LAHORE, Jan 20: Former judge of the Supreme Court and a member of the newly constituted national Kashmir committee Raja Afrasiab Khan has welcomed the Canadian deputy prime minister John Manley’s statement declaring his country’s support to implementation of UN resolutions to solve the Kashmir issue.

In a statement issued here on Sunday, Raja Afrasiab said that it was encouraging that Canada had come forward in support of the UN security council resolutions which called for holding a plebiscite in Kashmir which guaranteed the people of the valley the right of self-determination to decide their future. He said that the resolutions were adopted by the security council on Aug 13, 1948, Jan 5, 1959, and Jan 24, 1957, calling upon both the governments of Pakistan and India to hold plebiscite in Jammu and Kahsmir to which they had agreed.

However, as the time passed by India created many hurdles and ultimately refused to hold the plebiscite and started harping that Kashmir was its integral part. He said that the people of Kashmir refused to accept the India’s claim and continued their struggle for their right to self-determination and started an armed struggle in 1989 after they realized that India was not prepared to resolve the dispute through peaceful means. He said that they had given supreme sacrifices during the past 12 years as Indian security forces unleashed a wave of terrorism and atrocities killing as many as 70,000 Kashmiris and destroying properties worth billions of rupees and dishonouring thousands of Kashmiri women.

The chairman of the seventh wage board for newspaper employees said that India should realize the gravity of the situation and see reason and come out to solve the Kashmir issue which was a core issue between the two countries. He said that both the countries were in the grip of poverty, diseases, price-hike, unemployment, and literacy which were the real threats to their development and progress and it was a high time that they should tackle these evils. He said that India had deployed its armed forces along the Pakistani’s border spending billions of rupees which could be spent to alleviate the poverty of its people. War was no solution to the problem but it would create more serious problems and devastation instead of solving the Kashmir issue. He said that the only peaceful solution to the Kashmir issue lay in allowing its people to exercize their right to self-determination in accordance with the UN resolutions. He hoped that international community would follow the example of Canada to support the implementation of UN resolutions for solving the Kashmir issue.