The 15th SAARC Summit

So far, as many as over 100,000 innocent Kashmiri people have been buried through a systemic ethnic genocide simply because they wanted to exercise their right to self-determination under a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution adopted on January 17, 1948, only 139 days after the creation of Pakistan as an independent Islamic State out of partition of India on August 14, 1947.

Again, the UNSC passed another resolution the following year to ascertain the fate and future of Kashmir through a public fair and free plebiscite under UN auspicious, which never became a reality even the passage of the long 60 years of brutal state-run aggression and terrorism exercised by the Indian government by grossly violating the UN Charter, UNSC resolutions, and peoples’ right to self-determination and plebiscite. Indeed, the SAARC’s Colombo Declaration is absolutely right in pinpointing that peace and development in the region has been hampered by terrorism.

Until terrorism was not uprooted, peace and development cannot be achieved. SAARC must address the root-cause of terrorism in Kashmir. Otherwise, the future of the region would remain bleak. UN also needs to implement its resolution on Kashmir.

Unfortunately, Kashmir is one of the few unresolved major disputes pending before the UNSC, which is not only causing state-led terrorism but also a flash point of a possible nuclear war between India and Pakistan, looming large over the past decade after both countries conducted nuclear tests in 1998.

The event of August 11, 2008, not to speak of hundreds of thousands of other events, when over 100,000 Kashmiris marchers decided to cross the Line of Control (LoC) in protest of killing of Sheikh Abdul Aziz, a former chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), the other day. Killings, curfews, and indiscrimination against the Kashmiris would never create room for peace and progress particularly between Pakistan and India.