NEW YORK: Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif flew to London Friday on his way back home after five days of intense diplomatic efforts at the United Nations where he highlighted the serious violations of human rights taking place in Indian occupied Kashmir and nudged the world body to implement its resolutions calling for the exercise of the right of self-determination by the Kashmiri people.
He was seen off at Kennedy International Airport by Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United Nations Maleeha Lodhi, the Ambassador to the United States Jalil Abbas Jilani and senior officials of the Pakistan Mission here.
In an interaction with Pakistani media on Thursday, the prime minister expressed satisfaction over the progress made by his “Kashmir Mission” aimed at security justice and freedom for the Kashmiri people.
According to UN experts, with the prime minister’s effective advocacy of the Kashmir cause, his message was definitely getting through to the international community.
The main feature of his visit was, of course, his much-awaited address to the United Nations General Assembly in which he dealt at length with the decades-old Kashmir dispute before high-level delegates from around the world.
He called for an international investigation into the killings in Kashmir that now number 108, with thousands more injured, along with 150 blinded by pellets from deadly guns fired by Indian security forces.
The prime minister said on Thursday he has raised the issue of Indian crimes against Kashmiri people with every leader that he met – including US Secretary of State John Kerry.
The Prime Minister also held meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Saudi Crown Prince Prince Naif, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzi Abe, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during his stay here.
He said it was now the responsibility of the global community that it took notice of Indian actions in occupied land of Kashmiris.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had already offered to send a fact-finding mission to Indian occupied Kashmir, a move rejected by India.
Now Turkey has proposed a similar OIC mission for determining the extent to which Kashmiri people were being subjected to unprecedented use of brute force by India’s over 700,000 troops.
The prime minister, who had handed over to the UN chief a dossier on Indian atrocities in Kashmir, also said the document would also be shared with the permanent members of UN Security Council “Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States” and that Pakistani diplomats around the world were under instructions to apprise the governments they were accredited to, of the human rights violations in Indian occupied Kashmir. The campaign to expose Indian atrocities on the Kashmiri people would be taken forward, he said.
