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AJK president appeals to UK to reject India’s occupation of Kashmir

By APP
October 19, 2019

MIRPUR: Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) President Masood Khan has appealed to the British Parliament and the government to help save the people in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOJK) from ongoing carnage, incarceration and torture.

“Silence today while Kashmir today is being colonized and destroyed by the fascist regime of India would amount to endorsement of Indian crimes,” he said while addressing a packed conference in the House of Commons in London, said an official message released to the media by AJK Presidential Secretariat on Friday.

“India wants the world to look the other way but you must stare India down until it reverses its aggression in IOJK,” Masood Khan said. “There is a time to be silent and there is a time to speak; and today is the time to speak to save Kashmiris while Kashmir is being annihilated before your eyes. Compunction later would be too late, too little,” he said.

Political activist Faheem Kiani, Chairman Tehreek-e-Kashmir, organized this highly successful Parliamentary event that was skillfully chaired by British MP Jess Phillips.The conference was especially attended by the Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, despite the British Parliament’s single minded and all-consuming focus on Brexit.

In his remarks on the occasion, the Labour leader expressed strong and unequivocal solidarity with the people of Jammu and Kashmir and criticised the tendency to dehumanise the Kashmiris and Kashmir dispute and conveyed his deep concern over the ongoing punitive communications blockade in the occupied territory.

The AJK President thanked Watson and the Labour Party for passing an emergency motion in a recent party conference. He reminded his audience that last century when Hitler and Mussolini were busy attacking their neighbourhoods and Hitler burnt millions of Jews into ashes, the world did not intervene to stop a holocaust.

Today, he said, Modi and his criminal cohorts were preparing for a genocide and ethnic cleansing of Kashmiris. In this century, Kashmiris have been designated for annihilation by RSS’s death squads and lynching mobs.”

The AJK President urged the British parliamentarians not to allow India to hide behind its disingenuous stance that the Kashmir issue was a bilateral dispute, which meant to deceive Pakistan and the international community, perpetuate its occupation and brutalise the people of Kashmir.

He urged a cross-party assembly of lawmakers to continue to make statements, address communications to the FCO and 10 Downing Street as well as to the UN leadership, pass motions, and hold debates until India is held to account and made to roll back its aggression and colonial rule.

Masood Khan said the people of Azad Kashmir and Pakistan were in a state of war, a war declared by BJP and RSS leaders, who had re-occupied the IOJK, threatened to attack AJK to “retake” it militarily, and disintegrate Pakistan, inter alia, by using nuclear arsenal.

“This is not just war psychosis and nuclear brinkmanship, but a conscious campaign to push the entire world to an apocalypse”, he said, adding that half a million people of Azad Kashmir living across the Line of Control were bearing the brunt of India’s hostile fire.

Following the parliamentary conference, the AJK president separately received a 20-member delegation of the UK student leaders representing various disciplines and universities who are keen to raise awareness about the dire human rights situation in IOJK and mobilise the support of student bodies all over the world to seek justice for Kashmiris.

Earlier, he also held consultations with Shadow Minister Liz McInnes and All Party Parliamentary Kashmir Group Chairperson Debbie Abrahams, briefed them about the latest situation in IOJK and Azad Kashmir and invited them to visit AJK.