China has role in Kashmir: Attique

Hameed Shaheen

ISLAMABAD: Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan Prime Minister of Azad Kashmir says China, being contiguous regional country, is destined to play a crucial role in efforts for settlement of Kashmir dispute. “In fact strategically there are seven parties to this dispute now: Pakistan, India, Kashmiris, China, UN Security Council, European Parliament (EP) and Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). Kashmir is being debated as active dispute on the yearly agendas of EP and OIC who have passed strong resolutions supporting Kashmiris right to self-determination”, he said while talking to a group of legal experts meeting him in Kashmir House here.

“China is a global power and is bound to play a global role. British Prime Minister Mr David Cameron’s call yesterday to China to undertake its role as global balancer is in fact acceptance of the emerging status of China in world affairs. The phenomenal economic rise of Beijing is most impressive and it is now an active model for the developing nations”, he observed.

The AJK Premier expressed the need to coordinate the Kashmir roles of all the seven parties to the dispute. “It is a happy sign that the EP has agreed to associate the UN and the OIC in its (EP’s) Kashmir settlement efforts at the global level. What we now need is to consolidate all Kashmir-specific roles of UN, OIC, EP, Pakistan, China, Kashmiris to smoothen avenues towards peaceful solution to the dispute, he pointed out.

“We understand”, the AJK Premier said, “that the EP is trying to have UN and OIC participations in its forthcoming Global Discourse on Kashmir being held in Brussels in mid-March next year”. Therefore our diplomatic recourse should be tailored according to this new emerging reality of global institutional linkage on Kashmir, he stressed.

Replying a question he said that the US considers Kashmir as a dispute. President Barack Obama during his recent India visit clearly classed Kashmir as longstanding dispute needing solution. UK also harbors similar views, considers Kashmir as outstanding dispute requiring settlement, he added.

It is a mockery of diplomacy to support Indian wish to ascend to the UN Security Council seat leaving Kashmir dispute unsettled at India’s backyard, the AJK Premier added.

Kashmir is an issue of self-determination, not just a dispute of land

Kashmir Media Service

London, In London, Stop the War Coalition (STWC), a United Kingdom group has passed a resolution on Kashmir in its general conference. The resolution, which was moved by Khaja Aslam,

a journalist from Indian occupied Kashmir, on behalf of Britain/south Asia solidarity forum (BSASF), condemned the recent killings of over 111 innocent and unarmed young men and teenagers in the occupied territory.

It maintained that Kashmir was not a dispute of land between India and Pakistan but was a core political issue concerning to the future of millions of oppressed Kashmiris who had been deprived of justice since the partition of Indian sub-content. “The issue of Kashmir is the issue of self-determination which was guaranteed under successive United Nations Security Council resolutions. The self-determination of peoples is a basic principle of the United Nations Charter, which has been reaffirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and applied countless times to the settlement of many international conflicts,” it added.

“Presence of 700,000 Indian military and paramilitary forces without any moral, political and legal code has made Jammu and Kashmir the heaviest concentration in human history,” it added. It pointed out that India had put in force draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Disturbed Areas Act in occupied Kashmir that gave Indian troops to act with impunity.

The STWC resolution said that the lingering dispute needed the immediate attention of the world powers. It emphasised that the time had come when the world powers especially the US President, Barack Obama, who is going to visit India next week, should play an effective role in helping to secure a permanent settlement to the dispute in accordance with the Kashmiris’ aspirations.

It is to mention here that the STWC was founded in October 2001, one month after the then US President, George W Bush announced the ‘war on terror’, and has since been dedicated to ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing the troops home and forcing the British and US governments to change their disastrous foreign policies.

It is for the first time that SWTC has included the Kashmir dispute in its agenda. In the conference it was decided that in future there would be a full day discussion on the Kashmir issue to highlight it on international forum.

