MUZAFFARABAD, Jan 20: AJK Prime Minister Sardar Sikandar Hayat Khan said on Monday that no Kashmiri could think of according any sanctity to the Line of Control or accepting its conversion into a permanent border.

He expressed regrets over statements of the United States’ ambassador to India and said they amounted to sabotaging the cause of Kashmiris.

“It is painful to note that the ambassador is constantly issuing such statements that amount to sabotaging the Kashmir cause,” he said, talking to a delegation in Kotli, according to a handout.

The premier made it clear that the people of Kashmir would not give up their struggle, regardless of the propaganda made by any person to please India.

US ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, said in remarks released on Sunday that his country was pushing President Gen Pervez Musharraf to halt the “flow of militants” into occupied Kashmir.

The ambassador had said that the Line of Control could not be changed by violence. He had said that “every one should act to ensure the continued sanctity of the LoC in the absence of a jointly agreed Indo-Pakistani alternative.”

“I want to make it clear that there is no sanctity of the LoC for any Kashmiri, because it has divided our families,” the premier said.

“Kashmiris have been struggling and offering sacrifices to achieve their internationally acknowledged right to self-determination and there is no question of accepting the LoC as a permanent border,” he said.

Sardar Sikandar stressed that the US should not “accommodate or maintain its friendship with India at the cost of the right to self-determination of the Kashmiris, which it had also favoured when the resolution on Kashmir was passed by the United Nations Security Council.

“The US should honour the commitments and assurances it had extended to the people of Kashmir in 1949 when the UN had pledged right to self-determination for them through a Security Council resolution,” he said. “The conspiracies against us at the international level warrant for complete unity in our ranks,” he said.