Genocide alert

While the humanitarian crisis in occupied Kashmir is beginning to grow, the world conscience slumbers on. There has been some international focus on the nuclear flashpoint, but no action to bring respite to the millions of Kashmiris who have been under lockdown for nearly three weeks. With the telephone, internet and cable TV connections blocked, Kashmir has been cut off — both internally and from the outside world — since New Delhi’s illegal annexation of the disputed region on August 5. Kashmiris and their innocent children are starving as thousands of Indian security personnel have fanned out across the occupied territory to ensure curfew restrictions imposed by New Delhi. It’s pretty understandable that with no access to food, water and medicines, life in Kashmir is at grave risk.

Same concerns have been voiced by Prime Minister Imran Khan during a recent interview with the NYT. The PM has insisted that the “most important thing” was that the lives of eight million people are at risk. Drawing attention towards the “plight of millions of Kashmiris living under brutal Indian occupation, abuse and violence”, the PM has issued yet another call for the international community to make efforts to prevent “an impending genocide of Kashmiris” in the occupied territory. He has expressed worries that “there is ethnic cleansing and genocide about to happen.”

The PM’s call upon the international community is followed by a genocide alert for occupied Kashmir issued by the US-based global advocacy group, Genocide Watch. The genocide alert calls upon the UN and its member states “to warn India not to commit genocide in Kashmir”. The advocacy group has listed the BJP’s exclusionary ideology of ‘Hindutva’ as a trigger for genocide. It has warned that the “authoritarian military rule by a minority military force of Hindus and Sikhs over a majority Muslim population is another alarming factor that may lead to massacres in the future”. Very sadly though, all the cries and calls over rights violations in Kashmir and the alerts over an impending genocide in the disputed territory have failed to elicit an adequate response from the world community.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 23^rd, 2019.

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