EDITORIAL: Kashmiris in the occupied valley and everywhere else observed the 89th Kashmir Martyrs' Day on July 13, commemorating the martyrdom of 22 young men in the first Kashmiri uprising against their oppressive Dogra ruler. It used to be an official holiday in the occupied Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) since 1948, until last August 5 when the ultra Hindu nationalist BJP government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi scrapped the specials status of the disputed region, unleashing a reign of terror under a protracted lockdown. There has been a sharp increase in mass arrests, systematic torture, summary executions, and indiscriminate attacks on civilians by the Indian army and paramilitary forces acting with impunity. Various international human rights organizations have expressed grave concern over the human rights crisis New Delhi has created in occupied J&K, also setting out to change the demographic complexion of the disputed region by issuing domicile certificates to thousands of non-natives in an attempt to render the Kashmiri people a minority in their ancestral land.
Pakistan being a party to the Kashmir issue paid tributes to the Kashmir martyrs with the National Assembly adopting a unanimous resolution condemning Indian atrocities and reaffirming the country's commitment to continue "support" of the Kashmir people's right to self-determination. Foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi eulogized the courage of the 22 Kashmir martyrs in the face of "brutal Dogra forces, galvanizing a decades-old struggle for self- determination - an inalienable right. He went on to point to something unprincipled and unconscionable: deafening silence of the international community over the human rights disaster in Indian held Kashmir. Some of Pakistan's allies, he noted, could not raise their voices over the situation because of their economic interests. Contextualizing his concern, he said, "The world community remained silent when thousands of people were killed in Serbia," and urged the comity of nations to learn from that massacre. It may be recalled that back in July of 1995, as the world looked on the Serb forces rounded up more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, men and boys, in Srebrenica, a UN declared safe enclave, and killed them in cold blood. Later in 2004 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that the massacre of the enclave's inhabitants constituted genocide, a crime under the internal law, which was followed up by the capture and trial of the Serb army commander, Ratko Mladic, and the politician Radovan Karadzic who served as Serbian president during the conflict. They were convicted of crimes against humanity by the ICTY.
It is worth remembering at this time the telling comments on the inaction of the world community then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan made on the tenth anniversary of the massacre. Describing it as a tragedy that would haunt the history of the UN forever, he had expressed the lament that the UN had "made serious errors of judgment, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality." Yet that philosophy is being applied to Kashmir even though the world body has a responsibility under its own resolutions to resolve the Kashmir issue according to the wishes of the Kashmiri people. Once again, the world looks on as the Indian state commits worst crimes against humanity. Its hand must be stayed now. There is no use issuing plaintive howls of condemnation after the infliction of irreversible human suffering.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020
Comments
Comments are closed.