Altaf Hamid Rao.
MUZAFFARABAD/ MIRPUR [AJK], (Parliament Times) : The AJK President Sardar Masood Khan has called upon human rights bodies, civil society organizations, and youth activists to highlight mass atrocities in Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOJK) through short films, plays, skits, and other modern and traditional media.
He expressed these views while talking to a four-member delegation of the Human Rights Council of Pakistan which called on him under the leadership of the Council chief Jamshed Hussain here on Tuesday.
He said thousands of people in IOJK have been killed by Indian occupation forces in custody, extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances and these human right violations are committed by Indian forces with absolute impunity.
The State President said that one million Indian Army troops had besieged the defenseless Kashmiri people in the held territory for the last 73 years in general and the last two years in particular and they had let loose the worst oppression against them.
He maintained that besides killing, the Kashmiri people were being deprived of their properties, dignity, and jobs, and it appears that India is bent upon eliminating the Kashmiri people thereby changing the Muslim identity of the state.
Sardar Masood Khan lamented that the youth raising their voice against the heinous Indian plan of settling Hindus in the Muslim majority state to change its demography, are declared terrorists and killed.
He urged the Human Rights Council of Pakistan and other human rights groups to launch a full-scale campaign against these human rights violations and expose the brutalities of the Indian troops through all available media. He expressed concern that the so-called human rights champion Western countries were silent over the Indian brutalities.
The state president appreciated the Human Rights Council of Pakistan for its efforts in Karachi and other parts of the country to highlight human rights violations in occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
“Those who are shouting the slogans of ‘We are Pakistani and Pakistan is ours’ are the part of our soul and heart, and helping them at this critical time of their history is our moral and religious responsibility”, he asserted.
Earlier members of the delegation Jamshed Hussain, Secretary-General HRC, Zaid Rehman, Executive Member Nasir Khan, and Media Coordinator Jawerria Nayyar told the state president that Human Rights Council had been exposing the human rights violations in occupied Kashmir through movies, dramas, seminars and symposia for the last several years.
The organization now, they said was going to observe Kashmir martyrs week from Thursday which will start from a seminar at the National Press Club Islamabad where besides the AJK president, many national figures will speak.