The All Parties Hurriyat Conference has expressed serious concern over the prevailing situation in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir terming it as a nuclear flash point in South Asia.
According to Kashmir Media Service, the APHC leadership in a statement issued in Srinagar feared that the unresolved Kashmir dispute could provide the spark to light South Asia’s nuclear fuse, as the territory is the highest militarized zone in the world with over one million Indian troops deployed in cities, towns and villages to suppress the Kashmiri people brutally.
It urged the United Nations to intervene to resolve the dispute to avoid a nuclear catastrophe in the region.
The leadership said that forces’ personnel have set up roadblocks at various places where they keep pedestrians stand for hours in severe cold for frisking. Besides, crackdowns are carried out in various areas where men and women are paraded indiscriminately.
It deplored that the Indian forces’ personnel and Indian agencies NIA and SIA have intensified cordon and search operations and house raids across the territory during which people are tortured, arrested and harassed.
The APHC demanded release of of all illegally detained Hurriyat leaders including Masarrat Aalam Butt, Muhammad Yasin Malik, Shabbir Ahmad Shah, Nayeem Ahmed Khan and Aasiya Andrabi languishing in different jails of IIOJK and India.
The leadership said Kashmir is a humanitarian and political issue that can be resolved through comprehensive dialogue among the parties, not through the implementation of policies of coercion or military force. The arrests, harassment, killings and ongoing human rights violations are regrettable and reprehensible in all respects, it added.—KMS
