ISLAMABAD, Dec 16: Former Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Chairman Institute of Strategic Studies Ambassador Inamul Haq has observed that President General Pervez Musharraf’s proposals on Kashmir must be re-examined to avoid any pitfalls and traps in the future.
“It is better to have no settlement and wait for an appropriate time than having a bad settlement,” he said while speaking at a seminar on demilitarisation and self-rule, organized by the Kashmir Liberation Cell here on Saturday.
He said tens of million people of India were living either below poverty line or slightly over the line. He said a number of insurgencies were going on in the country and time may come when India would be forced to find out a solution to the Kashmir dispute.
He said demilitarisation could serve as a first step towards resolution of the Kashmir dispute, but self-rule and self-governance were vague terms having no clear definition in the international law. About joint management, he said the proposal to this effect must be carefully drafted and the scope of joint control should remain confined to limited areas.
He stressed that India wanted to emerge as a super power and pointed out that joint management proposal in Northern Areas bordering China, a strategic partner of Pakistan, was impracticable. He said India should not be allowed to leverage her emerging status as a world power. He said India was seeking a key role in the world and was fully aware that a larger nation benefits from such mechanisms.
He said Pakistan was not seeking unilateral demilitarisation of Kashmir and the proposal speaks of demilitarisation on both sides. He said India had refused demilitarisation in the past and was opposed to the idea even today. He said India claims Kashmir to be her integral part and says it was for it to make a sovereign decision for demilitarisation, whenever it deems fit. India also says that militancy was going on in the Held Kashmir and therefore it was essential to maintain military presence there. He said the third argument advanced by India was that Kashmir provided it the life-line to protect its Eastern border with China.
He rejected all the three arguments as false and said Kashmir was not integral part of India. He said the United Nations Security Council Resolutions does not recognize the accession of Kashmir to India by Maharaja Hari Singh.
He said 800,000 Indian occupation troops were present to fight two to three thousand militants. He said General Musharraf had also said that demilitarisation could be done in phases and some areas could initially be declared as peace zones.
He termed the Baroness Emma Nicholson draft report on Kashmir prepared for the European Union Foreign Affairs Committee as anti-Pakistan and anti-Kashmir. He said the report rejects the right to self-determination of the Kashmiris on a stupid argument that it was not feasible in view of the earthquake. He stressed that Pakistan and Kashmiris should speak against this biased report in strongest terms. He pointed out that it would become the official position of the European Union if the report was adopted by the European Parliament. He stressed that Pakistan should not move away from UN Security Council resolutions.
