AJK President urges UK to break silence on Kashmir issue

27 Aug, 2019

Addressing a news conference along with UK parliamentary group, he stressed  the UK government and Prime Minister Boris Johnson to play their role in addressing serious humanitarian crisis and preventing ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri people in  the Indian occupied territory.

"Being a permanent member of the UN Security Council, it is the moral obligation of the UK to take cognizance of the worst human rights abuses and the carnage of innocent Kashmiri people at the hands of Indian forces in Occupied Kashmir," he  said.

The Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) president said on the whole the UK's role in the recent UN Security Council meeting on Kashmir was satisfactory, but the people of Jammu and Kashmir expected from UK a more active role to bring improvement in  the situation of IoJ&K.

Sardar Masood thanked the Labor Party chief Jeremy Corbyn and the all-party parliamentary Kashmir Group in the UK parliament for expressing grave concern  over human rights violations in IoJ&K, and said that the international community  would have to take serious notice of genocide and war crimes against the  Kashmiri people.

He said more than 10,000 Kashmiri people including a large number of children  had been arrested since August 5, and they had been shifted to prisons outside Occupied Kashmir in New Delhi, Agra, Lucknow and other Indian cities.

"The  constant curfew has created starvation-like situation in Occupied Kashmir,  and the Indian troops are torching grain stocks, while milk is not available to  infants," he added.

The AJK president said “we consider India's aggression against Occupied Kashmir as aggression against Pakistan,” and warned that if India carried out direct attack on Azad Kashmir, it would get a befitting response.

Supporting the call of veteran Kashmiri leader Syed Ali Gilani, Sardar Masood said the government employees and the police personnel of held valley should also join the liberation struggle because struggle against India had now become a matter of ‘life and death,’ and had entered into the stage of ‘now or never.’

Speaking on the occasion, leader of UK parliamentary delegation Khalid Mahmood and MP Imran Hussain and MP Stephen Timms said India was indulging in the worst human rights violations in Occupied Kashmir.

They said India was engaged in ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri people in a bid to change the demography of Occupied Kashmir.

"This is a naked violation of international laws and the UN Resolutions, and this cannot be ignored by declaring it a bilateral issue between Pakistan and India or  an internal matter of India," they said, urging the UN Security Council to adopt a categorical stance on the situation of Occupied Kashmir, and declare the Indian actions on Kashmir as unlawful.

Copyright APP (Associated Press of Pakistan), 2019

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