ISLAMABAD - Pakistan yesterday said it stands by Kashmiris at the third anniversary of illegal merger of the occupied Kashmir into Indian union territory.
Speaking at a weekly news briefing here, Foreign Office spokesperson Asim Iftikhar Ahmed said the government and people of Pakistan continue to stand resolutely with the Kashmiris in their just struggle for self-determination and freedom from illegal Indian occupation.
“As we approach 3 years of Indian illegal and unilateral actions of 5 August 2019 in IIOJK, and subsequent unprecedented and unabated repression and human rights violations in IIOJK, we urge the world to take notice of Indian barbarianism,” he said. He said on 13th July, the government and people of Pakistan solemnly observed the 91st Kashmir Martyrs’ Day and paid homage to the 22 Kashmiri martyrs who rendered the ultimate sacrifice while braving the indiscriminate force unleashed on them in 1931 by the Dogra forces.
In a historic commemoration, on 19 July, the Government and people of Pakistan joined the Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) to mark the 75th anniversary of Kashmir’s Accession to Pakistan, he added. The spokesperson said as the Kashmiris renewed their resolve to persevere in their demand for self-determination, “Pakistan once again urges India to immediately halt its state-terrorism in the IIOJK, cease the human rights violations, release all political prisoners, lift the inhuman military siege and let the people of Kashmir exercise their right to self-determination.”
He said India’s sinister design of altering the demographic composition of IIOJK in order to forcefully convert the Muslim majority into minority will never succeed. Pakistan will continue to sensitize the international community on India’s blatant violations of international law and UNSC resolutions.
Pakistan, he said, strongly condemns India’s recent move of implicating Hurriyat leader Muhammad Yasin Malik in two more fictitious cases, which have been crafted around incidents that took place more than thirty years ago and have been reopened.
Pakistan, he said, urges the international community to hold India, the serial violator of human rights, responsible for its brazen suppression of the innocent Kashmiris, and to play its due role in ensuring a just and peaceful resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute in accordance with the relevant UN Security Council resolutions and the wishes of the Kashmiri people.
He said Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Ambassador Zhang Ming, was currently visiting Pakistan from 21-24 July. On the Cypher issue, he said the assumptions that are being made and some of the statements that had been made, they were removed from reality. “They are baseless. As we said, such a question does not arise. Foreign Office is a professional state institution, and we work according to professional norms and ethos,” he said.
On the 2022 Global Gender Gap Report by World Economic Forum (WEF), he said this report has been recently released.