Daily Times

Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has written a letter to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet Jeria on the increasing human rights violations in Indian-held Kashmir and other pertinent issues in which he asserted that India is exploiting the Pulwama tragedy for its electoral gains, according to a statement issued by the Foreign Office.

“I am writing to follow up on my letter dated December 16, 2018, regarding the deteriorating human rights situation in the IHK,” he wrote in the letter, and urged upon the need to view the Pulwama attack of February 14 ‘in an objective manner’ as the “Indian government chose to immediately externalise the blame for this attack, without [any] investigation [which] fits a known policy approach.” “Such an approach is clearly manifest in its attempts to divert global attention from the continuing grave human rights and international humanitarian law violations in IHK and branding those seeking to safeguard their legitimate political and human rights including the right to self-determination ‘terrorists’,” the foreign minister maintained in the letter.

Qureshi said IHK is an ‘internationally disputed territory’ and India’s occupation of the land is in violation of the international laws. The issue is an outstanding one on UN Security Council’s (UNSC) agenda, he added. He also recalled the four Geneva conventions and asserted that the nature of armed conflict demands that it should be impressed upon India to faithfully adhere to its obligations under the conventions to which it is a party.

Qureshi told the UN high commissioner that “there is hardly any individual in IHK who has not lost a loved one, a friend, or a relative since the Kashmiris launched their indigenous struggle in 1989.” “More than 100,000 Kashmiris have died in their quest to achieve freedom from the Indian occupation. Kashmiris have been tortured, maimed or summarily executed by the Indian forces as well as allegations of sexual violence,” the letter noted.

The foreign minister asserted that Indian repression in the region has alienated the local youth which results in violent incidents like the recent Pulwama tragedy. “The Pulwama attack, by India’s own accounts, was carried out by a young Kashmiri, who had been under Indian captivity,” he wrote.

The letter asserted that the human rights situation in IHK is worsening in the aftermath of the attack as “there is now a concerted campaign to whip up hatred and violence against Kashmiris and discrimination against them across India.” It blamed the Indian government for “leveraging this tragedy for electoral gains in the forthcoming general elections and constricting space for a political dialogue and negotiations with both the Kashmiris and Pakistan.” “What’s more worrying is that India has chosen to remain silent in the wake of appalling acts of violence against Kashmiris by extremists,” it added.

Qureshi wrote that Pakistan welcomes the call made by the European Parliament’s Sub-Committee on Human Rights on India to rectify the situation in Kashmir, which is consistent with the UN report last June as well as that of the All Parties Parliamentary Group of the UK in 2018.

Welcoming the concerns expressed by UN on February 19, the foreign minister requested UN to continue monitoring the situation and call for protection of people from all harm on account of their identity and ethnicity. He also urged the human rights watchdog to call on India to allow unhindered access to UN mechanisms to IHK as it must also be obliged to comply with its international humanitarian law obligations with respect to the occupied valley.

In a separate development, Qureshi spoke with his Nepali counterpart Pradeep Kumar Gyawali, which heads the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), and discussed the evolving peace and security situation in the region.

Published in Daily Times, February 24^th 2019.