MUZAFFARABAD: The Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) President, Sardar Masood Khan has called upon the world forums and global human rights organizations to help secure the basic rights to IOJK women guaranteed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“Sisters have died while saving their siblings, young wives have suffered defending their husbands and mothers have taken their last breath longing for their missing sons,” the President said while addressing a 70-member delegation of Air War College of Pakistan Air Force on Monday.
Sardar Masood said, “As the world is celebrating international women’s day, thousands of women in Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir are immensely suffering at the hands of occupation troops of an aggressor country”.
Masood Khan said Kashmiri women, children, youth and the old aged people are burning in the flames of a war, which they had not chosen but was imposed upon them.
“Women in Occupied Jammu and Kashmir are among the worst sufferers of Indian state terrorism. They are molested and objectified to collectively punish for their defiance to illegal Indian rule, he added.
“Sexual violation against women is being used as a weapon of war in occupied Kashmir just to force the whole Kashmiri nation to quit their demand for freedom and the right to self-determination,” the AJK president said.
Khan lamented that the modesty of Kashmiri women and girls is being outraged by the Indian troops in the presence of their parents, sisters, brothers and even their children. Their husbands are being killed or subjected to enforced disappearance to compel the women to live the life of a widowed.
“The international community should put pressure on India that the psychological trauma faced by ‘half widows’ (whose husbands have disappeared) should come to an end and it should provide access to information regarding the disappeared persons,” he demanded.
He maintained that the youth are being killed in fake encounters while 13,000 youth have been detained in prisons and concentration camps in the occupied territory and authorities tell nothing about their fate told to their mothers and relatives.
The state president said that under a preplanned strategy, India is importing and settling hundreds of thousands of Indian Hindus in the disputed territory in order to turn the Muslim majority state of Kashmir into a Hindu majority state.
