UNITED NATIONS: Pakistan deplored that millions of people, including those living in occupied Kashmir, continue to live under alien domination and foreign occupation despite the right to self-determination being UN Charter’s “cardinal principle”.
“The price of this failure is being paid, in blood, by successive generations of people living under foreign occupation,” Ambassador Aamir Khan, deputy permanent representative of Pakistan to the UN, told the Third Committee of the General Assembly which deals with social, humanitarian and cultural issues.
Speaking in a debate on the “Right of the Peoples to Self-Determination”, he noted that suppression of this “fountainhead of all other rights” — often brutal and violent — is one of the gravest violations of Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, referring to extra-judicial killings, arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, rape and sexual violence, torture, curfews, communication blackouts, lockdown of civilian populations, illegal settlements and demographic changes.
The right to self-determination must be exercised freely, cannot lapse with time and must not be obfuscated or eclipsed by conflating it with terrorism, the envoy said.
Despite these clear injunctions of international law, Khan said millions continue to live under alien domination and foreign occupation, calling it a “betrayal” of the UN Charter.
In occupied Jammu and Kashmir, he said, bloodletting has gone on for 75 years and has accounted for the lives of over 100,000 people, most of them Muslims, who have suffered decades of occupation awaiting the fulfilment of their UN-promised inalienable right to self-determination.
Since India’s annexation of the region in 2019, there have been arbitrary arrests, abductions, violence and a lack of hospitals to care for the wounded, Khan observed.
“Harrowing stories abound of widespread torture, inhumane or degrading treatment and arbitrary arrests; of how thousands including children have been abducted from their homes in the dead of the night, without any trace; of hospitals running dangerously short of supplies and turning into graveyards.”
India, he said, ignores the lesson of history that a people’s yearning for freedom can never be crushed by brute force.
“We would like to reaffirm that the Jammu and Kashmir dispute will remain on the UN agenda until the Kashmiri people are allowed to exercise their will, according to the agreed method prescribed by the Security Council a plebiscite under the auspices of the United Nations,” the envoy added.
