Geneva April 9: Under the auspices of Interfaith International, NGO with ECOSOC status, the film Sheen produced by Ashok Pandit of Bombay was screened at the UN Human Rights Commission, Geneva on April 8, 2004 to a jam-packed audience drawn from all the five continents of the world.

Screening of films is not anything new at the UN Human Rights Commission, but the impact that Sheen made makes it a memorable one. It tells the tragic story of expulsion of a whole minority community of Pandits from the Valley of Kashmir in 1990. Though interventions by various NGOs are regularly made at the Commission and the Sub-Commission on ethnic cleansing of Kashmir Pandits, but the film gave a visual story of tragedy and trauma of a harmless, miniscule religious minority that represented the continuity of thousands of years of Kashmir’s civilizational ethos. With all the suffering hurled on him, Amarnath, the Kashmiri Pandit hero of the film, does not succumb to hatred and de-humanization.

The producer of the film, Ashok Pandit, is himself a Kashmiri and a victim of terrorism. He is qualified in all respects to produce a documentary as a historical record. With the professional skill and the expertise available to him in Bombay, he has infused realism into the characters.

Minorities generally become the first victim of terrorism. This is the reason why the UN Human Rights Commission focuses its attention on the rights of minorities, ethnic, religious, linguistic or cultural. The suffering of the victims of terrorism, particularly the minorities are not told in full just because it has many dimensions. The film screened by Ashok Pandit, in a sense, educates the defenders of human rights on the dimensions of dangers they face while discharging their voluntary and humanitarian duties.