OIC Must Compel India To Reverse Post-August 5 Actions: AJK President

Suggests eight-point strategy for paving way for resolving Kashmir conflict

ISLAMABAD (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 30th November, 2020) The AJK President Sardar Masood Khan, on the occasion of 47th session of the OIC Foreign Ministers Council has shared an eight-point strategy to pave way for the settlement of Kashmir issues.

The AJK President submitted the complete text of his statement for the record of the 47th OIC Council of Foreign Ministers meeting and for circulation amongst all member states and appealed the OIC Secretary General that all the 57 members of the organization while jointly expressing concern over the worst human rights violations in occupied Jammu and Kashmir should demand India to respect the right to self-determination of the Kashmiri people and create conditions to enable the Kashmiri people to exercise this independently.

The President suggested that the OIC should engage intensely with the UN Security Council and the Human Rights Council to seriously deliberate on the situation in Jammu and Kashmir and come up with a substantive solution. The OIC should demand the UN secretary-general to appoint its special envoy on Jammu and Kashmir and direct his Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide to take cognizance of genocidal practices in Kashmir using open source data provided by the media and human rights organizations.

The AJK president said that the OIC should stress the Human Rights Council to constitute a Commission of Inquiry to investigate serious and systemic violations of human rights instruments and treaties.

Sardar Masood Khan suggested that the OIC should prevent the Indian government from destroying Islamic symbols and desecration of Muslim religious sites in occupied Kashmir, and ask the Muslim nations to Launch a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign against India and to start with, Halal certification should be made compulsory for all merchandise coming from India to the Muslim states.

Expressing his gratitude to the OIC for its staunch support to the right to self-determination of the Kashmiri people, the AJK President said that the OIC’s voice is important because it signals to the world that all 57 member states endorse this just cause and stand by the Kashmiris who are being subjected to unspeakable atrocities by the Indian occupation forces.

He maintained that since August 5 last year, the entire occupied territory of Jammu and Kashmir has been under constant siege enforced by 900,000 troops. The communication blockade has muzzled the voices of the Kashmiris and cut off them from one another and the rest of the world, he added.

Terming the occupation of IOJK as a reign of tyranny and terrorism in the territory, Sardar Masood Khan said that Kashmiris are being killed, maimed, tortured, forcibly disappeared and arbitrarily detained on an industrial scale. He apprised the participants that around 20,000 detainees, including thousands of political leaders and activists, are incarcerated without recourse to due process.

He said that the Indian civil society organizations have published reports that last year some 13,000 young men, including children as young as 10, 11 and 12 years of age, were imprisoned in concentration camps located in Kashmir and northern India. “These besieged Kashmiris are getting no relief whatsoever from the international community. They have been left to be annihilated en-mass. The situation is sombre and apparently irretrievable”, he underlined.

President Khan said that the domicile certificate rules, Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Public Safety Act are all black laws that authorize ethnic cleansing and enforce lebensraum and give occupation forces absolute impunity and immunity from prosecution.

The draconian laws, he added, have an eerie similarity with the Nuremberg Laws; while detention centres scattered all over IOJK and northern India are horror chambers like Auschwitz.

The AJK President admonished the conscious and criminal manoeuvring by the Indian government towards illegally settling a large number of non-native Hindus from all over India in the disputed territory. He informed that in the past few months, two million people have been inducted; which in the coming one to two years would swell to 5 to 6 million.

“This rapid population re-engineering is leading towards systemic disenfranchisement, dispossession and displacement of Kashmiri Muslims. The result would be the complete demographic transformation from a Muslim majority State to a Hindu majority colony”, he cautioned.

He went on to say that outsiders are being enabled to acquire Kashmiri land to build illegal settlements there through amendments in land acquisition laws. Non-native Hindus are being doled half a million jobs reserved for Kashmiris, resulting in loss of jobs and livelihoods by the Kashmiris.

The State President said that the BJP regime, in pursuance of the extremist Hindutva doctrine has annexed the occupied territory to its federation without the consent of its people and in stark violation of Security Council resolutions on Kashmir and now after abolishing the occupied State’s distinctive symbols of its disputed status like the constituent assembly, its constitution and its flag, the occupied forces have started a farce of local elections to legitimize its alien domination. “This is the first instance of brazen colonialism and foreign occupation in the 21st century. It will not succeed in its endeavours because of Kashmiris' relentless struggle under most difficult circumstances”, he maintained.

Sardar Masood Khan said that in an attempt to divert attention from its egregious human rights violations in Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, India continues to terrorize a population of 600,000 people living along the Line of Control in AJK through the use of hostile fire. Only this year, he informed, 30 civilians had been martyred, scores injured and critical civilian infrastructure destroyed.

India said Masood Khan is also jeopardizing regional and global peace by irresponsibly resorting to nuclear brinkmanship and threatening AJK and Pakistan with war. “Inside Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, India is sponsoring, engineering and committing acts of terrorism. It has unleashed ruthless terrorism, subversion and hybrid warfare against Pakistan, in violation of the UN Charter and international law. We condemn these acts strongly and call on OIC to press India to stop terrorism against Pakistan and Azad Kashmir.”, he said.

The AJK President lamented that India is taking these steps against people of Jammu and Kashmiris in full view of the international community. The silence of leading world capitals have emboldened India to accelerate its murderous campaign in the besieged territory.

The President also thanked the OIC Secretary-General for sending his Special Envoy for Jammu and Kashmir Ambassador Yousef M. Al-Dobeay to Islamabad and Muzaffarabad to assess the on-ground situation.