Kashmiris Await Justice for Relatives Killed in Warfare Ami Vitale for The New York Times Parveena Ahangar, the chairwoman of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Jammu and Kashmir. BONIYAR, India - After decades of war, Kashmir is blooming again. Hotels are bursting, roads are being fixed and offices rebuilt. But with the guns silenced, India must soon decide whether justice will be as welcome as the tourists. Mass murderers walk the streets openly, having killed thousands of people who are buried in unmarked graves in scores of secret cemeteries. This beautiful village has one such graveyard. Nine years after Indian police officers and troops deposited hundreds of bullet-ridden corpses here, dirt mounds still rise above the shallow and unmarked plots as if the circumstances of the deaths left the earth above the bodies unsettled. Atta Mohamad Raja Khan, the 70-year-old farmer who dug the graves, said one plot contained the remains of a 2-year-old boy. Others held teenagers and dowagers. Mr. Khan's graveyard quickly filled, so he buried only a fraction of the tens of thousands killed over more than 20 years of dirty warfare. Many of the buried were militants, including foreign mercenaries whose deaths and quick burials are often accepted as the wages of war. But myriad bystanders were murdered in clumsy government plots. None of the killers has been arrested. Tensions still lie just below the surface. On Monday, a fire in a revered Sufi Muslim shrine in Srinagar, Kashmir's capital, sparked clashes between the police and rock-throwing Muslim protesters. Six people were hurt after the police fired tear gas. But so far the fire has not led to wider unrest. Jumma Khan, 45, was one of the bystanders massacred. A blacksmith's apprentice, he lived in a mud house on a mountainside in the Anantnag district with his wife and 11 children far from any road. At 2 a.m. on March 24, 2000, soldiers broke down his door and dragged Mr. Jumma Khan away. Just four days earlier, more than a dozen gunmen dressed in fatigues had systematically massacred 34 men and boys in a nearby district, and the military was under pressure to find the killers. Mr. Jumma Khan's oldest child, Abdul Rashid, said his father had been targeted because he was poor and had a beard, which made him look like a militant. "They told my mother, "Don't worry, he'll be back in a half-hour," " Mr. Rashid recalled in an interview on the mountainside near his home. She nonetheless threw herself on her husband, and the soldiers beat her, he said. Later that morning, Mr. Rashid discovered that three other men in the area had been similarly taken. The next day and miles away, Zahoor Ahmad Dalal, 22, drove home after working all day in the family's fabric shop. He had dinner at 6 p.m. and left for his customary walk 30 minutes later. He didn't return. The family fanned out to find him but never did. The military soon announced that it had found five foreign militants responsible for the recent massacre hiding in an Anantnag hut. During the battle, the hut was burned and the militants killed, the military said. The charred bodies were buried without autopsies. After the announcement, Mr. Rashid feared the worst, he said. His village organized a protest march to demand that they see those arrested, but the police shot and killed seven of the protesters - including Mr. Rashid's younger brother. Local outrage grew. Facing a growing revolt, officials allowed families to unearth the bodies of the alleged militants. Families recognized the dead immediately. In a bungled attempt to hide the victims" identities, soldiers had forced each to don military fatigues but had neglected to remove the victims" old clothing, still visible under the burned fatigues. Genetic tests eventually confirmed their identities. There were no foreign militants. An investigation by India's elite Central Bureau of Investigation charged five soldiers with murder. The Supreme Court has ordered the army to decide by the end of July whether to court-martial those involved or allow a civilian trial.