Our Correspondent
Muzaffarabad
Azad Jammu and Kashmir President, Sardar Masood Khan has called upon United Nations and the civilized world to help end to the cruelest, inhumane and degrading treatment of Kashmiris in the Occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
‘We fully agree with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s statement that torturers must never be allowed to get away with their crimes, and systems that enable torture should be dismantled or transformed,’ Masood said in a video message released on International Day in Support of Victims of Torture observed on Friday across the globe.
AJK President asserted that torture is a crime against humanity. It is prohibited by international law and all religions. Yet this crime is committed every day by the Indian forces and authorities in the occupied territory, most brutally and systematically.
He appealed to the United Nations not to generalise and blur the focus on torture where it is pervasive. In the Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, he said, torture is most rampant and most egregious.
‘Torture has been committed by the BJP-RSS regime by reoccupying and colonising Jammu and Kashmir against the will of its14 million people, dividing their state into two parts, and enforcing decrees whereby the entire territory is now ruled by a foreign capital, Delhi, Khan said. He added that all this without the consent of its people. ‘As we mark this day today, in the IOJK young men are hunted down and killed in cold blood in fake encounters, demonstrators are blinded and sexual molestation is used as a weapon of war,’ he maintained.
The president went on to say that Convention against torture seeks to uphold human dignity and human security of each individual and community. Kashmiris, he said are being deprived of their homeland by importing Hindus from all over India and settling them in the occupied territory through new domicile rules.
‘Stripped of their permanent residence rights, Kashmiris are being robbed of their jobs, livelihoods, businesses and land. Systematically, the demography of the occupied territory is being altered permanently.
The state president said what India is doing in IOJK is a war crime according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, the ICC Statute and international humanitarian law. Referring to arbitrary arrest of political leaders and political activists, Masood said thousands of political detainees, illegally incarcerated, are being subjected to the cruelest and vicious torture leading in many instances to death and disability. He demand that political prisoners in the Tihar jail in India – Yasin Malik, Asiya Indrabi, Shabbir Shah – should be released forthwith and Syed Ali Geelani and other Hurriyet leaders – hundreds of them holed up in cramped prisons – should be set free.
