China shows Aksai Chin as its own

Details: http://jkmpic.blogspot.com

Beijing, Jan 19 : China today officially launched its state-run mapping website that rivals Google Earth, showing Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin in Jammu and Kashmir -- two key areas of dispute with India --  as part of its territory, K J M VARMA reports in Greater Kashmir 18/1.

The map called ‘Map World’ displayed on the Internet in Chinese language is already being used in I phone and other mobile and Internet user applications in China.

It shows Arunachal Pradesh that China has always claimed as “southern Tibet” as part of its territory. The map makes no specific mention of southern Tibet but it shows China’s borders covered up to Arunachal Pradesh.

Also, the Aksai Chin area, which India asserts as part of Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir has been included by the map as part of China’s Xinjiang province. Both areas are part of the border dispute being negotiated between the two countries, which so far have held 14 rounds of talks.

The map, however, displays the Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir region acknowledging the both sides of the areas respectively under the control of India and Pakistan.

The unresolved border issue has been a simmering issue in Sino-India relations for a long time.
 The issue of Arunachal was in the news again this month after two residents of the state were issued stapled visas by China, a development which observers said could be an indication of a change in Beijing’s policy. China had earlier refused to offer visas to the residents of the state.

However, China reiterated yesterday that its policy that Arunachal Pradesh is a “disputed area” remains “unchanged”.

The online mapping service called MAP WORLD is meant to offer an “authoritative, credible and unified” online mapping service, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Why after years of criminal silence you are now breaking the ice : By Firdous Syed

Srinagar, Jan 8: Pro-freedom and pro-India divide apart, present Kashmiri political scenario is immersed in filth. The political class in Kashmir on the whole has stooped to an unimaginable low. The so called pro-freedom leadership has crossed all the limits of decency, Mr. Firdous Syed, in an article in Greater Kashmir (8/1/2011)

After maintaining a criminal silence for decades, Professor Abdul Ghani Butt has urged intellectuals to speak truth. “We should speak out who killed Abdul Ahad Wani, Mirwaiz Umar's and Bilal Gani Lone's father”. It is too late in the day to comment on the pangs of conscience of ‘wise’ professor as better late than never? Too little and too little, it will have hardly any affect on the appalling political conditions. There is always a motive behind a politician’s move. He never acts aimlessly.Prof. Ghani is an astute politician, why he raked up a controversy at this juncture? And after remaining silent all these years, why he suddenly has decided to go public?  The self professed moderate leaders were in near hibernation all these months of mayhem and unrest. It seems now they have closed their ranks and joined a cause to pin down and destroy for ever their worst political enemy? Has anyone smelt the blood: Syed Ali Geealni in spite of unprecedented public support has once again miserably failed to prove his mettle and carry forward the movement in a meaningful manner?

Even if the motives are sincere: truth should come out. People in all probability will suspect the intentions of the leaders asking the questions, particularly when the political skills moreover integrity of the moderates is suspected by the masses. Moreover what has been asked is almost known to the public. People may not speak openly but they know who killed Abdul Ahad Wani, Mirwaiz Farooq and Abdul Ghani Lone? It is also known, why these leaders or almost all politicians and other intellectuals got killed. Furthermore, the ever enthusiastic attitude of police administration to put Pakistan in a dock has very nearly destroyed the possibility of an objective debate. Particularly when Yasin Malik true to his whimsical style has already declared: “90 percent intellectuals work on the ‘government aid”. In such a dreadful environment of suspicion hardly anybody will stick his neck out and speak the truth?    

Truth is sacrosanct, it has to prevail. Had we not been cowards or hypocrites, whosoever killed Mirwaiz Farooq in 1990 should have the courage to own the killing. If late Mirwiaz as some sections still believe was anti movement, Mazar-e-Shudha should not have been his final resting place. Traitors and martyrs cannot share the same space. Not only this, it also gave rise to a culture of indiscriminate killings. Since militant organizations were not under obligation to publicly own their acts, they started bumping off their opponents at will. It took no time for the Mujahid’s to become merciless killers. Some innocents were even killed on the flimsy grounds just to settle the personnel scores. And then usual champions of religion enacted Sharia courts, deciding the fate of innocents these kangaroo courts began hanging people from the trees. Mirwaiz Farooq for that matter all other innocent civilian didn’t deserve to be killed ruthlessly. Mirwaiz  in real sense was a politician, like traditional politicians he too had his weaknesses as well as strengths. From my own experience I can safely vouch that he feared for his life. Few days before his death, Gulam Qadir Hagroo a senior peoples League activist wanted me to meet Mirwaiz, for some reasons meeting could not take place. The purpose of the meeting was to put Mirwaiz at ease--militants had nothing personal against him. I am not sure whether our meeting would have put Mirwiaiz’s anxieties at rest. Dozens of militant organizations and many more splinter groups were freely operating.

