New York:(Parliament Times) The President of Azad Kashmir Sardar Masood Khan has said that Kashmiris have been striving to get their motherland liberated from Indian occupation no matter how long it takes and how harsh the conditions are created by India.The AJK president said this while addressing a full house of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir meeting held on the sidelines of the UN General assembly meeting here in New York on Thursday. The President thanked OIC Secretary General, and the member countries for their steadfast and committed support to the just cause of the people of Jammu and Kashmir for their right to self-determination.He said that since OIC’s first resolution on the Kashmir issued in 1990, every year, the Organization has passed resolutions on Kashmir, condemning human rights violations in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) and incorporating its decisions on Kashmir in its ministerial and Summit communiqués. “In the past three decades, no other international body has so consistently and so courageously extended diplomatic support to the Kashmiris”, he said.
Apprising the OIC of the grave human rights situation in IOK, the AJK President said that in the past 15 months 700,000 armed Indian troops have made it a living hell for the Kashmiri population by shamelessly murdering hundreds of peaceful protestors, blinding and incapacitating them with the use of illegal pellet guns, dishonoring women, torturing and illegally detaining them on concocted charges.
Masood Khan stated that the people of Azad Kashmir and IOK are thankful for Pakistan’s unwavering and resolute support on the Kashmir Issue for the past seven decades. If it were not for Pakistan’s sovereign diplomatic window to the international community the cause for Kashmir would had absolutely been globally disenfranchised.
India, he said, is using a series of illegal measures to completely transform the demographics of Jammu and Kashmir by threatening to rescind various articles in the Indian constitution that give a thin and meager impression of self-governance to IOK. He informed the members that India has relocated non-Kashmiris to IOK and have given them permanent residence, illegal settlements of nationalist Pandits and former army personnel are being built, and Kashmiri land is being illegally leased to Indian industrialists.
Despite India’s atrocious human rights violations and blatant breach of all international conventions and humanitarian laws, it is disheartening and distressing to witness the inattention of the international community. The condoning of these war crimes by the “champions of human rights” is in a way siding with the oppressor implied the President. The time has come for the world to make a just and moral political decision on the Kashmir.
