rights.

The World Sikh Organization, as well as human-rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, say the police used the harshest tactics imaginable -- including arbitrary arrests, routine extrajudicial killings and widespread torture. Thousands -- some estimates say tens of thousands -- of people were killed during the campaign to root out the Sikh Movement. Bodies of those killed by the police were disposed off without proper identification or a post-mortem.

The report also states that Mr. Gill personally introduced a system of bounties and rewards for police officers who killed Sikh militants, "a practice which, not surprisingly, has encouraged extrajudicial killings and disappearances."

In an 59-page report on the Punjab published in 2003, Amnesty International said that "human rights violations by police during the decade of the Sikh struggle were widespread . . . civilians were often arrested solely for being related to or living in the same village as members of armed freedom struggle groups.

In a report entitled Arms and Abuses in Punjab, Human Rights Watch says that "in their zeal to suppress the Sikh movement, Indian government forces, under the leadership of Punjab Director General of Police K.P.S. Gill, have continued to commit serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law."

"I'm outraged," said Sukh Preet Singh, a member of the executive committee of Dasmesh Gurdwara, a Surrey, B.C. , temple with 10,000 members.

"What they'd [Punjab state police] do is they'd arrest young Sikh men, militant or not militant, and after torturing and beating them they'd be killed and a story would be made up that this was a Sikh Militant who tried fighting back."

Mr. Singh added, "Here's a man who's responsible for this stuff and he's getting our taxpayers' money."

The Amnesty International report also states that "torture was widespread and used both as a substitute for investigation and as punishment."

Former federal cabinet minister Herb Dhaliwal is also opposed to this Grant. He remembers listening on Parliament Hill to a human-rights advocate from India talking about atrocities in Punjab province while KPS Gill was in charge of the police authority in the area. After the human-rights advocate returned to India, police picked him up. No one heard from him again.

Mr Dhaliwal further said "There is no doubt about it. When he was in charge of police enforcement in Punjab, there were unprecedented human-rights violations at that time . . . tremendous brutality, no rule of law, . . . killings. It's a very sad part of history, what happened in Punjab. I think people will be very unhappy, and some may even be outraged that Canadian money is going to [the] program . . ."

Mr. Gill was convicted of sexual harassment in 1998 for slapping the buttocks of a female civil servant while drunk at a cocktail party.

The conviction was upheld earlier this week in a decision of India's Supreme Court and was asked to pay a hefty fine. But in recent years, he has rebuilt his reputation as an expert on terrorism. As a consultant on terrorism, Mr. Gill has advocated brutality as a solution, which he openly practiced in the State of Punjab for a decade as a police chief.

CIDA should reconsider its support for the Institute of Conflict Management, Mr. Dhaliwal said.

The research project has been allotted $85,000, of which $60,000 has been disbursed, CIDA spokesman Clément Bélanger said.

Helena Guergis, the Conservative Party critic on international co-operation, said CIDA should undertake more thorough background checks before approving financial support for foreign institutions.

CIDA spokesman Mr. Bélanger said the agency dealt not with Mr. Gill, but with the institute's executive director, Dr. Ajai Sahni, and therefore did not see a need to "check into [Mr. Gill's] record."

A spokeswoman for CIDA minister Aileen Carroll said there are no plans to pull the institute's funding because of its connection with Mr. Gill.