Mirwaiz Farooq’s death was a big jolt. It raises many questions. For that matter all the high profile killings of persons like Abdul Ahad Wani, Abdul Ahad Guru, Gulam Qadir Wani and Abdul Ghani Lone have given birth, to many new controversies? If Mirwaiz Farooq, Abdul Ahad Wani, Abdul Ahad Guru, and Abdul Ghani Lone were killed on the orders of ISI, why Mirwaiz, Yasin and Bilal Lone still considers Pakistan to be a friend? And if Hizab-ul-Mujahideen is the real culprit, how come killers and killed could co-exist all these years. How was it possible for Mirwaiz Umar, Yasin and Bilal to work together with Geelani?  It is a very bizarre situation wherein both killers and the victims are double-faced? Killers in order to cover-up their crime are  compelled to hide behind a veil of secrecy. Why the self appointed political heirs of the killed knowing well the faces behind the veil  failed so far to unmask the assassins of Abdul Ahad Wani, Abdul Ahad Guru, Gulam Qadir Wani and Abdul Ghani Lone and numerous other innocents?     

It is not easy to answer all these questions. The truth is buried deep under the mystery. Rather than revealing the truth after uncovering the upper layer, the whole affair gets messier. Let us for a while accept that Mirwaiz Farooq was killed on the orders of a militant commander, shall we assume that the high command of that outfit after due deliberations ordered the killing? Stretching further the imagination, shall this also be concluded that assassination was carried out on the direct instructions of ISI?  Perhaps Mirwaiz’s murder was a rogue act of a splinter group believing in holier-than-thou attitude, not an organizational operation. In such an unpredictability and uncertainty, no concrete conclusions can be drawn.

Most of the civilian killings, (other than the killed by Indian forces) some indeed were ordered from the top and even from across the border, are individual acts or carried due to the local considerations by the junior commanders.  Innocent bloodshed is the main reason for the failure of the militant movement. It destroyed the moral basis and removed the distinction of a suppressed and a suppressor, ultimately leading to the erosion of overwhelming public support. Had APHC leaders been the free agents, they could have taken a courageous stand against the innocent killing when it mattered, it could have put brakes on the wanton killings and not allowed the movement to go astray. Crying wolf after two decades will only muddy the waters and fuel the raging fires of distrust and acrimony in the society.

Is it not an irony, if Mirwaiz could have escaped the death until the formation of APHC, he would have become the founder Chairman of the Hurriyat Conference? Ideological neatness is not the high point of this movement. Here a killer can be portrayed as messiah and a patriot as a traitor. It simply depends on the configuration of the time and political expediency.  More than the mercenary culture of the APHC leader’s, ideological bankruptcy of the present movement is the real reason for the doom.  Nationalists here are not true nationalists and people claiming to be the champions of the religion are the most horrible and ideologically barren. Respective ideological positions are subject to convenience rather based upon any conviction, the main reason for the prevailing ideological confusion. But if we are convinced that leaders are mercenaries, why do we expect them to be the torch bearers of any ideology.
Writer can be reached at: firdoussyed@yahoo.com

Why Kashmiris observe October 27 as Black Day!

by M Raza Malik
Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control and across the globe observe October 27 as Black Day and consider it as the blackest day in the history of Kashmir. This is the Day when India landed its army in Jammu and Kashmir, in total disregard to the Indian Independence Act and Partition Plan in 1947.

In order to change the demographic composition of the territory, Indian troops, the forces of Dogra Maharaja Hari Singh, and Hindu extremists massacred over three hundred thousand Kashmiri Muslims within a period of two months.

The Indian Independence Act and Partition Plan of 1947 had stated that the Indian British Colony would be divided into two sovereign states, India, with Hindu-majority areas, and Pakistan, with the Muslim-majority areas of Western provinces and east Bengal.

India by landing its Army in Jammu and Kashmir violated the guidelines set for deciding the future of Hyderabad, Junagarh and Kashmir, three of the independent Princely States at that time, which were given the choice to either accede to Pakistan or India, considering the geographical situation and communal demography. It forcibly occupied the Hyderabad and Junagarh, which had Hindus in majority but their rulers were Muslims. Kashmir was a Muslim-majority state and had a natural tendency to accede to Pakistan, but its Hindu ruler destroyed the future of Kashmiri people by announcing its accession to India under a controversial accession document (Instrument of Accession). Many neutral observers deny the existence of such document with the argument that had it been there Indian government had made it public either officially or at any international forum.

It is a historical fact that if the partition was done on the principles of Justice then India had no land route to enter into Jammu and Kashmir but the so-called Boundary Commission, headed by British Barrister, Cyril Radcliff, that demarcated partition line, under a conspiracy split Gurdaspur, a Muslim majority area, and handed it over to India, providing it terrestrial access to the territory.

Right from the day one, the people of Kashmir did not accept India's illegal occupation and started an armed struggle with the total support of public in 1948, which forced India to approach the UN Security Council to seek help of the World Body to settle the dispute. The UN Security Council through its successive resolutions nullified Indian invasion and occupation of Kashmir. It also approved a ceasefire, demarcation of the ceasefire line, demilitarization of the state and a free and impartial plebiscite to be conducted under the supervision of the World Body. Although the ceasefire and demarcation of the ceasefire line was implemented while demilitarization of the occupied territory and a free and impartial plebiscite under UN supervision remain unimplemented till date. As a result of the demarcation, about 139,000 square kilometers area of Jammu and Kashmir remained with India while 83,807 square kilometers constituted the territory of Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

Indian rulers promised before the UN to resolve the dispute and provide the people of Kashmir with their basic right of self-determination, but later backed away from their commitments. India has been putting peace, security and stability of the entire South Asia at stake by demonstrating continued rigidity and stubbornness and not responding positively to the efforts made by the international community to settle the Kashmir dispute during the last more than six decades.

