ISLAMABAD, Jan 30 (1995): Pakistan called on Monday for a nation-wide general strike on February 5 to back a revolt in Indian-ruled part of the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
The government said the strike, a repeat of one observed last year on the same day, was part of its continuing efforts to arouse world opinion in support of the Kashmiri rebels.”
“As a demonstration to this support, as a manifestation of our complete solidarity with our Kashmiri brothers and sisters, the government has decided to call once again for a hartal (strike) on 5th February,” Foreign Minister Aseff Ahmad Ali told a news conference.
The call for the strike was originally given by a parliamentary committee on Kashmir and also endorsed by opposition leader Nawaz Sharif.
Islamabad denies Indian charges of training and arming Moslem militants fighting New Delhi’s rule of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, saying its support is only moral and political.
Pakistan controls one-third of the former princely state, over which the two countries fought two of their three wars since independence from Britain in 1947.
Ali said Kashmiris waited for 40 years for India to hold a United Nations-mandated plebiscite in Kashmir before the 1990 start of the uprising, in which Indian police and doctors say more than 17,000 people have been killed.
But Ali put the toll at more than 40,000 and said the victims were killed “often brutally and in a cowardly way by the Indian troops while they are in custody.”
“Thousands of Kashmiris have been subjected to the most gruesome forms of torture,” he said. “Over 4,000 Kashmiri women have been dishonoured…as part of a conscious policy to break the will of the Kashmiris to resist Indian occupation.”
New Delhi says Jammu and Kashmir, the predominantly Hindu nation’s only Moslem-majority state, is an integral part of India.
Islamabad wants Kashmiris to decide in the plebiscite whether to join Islamic Pakistan or India. Some militant groups want to reunite Kashmir into an independent state.