Arundhati Roy and Kashmir’s struggle for justice

Murtaza Shibli

The news that the prize-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy may be arrested for her remarks about Kashmir is not surprising. It is a sign of growing Indian intolerance towards the issue. During the current phase of the Kashmiri intifada, the only Indian response to Kashmiri demands for justice and self-determination has been the use of overwhelming military force. More than 112 civilians – mostly youths – have been killed and several thousand injured, mainly by the Indian military and paramilitary.

The current unrest in Kashmir has met with an increasingly brutal response from the Indian military.

In the absence of strong international criticism, the Indian state has been emboldened to crush any dissent or demands of justice ferociously. Intimidating Kashmiri civil society has always been part of the standard Indian response, but it has grown exponentially over the last few months. In early July, the police arrested Mian Qayoom, president of the Kashmir Bar Association (the main lawyers’ body), for protesting against human rights violations. He was arrested under the draconian Public Safety Act, which authorises incarceration for up to two years if the authorities feel that the detainee may disturb peace and order or threaten the security of the state.

Several other human rights activists, such as Ghulam Nabi Shaheen and political workers remain behind bars, along with hundreds of Kashmiri youths who have been detained for offences such as throwing stones at gun-toting Indian armed forces.

Frustrated by having to treat the mounting casualties amid curfew restrictions and with dwindling medical supplies, a group of doctors at the government medical college in Srinagar staged a peaceful sit-in – only to be accused by the police of various “offences” including rioting and “disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant”. The police also accused them of inciting people and using “anti-national slogans”. The largest local newspaper, Greater Kashmir, lamented that creating an atmosphere of intimidation in this way “speaks of the mindset that always contributed to the worsening of the situation”. It continued: “Rather than establishing a connect with its people and knowing from them what has gone wrong and how can it be corrected, government, by initiating such actions against people, is only pushing the situation towards worse.”

From the very beginning of the current unrest, the government adopted the policy of restricting journalists reporting on demonstrations and brutal government responses. The Indian army and paramilitary forces beat several journalists, refused to respect their curfew passes and even forced closure of leading newspapers as their offices remained locked and the journalists were denied access. In one such incident in July this year, 12 photojournalists working for local, national and international publications suffered serious injuries from security forces trying to stop them recording the demonstrations. One of the BBC’s Urdu service journalists, Riaz Masroor, was stopped and beaten by police as he went to collect his curfew pass on 9 July. According the BBC, he suffered a fractured arm.

In September, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) renewed its call to allow Kashmiri journalists to cover the unrest. This is how Anuradha Bhasin, the executive editor of the Kashmir Times, described the situation to me in an email in September: “The level of intimidation is so high that many reporters have been forcibly doing table [desk-based] stories, mainly operating from the homes. And as an editor, sometimes, even I find that a safer arrangement, given the vulnerability of the reporters in simply stepping out of their homes”.

The current phase of intifada has deeply exposed Indian vulnerability in Kashmir. In absence of any Pakistani support to the new generation of Kashmiris, Indian claims to blame Pakistan, Islamic terrorism and Lashkar-e-Taiba have lost credibility even among its own population.

This has provoked several newspaper reports and opinion articles by Indian journalists and commentators that not only question India’s brutal tactics but also have shown sympathy to Kashmiri demands. It has created what Roy rightly describes as “panic about many voices”, and the threat of charging her with sedition, she says, “is meant to frighten the civil rights groups and young journalists into keeping quiet”.

As the “ISI or Laskhar-e-Taiba” theory of the protests becomes increasingly untenable, Kashmiri demands are finding greater resonance within Indian civil society. The threat to Roy may be a crude attempt to prevent such criticism from gathering momentum at a time when Barack Obama is planning a visit to India next month. India is determined to keep Kashmir out of the picture and, to achieve this, intimidation and terror against Kashmiris has already entered another phase.

Shaukat sees end to religion-based militancy in Kashmir

By Afnan Khan

LAHORE: Kashmiri leader Shaukat Maqbool Butt sees an end to religion-based militancy inside the valley and states that Kashmiris are reviving their secular values which can be gauged by the fact that they have picked up stones against occupying forces in the area, referring to recent protests launched by the people of Indian-held Kashmir.

