DM Monitoring
SRINAGAR: Minors are the prime victims of multiple physical, emotional abuses and violence at the hands of Indian Occupation Forces (IOFs) that had gone berserk in repeating their war crimes against humanity in the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK).
According to a report contained in the dossier recently released by the Government of Pakistan, highlighting Indian human rights violations in IIOJK, it held India’s commitment to the cause of children as ‘simply abysmal’. India’s compliance with the ‘Convention on the Rights of the Child’ in IIOJK is condemnable, it adds.
Children in IIOJK have been at the high risk of becoming separated from their families, a trauma more devastating than ever the displacement itself.
In fact, the reports emerging from IIOJK clearly indicated that terror against children had been a deliberate tactic in order to break the will of Kashmiris, coercing them to abandon their support to the resistance movement.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, on June 16, 2020, raised his concerns over the plight of children in IIOJK. “I remain concerned by child casualties in J&K and call upon the Government to take preventive measures to protect children, including ending the use of pellets against children,” he added.
The UN secretary general further said that he was concerned by the detention of children, including their arrest during night raids, internment at army camps, torture in detention and detention without charge or due process.
He urged the Indian government to immediately end these practices in IIOJK. Indian People’s Tribunal (IPT), an Indian NGO, described the plight of Kashmiri children in these words, “The entire concept of childhood has undergone a radical change in the valley. The children do not go to KG or learn nursery rhymes or play with the toys, as normal children would do.”
The IPT’s report further said that children were neither brought up under the loving tender care of their parents in a free atmosphere as their childhood memories consisted of an atmosphere filled with fear, terror, constant violence and insecurity. During 1997, 2009 and 2018, various gruesome cases of violence against children were recorded.
Amnesty India in its report during 2020, termed the unlawful killing of 8-year old Asifa Bano, as utter contempt of the human life and the fundamental principles of humanity.
