Kashmiri Protesters Set 5 Conditions to End 3 Month Long Agitations
Indian Prime Minister Mahmohan Singh’s drive to create an impression that
India is worried about Kashmiri youth and it is going to engage those youth with number of employment opportunities, seems not to have attracted much attention of the agitating masses of the Kashmir valley. The agitations are still continuing with even more determination. Indian forces are allegedly committing rapes on Kashmiri women and killing innocent people in a bid to suppress the agitation with force. The Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir is becoming more and more helpless with increasing anger of the protesting people.
For the first time after the protests began 3 months back on June 11, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, branded as hardliner among the constituents of the Hurriyat Conference, laid down 5 conditions to end their continuous protests and challenged the Indian government and even the international community to prove their sincerity and commitment to resolve the Kashmir dispute. He alleged that the Indian government is again playing the card of engaging Kashmir people politically but doing nothing practically. The five conditions put forward by the Kashmir agitation are as follows:
1. India’s Central Government should agree that Jammu and Kashmir issues are an international dispute.
2. The government should declare and initiate the process of evacuating all sorts of security forces from the region, and the process of demilitarization should be monitored by a credible international agency like the UNO.
3. The Prime Minister of India should make a public statement and ensure that no killings and no arrests would take place henceforth in the region. The Centre must also discipline the troops and order them to stop humiliating people and destroying public and private property.
4. The government must immediately and unconditionally release all youths and political prisoners, and withdraw cases against youths pending in courts for the last two decades. The list of 44 political prisoners include Parliament attack convict Mohammad Afzal Guru, Aasiya Andrabi, Shabir Ahmad Shah, Nayeem Khan, Mohammad Qasim and several key separatist leaders.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati