President of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), Sardar Masood Khan, has urged the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to create a humanitarian corridor to help the people of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) who are under military siege due to Indian state-sponsored terrorism.
On Friday, he made this plea to a 12-member team from the OIC’s Independent Human Rights Commission (IPHRC) at the Aiwan-i-Sadr. Diplomats and delegates from the United Arab Emirates, Uganda, Nigeria, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Gabon, Tunisia, Turkey, and Morocco made up the OIC-IPHRC mission.
Marghoob Saleem Butt, Executive Director of the IPHRC, and Tasneem Aslam, a renowned Pakistani diplomat, were also there.
The AJK President commended the OIC for its brave and unwavering support for the Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination. He also thanked the panel for releasing a thorough and important report on the human rights situation in the IIOJK in March 2017.
Mr. Khan described the IPHRC’s previous report as a forerunner to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ reports on the human rights situation in IOJK, saying that since the OIC Human Rights Commission’s last report, the situation in IOJK had changed significantly, requiring the commission’s immediate attention.
He insisted that, in view of the IPHRC’s previous report’s recommendations, the Muslim world, especially OIC member nations, should raise their voices against the worst-ever human rights abuses in IOJK and consider imposing sanctions on India.
He further urged that the OIC take urgent action to offer emergency aid to the besieged Kashmiris by creating humanitarian corridors and providing scholarships to Kashmiri students studying in any part of the country or abroad to complete their studies.
The president told the group that there were about 42,000 refugees from across the split in AJK at the time, with the bulk of them living in or near Muzaffarabad.
According to him, the AJK administration works with Pakistani organizations to offer help to these people.
Mr. Khan urged the delegation members to expose India’s false propaganda that its troops were fighting terrorism in occupied Kashmir, trying to point out that the Indian police chief in the occupied territory, Dil Bagh Singh, had admitted that there were only 200 militants in the occupied territory against whom India had deployed 900,000 troops.
Mr. Khan said that India had sent in such a big force not to combat terrorists but to murder the innocent and helpless people of the occupied territory.
Informing the OIC delegation of the illegal and unilateral steps taken by the Indian government on and after August 2019, he said that after snatching symbolic special status of IOJK, bifurcating and annexing the occupied state with the Indian union, settling non-Kashmiri Hindu citizens in it to convert the Muslim majority into a minority, New Delhi was now actively engaged in gerrymandering to reduce Muslim representation in the state legislature of IOJK.
