Kashmir atrocities: Malaysian council seeks UN intervention against India

ISLAMABAD: The Malaysian Consultative Council of Islamic Organisations (MAPIM) called on Wednesday for United Nations’ (UN) immediate intervention against India’s impunity on Kashmir’s freedom and human rights activists to ensure their protection, particularly Aasiya Andrabi.

In a statement, MAPIM President Muhammad Azmi Abdul Hanid called for dropping “concocted charges” against Andrabi and her unconditional release.

“India must end all persecutions on Kashmir political dissenters and human rights activists and those apprehended without charge must be released,” Azmi said. The statement was endorsed by Chairman MANAR Datuk Seri Syekh Ahmad Awang, Chairman SHURA Datuk Wira Syekh Abdul Ghani Samsudin, Chair Malaysia Women for Kashmir Datin Seri Ustazah Rosiah Saleh, Chair Malaysian Kashmir Youth Movement Mohammad Fadhil Yusni and Chair Association for Justice and Development Cambodia Jamal Abdul Nasir.

The MAPIM called for investigation to identify Indian security officials responsible for the violent attacks on Kashmiri civilians.

Demanding the revocation of draconian laws intended to crush Kashmir political activists, the MAPIM demanded UN intervention to end torture and physical and mental abuses of Kashmiri human rights activists in Indian jails.

It said the worsening human rights violation and forced demographic changes to alter Kashmir from a Muslim majority populated territory to a Hindu dominated region was a dangerous path. “A regional instability will be an imminent outcome if this is not checked,” it added.

The council said the human rights violations were visible and well recorded, besides the brutality being glaring enough for the UN to step in. It observed that the Indian troops had acted beyond the rules of the standard international law to claim that India was to weed out so-called terrorists.

Under the pretext of the so-called crackdown against terrorists, India was executing extrajudicial murders, torture in custody and detention without access to legal recourse, the MAPIM said.

Protesting the Indian operation to “crush voices of dissent”, the council believed that the extrajudicial killings and collective punishment by barbaric raids on homes and setting ablaze houses by Indian troops could not be allowed to persist and those responsible go unpunished.

“India must be held fully responsible for the atrocities and crimes against humanity in occupied Jammu and Kashmir,” it added.

Taking cognisance of the two Kashmir reports issued in 2018 and 2019 by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the MAPIM said even the Indian judiciary was clearly complicit in legitimising unlawful actions by the Indian government.

The council expressed serious concern on the inhuman treatment of freedom activists in custody, saying Andrabi and her associates were under tremendous brutal ordeal in a concocted range of criminal allegations. “The possibility of her being sentenced to death by the Indian court is imminent,” it said, adding: “The international community must not remain silent on the fate of the victims of the Indian ruthless oppression.”