zeemax

I suppose this will end in 2010 when kashmir becomes pakistan...HAHAHA

India record on Kashmir called ‘gruesome’

* KAC executive director says India denied UNSC’s plebsicite mandates for over 60 years
* Says Kashmir’s religious groups are ‘model of religious harmony’

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai, executive director of the Kashmiri American Council (KAC), has said that as India celebrates its Republic Day, it should be noted that its “gruesome record” in Kashmir is far worse than that of Yugoslavia in Kosovo, Indonesia in East Timor and Russia in Chechnya.

In a statement, Fai said that while the last two provoked international outrage, no such reaction has been forthcoming in the case of India. He said an “Iron-fisted military rule has prevailed in Kashmir, featuring a staggering 700,000 soldiers and paramilitary personnel. Human rights atrocities against non-combatants are commonplace. Every neutral human rights organisation that has surveyed Kashmir, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, has reported a chilling number of extrajudicial killings, rapes, torture victims, abductions, arbitrary detentions, and crimes of arson, plunder, and custodial disappearances. All peaceful political dissent has been and is being ruthlessly suppressed.”

Fai said that in October 1947, the Maharaja, although divested of power, pleaded for Indian military intervention to rescue his tottering regime. India sent in its troops and also contrived a bogus instrument of the state’s accession on which it continues to rest its sovereignty claim over this disputed territory. It was India, he stressed, which went to the Security Council to ask for a UN-conducted plebiscite after demilitarisation of the territory.

60 years: The Security Council endorsed mutually reinforcing plebiscite mandates, which India has defied for more than 60 years. He said Kashmir has always been a bastion of religious pluralism and amity. Its four major religions - Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism - have flourished side by side for centuries. Kashmir’s religious groups live in the same neighbourhoods, work together, socialise together, which is what makes them a model of religious harmony. The Kashmir conflict is not one between Muslims and Hindus. It is a conflict between self-determination and foreign occupation, he added.

flag objectionable content