Daily Times

A prominent Kashmiri leader has called for a “Global initiative” to resolve the lingering Kashmir dispute, saying it would not only end the bloodshed and suffering of Kashmiri people but also have a positive effect on international security with the elimination of regional tensions. “It is It is in everyone’s interest to settle the Kashmir conflict peacefully without further delay,” Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, Secretary-General of the World Kashmir Awareness Forum, a Washington-based advocacy group, said Saturday.

He was speaking at a discussion on ‘Countering and dismantling Islamophobia, locally & globally’ jointly organized by The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) in Baltimore, Maryland. The topic included Kashmir, Palestine, and Islamophobia. Dr. Hatem Bazian, a well-known scholar on international relations spoke on: ‘Palestine: Century of settler colonialism’; Dr. Fai on ‘The Situation in Kashmir’; Joram Van laveren, a Dutch politician and author of ‘Apostate: on ‘From Christianity to Islam in times of secularization and terror’ and ‘The rise of the far right in Europe’ , and Edward Mitchell, Deputy Director of Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)’ on ‘The ripple effect of Islamophobia.’

In his remarks, Dr. Fai regretted that India’s continuing barbarities in Kashmir were going unpunished. The irony, he said, was that the impunity granted to the violator of human rights was not in the context of a new dispute where the actions of the parties remain unclear delaying an international response — they are taking place in Kashmir even though the dispute is more than 76 years old. “There is no alibi for the international communities’ inaction, except that India with its major power pretensions, maintains violent occupation of the territory,” Dr. Fai said. The dispute, he said, has the potential of a large-scale international conflict with the possibility of a nuclear confrontation. Therefore, he said, ending the suffering of the people of Kashmir was “vital and urgent”. The United States, he said, holds unique powers of moral suasion and the capability of coming up with material and economic assistance to help Kashmir’s search for an enlightened solution. “After all. the United Stats has made such efforts in other international conflict, How was Kashmir any different?” Dr. Fai also denounced the Modi government for asking the High Court to impose the death sentence on the most popular leader of Kashmiri political resistance movement in Indian-occupied Kashmir – Mohammad Yasin Malik — and called on the international community to pressure India to drop the trumped-up charges leveled against him to pave the way for his release.