Afghan Sikhs protest after Muslims stop cremation

Tuesday, 18 September , 2007, 01:27 (Sify)

Kabul: More than 100 Afghan Sikhs, the country’s smallest religious group, marched through Kabul with a corpse on Monday to protest attempts by Muslim villagers to stop them from cremating the body.

Police later detained six of the Muslim villagers who had tried to prevent the cremation, a police officer said.

One of the Sikh protesters, Diah Singh Anjan, said dozens of villagers had issued threats as the cremation was being prepared at a temple in the south of the city.

“The villagers tried to stop us and threatened us with death,” he said.

This prompted about 100 men to march into the city centre, first to the presidential palace and then to the United Nations compound.

Police escorted them back to the temple, which is inside a walled compound. “The police came and detained six of them and we performed our ceremony,” Anjan said in front of the burning pyre.

“The villagers who have grabbed the land around us now say we can’t perform our ceremonies here. They say we should stop cremating our dead here,” Anjan added. Muslims bury their dead.

Afghanistan’s Sikh community, said to number several thousand people in major cities, have lived in overwhelmingly Islamic Afghanistan for generations.

During the 1996-2001 Taliban regime, they were forced to wear yellow arm bands to distinguish them from Muslims.