ANKARA – Speaker of the National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq forcefully highlighted the gross and systematic violations of human rights in the Indian Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (IOK), reiterated the UN Human Rights Commissioner’s call for sending a Fact Finding mission to IOK, and pressed for enabling the Kashmiri people to exercise their fundamental rights including the inalienable right to choose their own future in accordance with the UN Security Council resolutions, said a press release issued by the Foreign Office on Tuesday.
The Speaker was addressing the 36th Meeting of the Executive Committee of the Parliamentary Union of Organization of Islamic Conference (PUIC) in Ankara on Tuesday/. The meeting’s outcome document — “Ankara Declaration”– strongly reaffirmed the right to self-determination of the Kashmiri people.
In his statement, Speaker Ayaz Sadiq blasted the Indian attempts to equate the legitimate struggle of the Kashmiri people for self-determination with terrorism, noting that these had been repeatedly and categorically rejected by the OIC Member States as well as by the international community. As part of his extensive expose on the brutalities being perpetrated against the Kashmiris by Indian Occupying forces, he highlighted the draconian “laws” that enable them to carry out such atrocities with complete impunity.
A moving documentary and pictorial slide-show were shown during the statement of the Speaker, vividly capturing the Indian state-terrorism in IOK, including the impact of pellet guns against the defenseless Kashmiris, particularly women and children; deaths and injuries caused by live ammunition fire at peaceful protestors; effect of torture; as well as discovery of mass graves in IOK. The documentary’screscendo was the ubiquitous chants of “Azadi”(freedom) by Kashmiri women in IOK that echoed in the meeting hall of the Turkish Grand National Assembly