Shaukat is the son of famous Kashmiri revolutionary leader Maqbool Butt who died during the guerrilla struggle against Indian occupation of his motherland, on the footsteps of Che Guevara, and his other predecessors from the left. His son Shaukat and his companions continued their struggle facing challenges after challenges on both sides of the border.

Currently, Shaukat is leading the National Liberation Conference (NLC), a left wing pro-independence political party, and is also founder of a consortium of different nationalist parties called the All Parties National Alliance (APNA) and said that the Kashmiris were facing the brunt of the enmity between Pakistan and India over the disputed territory, which is a matter of life and death for both archrivals.

However, Shaukat has a different point of view on the issue and during an interview with Daily Times on his recent visit to Lahore, he said, “Religious extremism was never part of a Kashmiri lifestyle and people from all religions were peacefully living in the area for centuries despite the fact that they were suppressed by different imperialist forces at the same time.”

He said his father, regarded as the founding father of the current independence movement for the formerly princely state, started the strongest-ever freedom struggle in Indian-held Kashmir, which has now turned into a more sophisticated one by the locals who actually desire an independent state out of the influence of both Pakistan and India as well as any other foreign powers and the struggle is still going on.

He said Indians tried their best to crush this struggle and the Pakistani establishment also launched militancy inside the disputed territory in the name of religion, but it could not succeed because Kashmiris never believed in religious extremism and now do not even believe in any armed struggle, but want to secure their freedom through political dialogue and campaigning across the world.

Shaukat said Kashmiris had got sick and tired of living under the influence of both Pakistan and India because they had faced physical and mental loss throughout history during the tussle between both the countries. He said his party welcomed the friendship initiatives taken by both sides, yet they believed that the inter-Kashmir bus service as well as trade was heavily controlled by the intelligence agencies and bureaucracy on both sides of the border and they were only allowing selected people to visit their relatives of trade across border.

He said that most Kashmiris were still deprived of the facility of moving across the valley and especially those who had differences of opinion with Pakistani or Indian establishments were still barred from moving around. Shaukat said he himself had tried to visit his relatives in IHK but was not granted permission. He said an independent Kashmir was in the best interest of all stakeholders, but Pakistani and Indian establishments did not understand this.

He said that a free Kashmiri state would definitely end the bloody rivalry between both the countries, as it remained a bone of contention and the root cause of so many wars and bloodshed in the past between the two countries. He said both the countries were keeping a stranglehold on natural resources in the region, which actually belonged to the people of the soil.

“Pakistan faces a major water crisis and blames India for the phenomenon as it has control over the origin of the water resources. This will not be the case if there is an independent Kashmir as the Kashmiris sympathised with their Pakistani brothers and don’t believe in persecution after facing it themselves at the hands of foreign powers,” he explained.

He said the Pakistani establishment also had a hold on the Kashmiris’ resources and pretended to be feeding the Kashmiris while they were actually utilising their resources. He added that he and all other Kashmiris believed that the government of Pakistan violated their own constitution by declaring Gilgit-Baltistan a separate province when the territory was declared a part of Azad Jammu and Kashmir state under the same constitution.

Shaukat said those who migrated from IHK to AJK were still facing an identity crisis as the Pakistan government was hesitant in issuing them identity cards. He said the recent peaceful protests against Indian occupation and its army’s role in the valley following an intifada was a clear indication that the Kashmiris had strongly rejected religion-based militancy.

“We never wanted to kick any Kashmiri out of their homeland on the basis of caste, creed or colour. We have been living with Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians and people of other faiths peacefully for centuries and want all those who were kicked out of the state by religious fundamentalists back,” Shaukat asserted.

Fighting the Pakhtuns

Ahmed Quraishi

There is a very simple question that every Pakistani government official needs to ask the Americans: If you fail to pacify the Pakhtuns in Afghanistan, is it Pakistan’s responsibility to sever historical ties and wage war against them?

