Statement by Sardar Masood Khan at the Emergency Meeting of the OIC Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir

Honourable  OIC Secretary General,

Honourable Foreign Ministers

Asslam-o-Alaikum,

We are grateful to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) for convening this emergency meeting on Kashmir. We thank OIC Secretary General, H.E.Dr. Yousef Al-Othaimeen, and Foreign Ministers of Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan and Niger for participation in this meeting and for their powerful and compelling statements in support of the Kashmiris. We also thank  the OIC Special Envoy for his recent visit  to Azad Kashmir and statements of the OIC’s Human Rights Commision.

We express sympathy and support to our friends and families in  the OIC countries  over their losses of precious lives during the Covid 19 pandemic. We are all in it, together. As we cope with the devastations of this virus, we are grateful to our friends who have helped us morally and materially to beat this continuing menace.

During the pandemic, while the rest of the world was silent, we are beholden to  the OIC for condemning India’s fascist steps to introduce new domicile rules that have fast-tracked a process to transform the Muslim-majority occupied Jammu and Kashmir into a Hindu state by settling non-native Hindus from all over India. This is a replication of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. This is a revival of the Nazi Party’s 1935 Nuremberg laws.

European Parliamentarians too have been active. Fifteen MEPs have written to the President of the European Commission and European Union’s High Representative advising them to address the “worst human rights violations’ and ‘intolerable suppression of freedom and fundamental rights’ in the Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir in the past 73 years.

The UN Secretary General has recently asked Indian authorities to stop detaining and killing children in the IOJK.

Mr. Chairman,

The situation is dire. Under the cover of Covid 19,  every day dozens of young men are being killed by occupation forces in staged encounters. Floodgates for new Hindu settlers from India  have been opened, while Kashmiris are running from pillar to post to prove that their homeland is theirs. This is settler colonialism in full swing. The new settlers now qualify for half a million jobs that used to be reserved for Kashmiris. That’s not all. We are witnessing the biggest land grab of our times. Kashmiris are being deprived of their human habitat.

Mr. Chairman,

Some thirteen thousand boys and children are being tortured in concentration camps. Demonstrators are being blinded and maimed. Women are being raped and molested. The occupied territory has been torn asunder into two parts, without the consent of its people, and is now being ruled directly as a colony by Delhi. We see the rise of imperialism in this century.

This is a story of disenfranchisement, dispossession and displacement, unfolding before our eyes. This is naked lebensraum, irredentism and expansionism being executed through state terrorism.

In Azad Kashmir, across the Line of Control (LOC), some 80,000 civilian households  are directly targeted by Indian forces frequently, resulting in killings, serious injuries, disabilities  and destruction of critical infrastructure.

Besides, India has also created war psychosis by threatening  to attack Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan militarily. Their prime minister (Narendra Modi) has twice threatened to wipe out Pakistan by the use of nuclear weapons.

India hurls false accusations of terrorism against Pakistan to hide genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against  humanity perpetrated by it in IOJK. As President of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, I say,  with full authority,  that there are no “launch pads” in our territory and that we are not sending fighters across the LOC. The Indian propagandists lie through the teeth,  taking a leaf from Goebbels’ playbook.

The BJP-RSS religious supremacist doctrine is anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Kashmir. Its sole purpose it to wage a civilisational war against Islam and other faiths to “cleanse” India.

Despite their brutalisation by India, Kashmiris remain undeterred  and  have vowed that they would continue their peaceful struggle for freedom, liberty and self-determination in accordance with the UN Security Council resolutions.

I appeal to the OIC leadership to urgently:

1. Send a message to the UN Secretary General to appoint a Special Envoy on Kashmir without further delay;
2. Request the UN Security Council to hold result-oriented meetings on Kashmir to implement its own relevant resolutions;
3. Remind the High Commissioner for Human Rights to revive the proposal for the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry for investigating the human rights situation in the Occupied  Jammu and Kashmir;
4. Ask India to respect the right to self-determination of the Kashmiri people recognised by international law and the international community;
5. Ask India to restore the disputed status of the Occupied State of Jammu and Kashmir;
6. Ask India to stop forthwith its illegal settlements in Kashmir and restore Kashmiris’ rights to life, residence, property, livelihood and education, protected under international law;
7. Initiate a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against India and, to start with, ban import of non-Halal meat and all non-Halal products from India into OIC countries; and
8. Establish a Kahsmir Humanitarian Fund (KHF) with the help of the Islamic Development Bank (IDF) and Islamic Solidarity Fund (ISF).

Kashmiris’ screams must reach   the multilateral chambers  that take decisions on human security. First things first, stop carnage and land grab in IOJK.

I thank you.