At the United Nations, Pakistan has reaffirmed that the Jammu and Kashmir dispute will remain on the world body’s agenda until the Kashmiri people are allowed to exercise their right to self-determination. This stance was presented by Pakistan’s Deputy Permanent Representative to UN Amir Khan while speaking in a debate on ‘Right of the people to self-determination’ in the General Assembly’s Third Committee. He deplored that millions of people, including Kashmiris, continue to live under alien domination and foreign occupation. Amir Khan said right to self-determination must be exercised freely, cannot lapse with time and must not be obfuscated or eclipsed by conflating it with terrorism.

He said that suppression of this “fountainhead of all other rights”, often brutal and violent, is one of the gravest violations of Security Council and General Assembly resolutions. He said in Indian Illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, bloodletting has gone on for 75 years and has accounted for the lives of over 100,000 Kashmiris, who have suffered decades of occupation awaiting the fulfillment of their UN- promised inalienable right to self-determination. He said that since India’s illegal annexation of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, there have been arbitrary arrests, abductions, violence and a lack of hospitals to care for the wounded.

He said India continues to delude itself that it can subjugate the Kashmiris through the application of extreme force, ignoring the lesson of history that the people’s yearning for freedom can never be crushed by brute force. The Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN said Pakistan has played an important role in the promotion of inter-religious and inter cultural dialogue. He said we have always sided with the forces that work to unite the humanity and opposed those who seek to provoke violence through hate speech and defamation of religion. Mohammad Aamir Khan said Pakistan is committed to continue its efforts to build bridges of understanding and to challenge and resist those who seek to construct walls of bigotry and hatred, which threaten to reverse the march of modern civilization.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan-INP