This is the mother of all questions because it deals with the issue of some, not all, of the Afghan Taliban using Pakistani territory to attack occupation armies in their country. Apparently this is the excuse the United States is using to expand its failed Afghan war into Pakistan. US officials say Pakistanis are unable to exercise sovereignty over their own territory. Then some here inside Pakistan – in politics and the media – use this argument to ask another question: isn’t Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban violating Pakistani sovereignty by using our border-pockets as hideouts away from action inside Afghanistan? This argument is used to justify US violations of the Pak-Afghan international border. If the Afghan Taliban can do it, why not the US military? So the justification goes.

Pakistan still has time to come out strongly with two arguments at policy level. One, there is no way of completely stopping Pakistani Pakhtuns, who are an integral part of the Pakistani nation, from sympathising with the Pakhtuns in Afghanistan. And two, the US must solve the ‘Pakhtun problem’ inside Afghanistan. The solution is not by starting a war between the Pakistani military – manned in substantial part by the Pakhtuns – and Pakistani Pakhtun tribes or some of the Afghan Taliban, like the so-called Haqqani network. This will not fix the toy the Americans broke in Afghanistan.

In other words: what is it the US is doing wrong in Afghanistan to spur Pashtun and Taliban resistance, including pushing some of them inside Pakistan? And should Pakistan respond by killing these Pakhtuns because the US says so?

There are two more strong arguments that can strengthen a Pakistani policy review, which is overdue nine years into a failed war.

One is the fact that the Pakhtun and Taliban resistance against occupation in Afghanistan is not a function of the Pakistani tribal areas. The US military dare not claim that Pakistan’s devastated tribal belt is alone responsible for the rout facing US, NATO and ISAF forces across Afghanistan. But this is what the Americans imply when they shift the world focus to Pakistan without anyone from the Pakistani side disputing this twisted American logic.

And the second argument has to do with Al-Qaeda. Pakistan needs to dispute American claims about the quality and strength of Al-Qaeda presence in the Pakistani tribal belt. London’s International Institute of Strategic Studies is not exactly a den of antiwar activism. In a report last month, the think-tank questioned the US-policy line that Al-Qaeda can muster attacks anywhere outside Afghanistan or Pakistan.

If anything, we are seeing a US-occupied Afghanistan becoming a magnet for unknown terrorists from multiple backgrounds and questionable loyalties using Afghan soil to enter our tribal belt, as in the case of the Germans involved in the alleged Mumbai-style Europe-terror plot. Washington is conveniently using these conspiracy theories to expand its war onto Pakistani territory without any credible evidence.

Pakistan does not have a quarrel with the Afghan Pakhtuns or the Afghan Taliban. The latest US reports and assertions that Pakistan’s spy agencies maintain contacts with either are ridiculous. Islamabad must maintain those contacts. In fact, we must expand contacts with the Afghan Taliban in view of the double game the United States played with us in Afghanistan over the last eight years, where it turned Kabul into an Anti-Pakistan Central and deliberately expanded and continues to encourage Indian presence on our western borders.

The American duplicity extends to peace talks. Washington wants us to enter into a war with Afghanistan’s Pakhtuns while it secretly establishes contacts and tries to win them over behind Pakistan’s back. The same argument extends to the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Kashmiri groups. Islamabad can’t shower bombs upon Kashmiris who decide to become part of LeT or support their kin resisting Indian atrocities in Kashmir. The solution there too is for India to resolve its own problems. Its festering occupation in Kashmir, like the festering American occupation in Afghanistan, is breeding a two-way violence that first and foremost de-stabilises Pakistan. Our answer can’t be to send troops to crack down on Pakhtuns and Kashmiris. others need to answer for their actions that are destabilising Pakistan and the region.

India Desperate For A Photo Op, Pakistan Shouldn’t Give It

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan-A joint photograph of Pakistan’s foreign minister with his Indian counterpart in New York could do wonders on the pro-freedom demonstrators in Indian-occupied Kashmir, Indian officials have concluded.

