NEW YORK, Sept 17: The All Parties Hurriyat Conference will have no objection if the chief minister of occupied Kashmir is invited to visit Azad Kashmir, APHC chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq told a news conference here on Saturday after his meeting with President Pervez Musharraf.
“We believe that all Kashmiri leaders should be allowed to visit Azad Kashmir, even those who are pro-India,” said the Mirwaiz while commenting on the reported invitation to Chief Minister Mufti Sayeed to visit Pakistan.
He said that both Omar Abdullah and Mahbuba Mufti, the pro-India Kashmiri politicians, had said in the past that they wanted to visit Pakistan and Azad Kashmir and “we say why they should not.”
The APHC leader, who had a 45-minute meeting with President Musharraf on Friday, said he was convinced that the India-Pakistan peace process was “well on the track.”
Asked if the APHC supported the peace process, he said: “Not only that we support it, we want it to be further expedited.”
The Kashmiri leader, who held first-ever direct talks with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi earlier this month and had visited Pakistan in June, said he was convinced that both the countries had realized that there was no military solution to the Kashmir dispute.
“They want to resolve this dispute through talks… and we fully support their position.”
About criticism of his decision to hold talks with the Indian leadership, the Mirwaiz said he had decided to engage separately with the Indian and Pakistani leaderships because the Indians were not yet willing to have trilateral talks. “But we hope that our contacts with India and Pakistan would lead to trilateral talks in which other Kashmiri leaders can also participate as a party to the dispute.”
He said the Indian prime minister did not insist that his talks with the APHC should be held within the framework of the Indian constitution, which has no provision for treating Kashmir as a dispute.
“We did not meet him as an internal Indian party, but as a party to the dispute. The joint declaration issued after the talks spoke of an acceptable and durable solution to the Kashmir dispute. It is our greatest success. India is recognizing that it is a dispute and it can be resolved through talks only,” the Mirwaiz pointed out.
He dispelled the impression that Wednesday’s Musharraf-Singh talks had stalled the India-Pakistan peace process.
“The process continues. There may have been hiccups but no hiccup is strong enough to throttle the process,” he said. All parties in Kashmir, he added, should support this process. “And those who are pro-India should rise above their vested interests and support the peace process. It will strengthen our voice.”
The APHC leader said that in the past when Kashmiri politicians said Pakistan had to be involved in the process “people in New Delhi said we were traitors but now they have not only accepted our right to talk to Pakistan, they also have accepted the fact that Pakistan needs to be involved in any effort to resolve the Kashmir dispute.”
Demanding some relief for the people of Kashmir, he said the APHC leaders were preparing for a second visit to Pakistan to discuss the mechanism for involving Kashmiris in the peace process.
