London: According to the Kashmir Centre report, 11 June 1991 is the blackest days of the history of occupied Kashmir when the Indian forces while opening indiscriminate firing mercilessly martyred 17 Kashmiris in the busiest commercial center Chota Bazaar in Srinagar.According to the report, Indian occupation forces opened fire in Chota Bazaar, one of Srinagar's busy commercial districts. 17 civilians were killed. They weren't at a protest. They weren't marching. They were shopkeepers, customers and passers-by, people going about their daily lives in a marketplace. No investigation produced accountability. The occupation's forces were shielded from any court.They were not at a protest. They were not marching. They were people in a marketplace, going about their daily lives. The occupation killed them and walked away. Not one person was ever prosecuted.According to the report, by 1991, the Indian occupation apparatus had placed Kashmir under what amounted to a full military siege. Crackdowns, cordon-and- search operations and mass detentions swept through towns and villages. Extrajudicial killings had become so frequent that human rights organisations documenting them struggled to keep pace. Chota Bazaar was not an aberration. It was one entry in a long, bloody ledger.According to the report, Chota Bazaar is where people buy fabric, spices and hardware. It is where shopkeepers open their shutters in the morning and close them at night. On 11 June 1991, Indian occupation forces fired into that ordinary space and killed 17 people who had simply been there. The location was not incidental. It sent a message: nowhere in Kashmir was beyond the reach of occupation violence.Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were documenting the pattern of extrajudicial killings in Kashmir during this period with growing alarm. Figures ran into the hundreds within single years. The Chota Bazaar killings were carried out in the knowledge, established through years of precedent, that the AFSPA would shield the perpetrato rs and that the Indian occupation regime would never grant the sanction required to bring charges.The Armed Forces Special Powers Act meant that occupation forces could not be prosecuted in civilian courts without prior sanction from the Indian occupation regime in New Delhi. That sanction was never granted. Not for Chota Bazaar. Not for the hundreds of other killings documented in Kashmir that year. The law was not a failure of accountability. It was the mechanism designed to prevent it.The 17 people killed in Chota Bazaar on 11 June 1991 have no monument and no official recognition. Their names were never entered into any official record of accountability. They live only in the memory of those who were there, passed down as so much of Kashmiri history has been passed down: in the absence of any official record that chose to preserve it. They deserved better. Kashmir remembers them forevermore.