December 4, 2001	Tuesday	Ramazan 18, 1422

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MUZAFFARABAD, Dec 3: AJK President Mohammad Anwar Khan said on Monday that international support for the resolution of the Kashmir issue had increased following the launching of the ongoing campaign against terrorism.

Talks between India and Pakistan to find a peaceful solution to the dispute was, as the world leaders had observed, indispensable, he said and called upon Indian rulers to make positive advancement towards resolving the dispute.

The president was talking to an eight-member foreign media team, which met him here at the Aiwan-i-Sadr.

He called for drawing a distinction between terrorism and the established movements of freedom, and urged the international media to play a forceful role regarding the issue.

The Kashmiris, he said, had been sacrificing their lives for 54 years to get freedom from the Indian subjugation and that was not terrorism by any standard. “How can a nation be terrorist which is demanding right to self-determination in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolutions, and for the very reason is being subjected to worst kind of repression by more than 700,000 brutal forces?”

The president said India had been committing state terrorism in the occupied territory for five decades and that terrorism included indiscriminate shelling on the civilian population living along the Line of Control.

Replying to a question, he said the Sept 11 incidents in the US were terrorism. He, however, called for a clear definition of terrorism so that it could be differentiated from freedom movements.

He told the media team that a bigger hurdle in the resolution of the Kashmir issue was India’s intransigent attitude towards the grant of the right, which the first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had pledged to Kashmiris publicly on a number of occasions.

“Had Kashmir been an integral part of India, as the Indian leaders claim, India would never had promised at the august forum of the UN to hold a plebiscite in the Himalayan region.”

Answering another question, he ruled out the possibility of an independent Kashmir, saying that the UN resolutions provided only two options to the Kashmiris — accession either to India or to Pakistan.

He observed that even if the majority of the Kashmiris agreed on the third option, the approval of both Islamabad and New Delhi would be must to get it materialized. The struggle in the held Kashmir was purely indigenous because such movements could not be run from outside through “remote control”, he said, while replying to another question.