India in war frenzy, says AJK President

LAHORE:Azad Jammu and Kashmir President Sardar Masood Khan has said that apart from what has been termed “Islamophobia”, recent comments made by French President Emmanuel Macron are indicative of rising European nationalism and remnants of imperialism. University of Health Sciences (UHS) Vice-Chancellor, Professor Javed Akram, on the other hand, has announced that his varsity will not collaborate anymore with French institutions in research and academics.

Addressing the senior faculty during a visit to UHS on Thursday, Sardar Masood Khan said the issue of Kashmir had come out of the nationalism borders because of civilisational fault lines. "India is using the cover of COVID-19 to ethnically cleanse Kashmiris. This is the eighth stage of genocide. In Occupied Kashmir, a child can be sentenced to two years for merely chanting the slogan of independence.

They are being persecuted because they are Muslims," Khan said. He said that India was doing the same to Kashmiris what Nazis did in the 1930s to the Jews. "India has taken a leaf from the Israeli playbook; it is adopting the so-called Nuremberg laws in Indian-occupied Kashmir which are aimed at forcing people to migrate," the president revealed.

The AJK president said that India was in a war frenzy; therefore, it was fighting with all its neighbours. "What India is doing in occupied Kashmir falls under the category of war crimes", he said adding that the pressure on UN Security Council needed to be increased to force it to take tangible steps for the right of self-determination for Kashmiris.

"Diplomacy and dialogue have failed to increase the pressure on the Security Council, for which people in major cities around the world will have to take to the streets", he opined. The president added that it was gratifying that now professional organisations and journals had started raising their voices against the oppression of the Kashmiri people by the Indian government.

He said that AJK had a special bond with the UHS as all the three government medical colleges in Kashmir were affiliated to the university. "Professor Javed Akram and his team went to the Line of Control and proved that when a doctor wants to reach his patient, no border or army can stand in his way", he appreciated.

UHS Board of Governors' Chairman, Justice (r) Tassaduq Hussain Jilani, said that India had failed to silence the voice of the people of Jammu and Kashmir for the last 70 years. "In August last year, around 60 writ petitions were filed in the Indian Supreme Court against the abolition of the special status of Occupied Kashmir, on which no decision has been taken so far", he added.

He urged that like government medical colleges in Punjab, UHS should also allocate seats for Kashmiris in its MPhil and PhD programmes. UHS VC Professor Javed Akram said that he strongly condemned the French president's blasphemous statement. Head of the team of Chinese researchers, Dr Qiu Don Xu, said that the human trial of Chinese vaccine for corona had started in Pakistan and so far 2,000 volunteers had been registered for this trial. Our target is to register 10,000 volunteers, he added.