Disappointed at the failure of all the efforts aimed at resolving the Kashmir dispute through peaceful means, the people of occupied Kashmir launched a massive uprising in 1989 to secure their right to self-determination. This movement gathered momentum with the passage of time and pushed the Indian authorities to wall, forcing them to sit around the negotiation table with Pakistan in January 2004. The talks process continued till it was hampered after Mumbai attacks on November 26, 2008, when India without any substantive evidence laid the responsibility of these attacks on Pakistan and its intelligence agencies. However, Prime Ministers of the two countries, Yousuf Raza Gilani and Manmohan Singh after a meeting at Sharm El-Sheikh, on July 16, 2009, in a joint statement declared to resume the composite dialogue process to resolve all outstanding issues.

It is worth mentioning that Pakistan demonstrated considerable flexibility in the dialogue process by floating various proposals including demilitarization, self-governance and joint-management to settle the conflict over Kashmir, but India's intransigent approach continued to remain the biggest hurdle in making successful any effort made in this regard. The ground situation in the occupied territory remains unchanged, as the confidence building measures and the dialogue process could not provide Kashmiri people respite from the Indian state terrorism.

India has exhausted all its resources and means but has not been able to deter Kashmiris from continuing their liberation struggle. It has given a free hand to its troops and police to subject peaceful protesters to brute force. Over 70 people were killed only within a period of two months in 2008 when Indian police personnel resorted to indiscriminate firing to break up demonstrators in Kashmir. The Chairman of All Parties Hurriyet Conference, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq was placed under house arrest for two months to prevent him from addressing public gatherings. Liberation leaders including Syed Ali Gilani, Shabbir Ahmed Shah, Aasiya Andrabi, Nayeem Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Ashraf Sehrai, Masarat Alam Butt and Muhammad Saleem Nunnaji have been booked under the infamous draconian law, Public Safety Act to keep them away from the people. The troops have been setting new records of human rights violations by killing innocent people, arresting youth, disgracing and harassing women and setting residential houses afire with impunity.

The troops have killed over ninety-two thousand Kashmiris, widowed more than twenty five thousand women, orphaned more than one hundred thousand children and molested or gang-raped around ten thousand Kashmiri women during the past 20 years. The whereabouts of thousands of innocent Kashmiris, disappeared in the custody of troops, are yet to be made known while hundreds of unnamed graves have been discovered in the occupied territory, which are believed to be of disappeared Kashmiris. This whole mayhem is being carried out with the protection of draconian laws, by virtue of which any person can be killed or put behind the bars without any accountability.

The All Parties Hurriyet Conference sources made a shocking revelation recently that in line with a new scheme, Indian troops were killing innocent Kashmiri youth in fake encounters in the areas near the Line of Control after arresting them from different parts of the occupied territory. According to the APHC sources through these killings India wanted to mislead the international community by propagating that Kashmiri youth were trying to enter Indian occupied Kashmir after crossing over the Line of Control.

The Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Asia Watch and other international humanitarian organizations in their regular reports over the unabated rights abuses in the occupied territory have been raising their concern. Even the European Union Parliament during its session in Strasbourg on July 10, 2008 unanimously passed a resolution calling upon the Indian Government to urgently conduct an independent and impartial probe into the issue of discovery of mass graves in the territory. It also strongly condemned unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, torture, rape and other human rights abuses, which have been taking place at the hands of the occupation troops in Jammu and Kashmir since 1989.

It was yet another exposition of India's callousness that the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh on India's Independence Day, this year, tried to hoodwink the international community by stating that the elections in Kashmir had rendered the freedom element irrelevant. To protest this unrealistic statement Kashmiri people observed crippling strike on August 22. Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi while addressing a meeting of Kashmiri leaders on September 4, 2009 in Islamabad categorically emphasized that the elections in Indian occupied Kashmir could not be a substitute of Kashmiris' right to self-determination. He reaffirmed his country's moral, political and diplomatic support to Kashmir liberation movement. The mammoth anti-India protest demonstrations, participated by millions of people in Indian occupied Kashmir, last year, should be taken as Kashmiris' referendum against the Indian illegal occupation of their soil.

These are the reasons that why Kashmiris observe October 27 as Black Day. The observance is intended to send a loud and clear message to the international community to take cognizance of the miseries of Kashmiri people, help stop human rights violations in the occupied territory and play its role in bringing about a solution of the Kashmir dispute in accordance with Kashmiris' aspirations. It is also aimed at calling upon India to read writing on the wall, accept the ground realities and come forward with a realistic approach to settle the dispute for the larger interest of the people of the region.

(The writer is working as Senior Editor at Kashmir Media Service, Islamabad, and can be reached at razamalik849@yahoo.com)