Srinagar, The incarcerated Chairman of Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Freedom Party, Shabbir Ahmed Shah, has said that peace in South Asia and the Middle East is inescapably linked to settlement of the Kashmir and Palestine issues.
According to Kashmir Media Service, Shabbir Ahmad Shah in a message from New Delhi’s Tihar jail urged the world leaders to play their much needed role to halt the genocide of Palestinians by Israel in the Gaza Strip. Drawing parallels between the Palestine and Kashmir issues, he said that the inaction on the part of the international community would be tantamount to granting a free license to Israel and India to kill the Palestinians and the Kashmiris in the two occupied territories with impunity.
Meanwhile, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference in a statement issued in Srinagar termed the prevailing situation in occupied Jammu and Kashmir as a nuclear flashpoint in South Asia. The APHC feared that the unresolved Kashmir dispute could provide the spark to light South Asia’s nuclear fuse, as the territory is the highest militarized zone in the world with over one million Indian troops deployed in cities, towns and villages to suppress the Kashmiris’ voice for freedom.
As per a report compiled by Germany’s international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, the Kashmiri Pashtun community, also known as Kashmiri Pathans, openly condemns the discriminatory treatment meted out to them by the successive Indian installed governments in occupied Jammu and Kashmir. The report said that the Pashto had been confined to being a spoken language, with no locally-produced texts or encouragement for its promotion on the part of the government. The community received a major jolt after an Indian government-sponsored survey in 1986 categorized Pashtuns under the Gujjar community, creating a sense of injustice and erasing their distinct identity, and later they were even dropped out of the Gujjar community, leaving them without any recognition.
On the other hand, senior APHC-AJK leader Muhammad Farooq Rehmani in a statement issued in Islamabad demanded a ban on weapons supply to Israel and India to prevent bloodshed in Palestine and Kashmir. He said, the Zionist state is solely responsible for the 21st century’s holocaust in Gaza.