The organization Families and Supporters of America’s Arunachal Missing in Action is composed of over 300 family members and supporters of the 400 United States Army Air Force aviators whose mortal remains still lie unrecovered from their World War II crash sites throughout Arunachal Pradesh. Our organization’s members come from all parts of the United States, India (including Arunachal Pradesh), Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Israel, Russia, Malaysia, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Nepal, and Bhutan. Our organization’s mission is to persuade the Government of India to allow the immediate and large-scale resumption of operations to recover the remains of these military heroes’ from their documented crash sites in Arunachal Pradesh. A recent article in the Arunachal Times described our organization’s campaign:arunachaltimes.in/wordpress/2014/08/23/mortal-remains-of-american-mias-in-arunachal-jungle-await-for-indias-permission-to-fly-back-home/ Since the end of World War II, the US and Indian Governments cooperated only once, in 2008-2009, to recover remains from just one of the many US crash sites in Arunachal Pradesh. That particular effort, in the Upper Siang district, was suspended before the recovery effort could be completed, and before any human remains could be recovered. Over two years ago, in June 2012, the US State Department, US Defense Department, and Indian Ministry of External Affairs announced that a resumption of recovery operations in Arunachal Pradesh would be forthcoming, but since that announcement no significant progress has been made toward the actual resumption of recovery operations for the remains of American missing in action (MIA) soldiers in Arunachal Pradesh: (1) US Defense Department remains recovery teams of the Defense Department’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) continue to be barred from entry into the Northeast Indian region of Arunachal Pradesh, the location of the vast majority of American World War II MIA remains unrecovered from Government of India territory. (2) The Government of India continues to refuse to make any commitment for any time in the future for allowing resumption of recovery operations in Arunachal Pradesh. (3) The Government of India continues to insist on the highly unreasonable restriction that it will permit only one crash site investigation or one crash site excavation in the entire territory of India in any given year. (4) The Government of India, in violation of its obligations under the Geneva Conventions, has made no effort to protect these unrecovered crash sites from either scavenging, or from “crash site tourism.” (5) The Government of India continues to minimize the significance of this issue in the scope of US-Indian relations by rarely mentioning it in press releases or speeches. (6) Since the State Department announcement of recovery operations resumption in June 2012, the Government of India has continued to give to family members of our Arunachal MIAs the same unsupportable reasons for inaction that it gave to them prior to that announcement. (7) Since this announcement was made in 2012, the US Defense and State Departments have clearly shown, in their press releases about US-India relations, little interest in persuading the Government of India to fulfill the commitments it made in 2012 to allow MIA remains recoveries in Arunachal Pradesh, and have consequently attached very low priority to this goal. In light of these failures, the pledge the Government of India made to the United States in June 2012 to allow resumption of MIA recoveries in Arunachal Pradesh, as a “humanitarian gesture” (in the words of the Government of India), is beginning to look like a shattered promise to the families of these MIAs. And it is also clear the US Government is doing little or nothing to persuade the Government of India to fulfill this promise. The organization Families and Supporters of America’s Arunachal MIAs works to persuade the Government of India to (1) permit an immediate resumption of MIA remains recovery operations in the northeast Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and (2) permit those operations to be conducted simultaneously at the multiple documented crash site locations in Arunachal Pradesh.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 03:32:16 +0000
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