Foreign Desk Report
NEW YORK: No solution of the Kashmir dispute will hold unless based on the principles of self-determination, Ghulam Nabi Fai, a prominent Kashmiri leader, has said, as he firmly rejected one of the of-repeated proposals to convert the existing Line-of-Control (LoC) into an international border.
Speaking in a Webinar, he said that making the LoC into a permanent border amounted to sowing a minefield in South Asia that will lead to a nuclear disaster.
“Certainly today, there is no issue is of greater urgency and concern than the Kashmir issue where two nuclear powers, uninhibited by any treaty constraints, glare at each other over this territory,” Fai, who is the Secretary-General of Washington-based World Kashmir Awareness Forum, said during the webinar organized by Erzurum Diplomacy, an Istanbul-based NGO, on Kashmir: What are the options.
Over 60 Academics, university students and journalists attended. “Jammu and Kashmir alone is the issue that has kept India and Pakistan from normalizing their relations, and it is Kashmir alone that has led to three wars, excessive militarization and nuclearization,” the Kashmiri leader added.
Fai, who was replaying to a question, said that making LoC a permanent border was no solution, as ” Kashmiris wish to emphasize that their land is not a real estate which can be parceled out into two parts but the home of a nation with a history far more compact and coherent than India’s and far longer than Pakistan’s.
“No settlement of their status will hold unless it is explicitly based on the principles of self-determination and erases the so-called line of control, which is in reality the line of conflict.,” he added. As regards autonomy for Kashmir, Fai called it a non-solution.
