“The world community has a stark choice to make: to be hamstrung by the dictates and dynamics of realpolitik or to take steps to help resolve the Kashmir dispute in pursuance of the UN Charter’s core objective: maintenance of international peace and security,” President of Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir, known as Azad Kashmir, Masood Khan said.
He was speaking at a luncheon hosted by Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States Jalil Abbas Jilani.
“There is a referendum being expressed each day on the streets of (Indian) occupied Kashmir,” Khan said, making a case for settlement of the decades-old dispute on the basis of UN Security Council resolutions that urge determination of the will of people of Jammu and Kashmir through a plebiscite.
A former diplomat, Khan said the United Nations, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir are amenable to the idea of a plebiscite and the only party opposing this is New Delhi.
He spoke amidst ongoing violence in Kashmir, where Indian security forces’s crackdown and brutal repression tactics like use of pellet guns in reaction to July 8 breakout of protests have killed more than one hundred Kashmiri men, women and children since then, blinded hundreds more and left thousands more more injured.
The sharply deteriorating situation in the disputed territory has heightened Pakistan-India tensions, prompting UN and US calls for dialogue to stop the tensions from spinning out of control. Pakistan and India have also clashed at the United Nations General Assembly in the backdrop of killing of civilian protesters and an attack on an Indian military base in Uri that left 17 soldiers dead.
Commenting on the Indian claims that pellet guns were non-lethal, Masood Khan remarked that the Doctors Association in Kashmir had clearly said that the embedded pellets in the bodies of the victims were causing fatal lead poisoning and put pregnant women at serious risk. Further, the toxic lead deposits in children’ bodies would stunt their growth.
Massod Khan has been drawing US and international attention to the precarious situation in Kashmir where, he said, the people are under siege in their own land. The use of sexual molestation and rape, as an instrument of terror, had been common. Peaceful demonstrations were a crime, political meetings were banned and true representatives of Kashmiri people had been incarcerated. He referred to prolonged curfews and mobile telephone and Internet blackouts .
Ambassador Jilani said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif drew international attention to the worsening Kashmir scenario during his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York and demanded formation of a UN fact finding mission to investigate the Human rights violations.