India is desperate in Kashmir and is hoping that a joint photograph of Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers in New York would prove a damper for the Kashmiri demonstrators, showing them Pakistan is ‘onboard’ with India’s handling of the killings in the disputed region.

This is why the Indian government is using every India-sympathizer in Washington and inside the Obama administration to convince Pakistan to send its foreign ministerto shake hands with India’s S. M. Krishna for the cameras.

Would Pakistan do it?

The race is certainly on and it seems there are some key figures in Islamabad who wouldn’t mind obliging the Indians and the Americans.

Early morning today a frantic text message reached Dr. Shireen M. Mazari, the editor of Pakistan’s The Nation daily newspaper. The message was simple:

“[President] Zardari & [Pakistan envoy to Washington Husain] Haqqani are desperately arranging for [Pakistani foreign minister] Shah Mehmood Qureshi to meet Indian foreign minister without agenda & without concrete Indian commitment to talks. Shah Mehmood is reluctant but US is pressurizing to give Indians chance to show Kashmiris that Pakistan is on board.”
Strangely, the message didn’t mention the name of Abdullah Haroon, an India-enthusiast appointed by Mr. Zardari as Pakistan’s envoy to the UN.

Dr. Mazari came on television by midday to break the news on a television channel owned by her newspaper.

If the move succeeds, India will walk away with an important psychological achievement at a crucial time, while Pakistan won’t get much, as usual.

The Indian desperation for this photo-op can be judged from the diplomatic moves India has initiated in the last five days to lure Pakistan into a meeting.

To ensure Pakistan falls for the trap, Indian officials have been generously mentioning ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Pakistan’ in the same sentence, creating the right atmospherics for jubilation in some Pakistani circles ['Wow, India is conceding its position on Kashmir …'].

But a careful look at these statements shows a desperate India cooking up a ruse

NIRUPAMA RAO: The India foreign secretary was apparently the first to be tasked with luring Pakistan into a photo-op in New York. She issued a misleading statementin Boston, US, saying India is ready to discuss ‘all outstanding issues’ with Pakistan ‘including Kashmir.’ Unfortunately, much of the Pakistani and world media ignored the remainder of her statement. Buried somewhere else in her media interaction was the line, “It is an internal affair because it (Kashmir) is an integral part of India.” So, is India discussing Kashmir or not? Ms. Rao’s next line explains it all: “The issue of Jammu & Kashmir comes up in our relationship with Pakistan and we’ve said very clearly, very confidently and very transparently that we are prepared to discuss all outstanding issues with Pakistan.” What India’s second most senior diplomat is saying is that ‘Kashmir does come up in our bilateral relationship’ with Pakistan in the form of the so-called cross-border terrorism and Pakistani meddling in Kashmir. The choice of words is careful not to indicate any concession to Pakistan.
S. M. KRISHNA: Her boss, the foreign minister, has reiterated over the weekend that Pakistan can’t force India to discuss Kashmir in future talks because his country won’t accept ‘preconditions’, which means another round of endless talks where India will keep delaying Kashmir while insisting on discussing nonissues such as trade and cultural exchanges.
S. M. KRISHNA: In a classic sign of Indian desperation, Mr. Krishna couldn’t wait a day to throw coldwater on the feel-good effect of his number two’s statement when he childishly advised Pakistanto ‘stay out of Kashmir’ and vacate ‘its side of Kashmir’ before ‘lecturing’ Indian on what to do in Indian-occupied Kashmir.
These statements underline how desperate India is this time on Kashmir.

If Pakistan goes full throttle now and demands international intervention to stop Indian state-sponsored Kashmir genocide, New Delhi can’t cry foul. It can’t say Pakistan is feeding the insurgency, not when thousands of Kashmiris have shown they want Indian occupiers out. Nor can India’s usual supporters in Washington and London cover up the clear signs of Indian genocide in Kashmir.

Pakistan and the Kashmiris have India by the tail this time. Whatever Islamabad does, it shouldn’t grant India a photo-opportunity so it could use it to demoralize Kashmiri demonstrators.