Staff Reporter
Islamabad
Sardar Masood Khan, President of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, has appealed to the leadership of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and African Union to intervene and stop the ongoing genocide, apartheid and settler-colonialism in the Indian Illegaly Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), says a message received here from Niamey, Niger.
Upon his arrival in Niamey, the AJK President in his interview to two Niger media networks – Labari TV and New Republic – said that Niger was the founding member of the OIC Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir and, over the decades, has consistently supported the right to self-determination of the Kashmiri people. The Contact Group, he said, was established on the watch of the then OIC Secretary General Mr. Hamid Algabid who had also remained the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of Niger.
‘The people of Jammu and Kashmir are grateful to the people and government of Niger for their forthright stand on Kashmir’, he said. The AJK President said last century scores of African countries after arduous struggles attained freedom and joined the United Nations. ‘The people of Jammu and Kashmir also started their struggle for freedom and self-determination in 1947 but one big part of the State of Jammu and Kashmir is held in captivity by India’, he said.
Sardar Masood Khan briefed the media networks about the situation in IOJK since August 5, 2019, characterized by military siege, killings, massacres, blindings, enforced disappearances, staged encounters, mass incarcerations and use of rape and sexual molestation as a weapon of war. ‘Because of a complete communication blackout imposed by India, the territory of occupied Jammu and Kashmir is cut off from the rest of the world. People are cut off from one another. People are prisoners in their homes and neighborhoods; homeless in their own homeland’, he said adding that settler-colonialism is extending its ominous shadow like a rapid moving avalanche in the occupied territory.
‘In the past quarter of the year, more than 2 million Hindus from India have been transferred and illegally settled in the occupied territory to change the demographic composition of the occupied State. This is unacceptable to the people of Jammu and Kashmir and this constitutes violation of the UN Security Council resolutions on Kashmir, as well as international law’, said Masood Khan.
