INDIA: Mass burials of Muslims killed in India's western Gujarat state took place yesterday with clerics keeping their faces covered. They performed last rites with perfume rubbed under their nostrils to keep out the stench.
Many of the 100 people buried were women and children, their bodies charred beyond recognition after they were set alight by frenzied Hindu mobs during five days of rioting in which nearly 600 people were killed.
In some instances, entire families were buried together in a single grave near the police commissioner's office in Gujarat's commercial capital, Ahmadabad. In the backlash that followed the February 27th massacre of a trainload of 58 Hindus most of the dead were torched as they slept.
Attacked by a Muslim mob, the train was returning from the northern town of Ayodhya, where Hindu activists had gathered to start building a temple to their god Lord Ram from March 15th on the ruins of a 16th-century mosque.
The mosque's demolition by Hindu zealots in December 1992 led to sectarian rioting lasting several weeks in which over 2,000 people died in India.
Police officials in Ahmadabad - the city closely associated with Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peace and communal harmony - said the final death toll could be more than 1,000 as bodies are still being recovered from remote Muslim villages attacked by Hindu mobs.
The International Federation of the Red Cross expressed concern yesterday about tens of thousands of people rendered homeless by the rioting.
The federation said it had reports of nearly 30,000 people being sheltered in 24 temporary refugee shelters in Ahmadabad alone.
"Although the situation is calm, the concern for us is who is looking after the welfare of these people," the Red Cross press officer, Mr Patrick Fuller, said in New Delhi. "We are worried that these shelters do not have the medical or hygienic facilities to cope," he added.
Red Cross workers handing out food, medicine and clothing in Ahmadabad were told at some shelters that they were the first assistance to come through in a week.
Meanwhile, officials in Gujarat said the riots had dealt an economic body blow to the state, coming at a time when it was still recovering from prolonged drought and an earthquake in January 2001 in which over 20,000 people died.
"Gujarat's economy is suffering a daily loss of about Rs3 billion (€70m)," a spokesman for the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry said.
Whatever signs of recovery the economy was showing signs have been extinguished by the riots in one of India's most prosperous states, he added.
Gujarat's lucrative petrochemical and textile sectors were badly hit as most highways were closed by curfew.
The automobile industry also took a beating with the US-based General Motors production unit in Gujarat projecting a 20 per cent drop in production after looters attacked it and burned nearly 30 brand new cars.