Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, along with National Security Adviser DrMoeed Yusuf and Federal Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari, recently presented a detailed dossier on war crimes and human rights violations in Indian-occupied Kashmir.
Addressing a press conference in Islamabad, Minister
Qureshi said there was a continuing communications blackout in IoK as independent journalists and observers were denied access, while facts were distorted and brutalities went unreported “by design”.
The dossier comprises 131 pages and has three chapters: one on war crime by the Indian army and its genocidal actions, second on the disappointment of Kashmiris and how a local resistance movement is being born despite the propaganda of everything being normal, and a third chapter on how UN Security Council resolutions, international laws, and humanitarian laws were being violated through efforts to bring about a demographic change in the valley.
All the references in the dossier are from international and Indian media outlets as well as international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The dossier contains details on a vast range of incidents and atrocities from war crimes, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, torture, pellet gun injuries, rapes, over 100,000 cases of children being orphaned, search and cordon operations, false flag operations, fake encounters, and planting of weapons on innocent residents to implicate them and harm the resistance movement.
The dossier also contains details of Indian patronage and training of the militant Islamic State group. India was operating five training camps in Gulmarg, Raipur, Jodhpur, Chakrata, Anupgarh, and Bikaner.
By injecting these state-trained ISIS fighters, India’s aim is to establish linkages of the freedom movement with international terrorism in order to malign the freedom struggle and to justify its own crimes as counter-terrorist operations.
Data gathered since the onset of the crisis shows that more than 400,000 men, women, and children have been killed in the valley — which is four times more than those killed in Bosnia and about a half of those killed in Rwanda.
However, despite tell-tale signs of a genocide in Kashmir that is being carried out by the Indian forces, the UN appears to be helpless. Children have been injured, women have lost their honor, and young people are being randomly killed on suspicion of belonging to the freedom movement. But the world is probably waiting for the situation to deteriorate further before they think about any preventive measures.
Over the past seven decades, 11 UN resolutions have been passed on the Indian Occupied Kashmir but no action has followed.
According to experts, the world is following the policy of appeasement. The western nations’ commercial, economic, and strategic interests have blinded them to India’s blatant human rights violations.
The situation in Indian occupied Kashmir continues to deteriorate despite warnings from international human rights groups, including Amnesty International, the UN, and the Genocide Watch.
According to Amnesty International, the Indian government’s decision to revoke the special status of occupied Kashmir has inflamed tensions in the area and that has increased the risk of further human rights violations. For its undiluted warnings about the atrocities and violations in the valley, including the longest blockade of the internet, the London-based rights group was forced to halt its operations in India.
But before leaving, Amnesty exposed the Narendra Modi government over a number of issues, including the heavy presence of Indian forces in the valley and their use of force against unarmed civilians.
According to CJ Werleman, a US-based journalist and global correspondent for Byline Times, India, through its media campaigns have made the Kashmiri resistance against the occupation and colonial rule indistinguishable from violent jihadism and terrorism in the minds of Western audiences.
India has also cleverly lobbied Western governments and audiences into believing the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir is a bilateral issue between New Delhi and Islamabad, which, in turn, has made the international community disinterested observer. The truth, according to multiple UN resolutions, however, is that Kashmir is a multilateral issue, one in which the UN is responsible for arbitrating or facilitating its long-promised referendum.