Whenever you walk along the streets of New York you may frequently come across some women, young or old, who beg claiming themselves as the refugees from Bosnia. They are the victims out of 25,000-30,000 Bosnian ill-fated Muslims who were forced to take refuge in several countries of the world.
The Serb Christian forces, during the 3 year long ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, conducted the cruelest genocide between July 11-22 of 1995. 8,372 males and even minor boys were massacred only in and around Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave. Muslim women and girls, those who were kept alive, were subjected to torture, rape and gang rape for months.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the tormented relatives of the ill-fated Bosnian Muslims thronged at the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Cemetery to remember and pay their homage to their dear ones, Al Jazeera and many other international media reported.
Marking the 25th anniversary of these tragic events, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, former and current UN Secretary Generals Kofi Annan and Antonio Guterres respectively released messages condemning the Srebrenica massacre.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan recalling that Massacre at Srebrenica in particular and Bosnia & Herzegovina in general urged the international community to remain vigil to avert further genocide in any part of the world.
In a video message on July 11, commemorating and remembering the scars of massacring the Muslims, Prime Minister Khan said: “I still feel the shock how such a thing could have been allowed by the world community. I think it is important for us to learn lessons from that. The world community must never allow such things to happen again.”
“We see problems for the people of Kashmir. 800,000 Indian troops have besieged 0.8 million people of Kashmir and we all fear that a similar sort of massacre may follow there. So the world community must take notice and never allow such acts to take place again”.
The Pakistan Prime Minister’s apprehension deserves due consideration. The Kashmir crisis needs to end on an urgent basis. But all concerned, including the UN, western powers, even the Muslim community, are silent. In being so, they allow India to continue its barbaric atrocities against the Kashmiris, which are worse than the Srebrenica massacre.
The disunited Muslim countries are also responsible for the miseries of the Kashmiri people. The money of the Muslim countries, particularly the Arab countries, even Bangladesh, is used to kill the Muslims of Kashmir, and beyond.
A survey conducted by two Indians, Priyansha Singh and Mohammed Ameen Arimbra, printed on the American media outlet Medium.com on July 30, 2019 revealed that around 8.5 million Indians live and work in the Gulf countries, one of the largest concentrations of migrants in the world. Besides, the Middle East Institute on April 14, 2020, mentioned the number of the Indians as 8,533,518. Most of them work in the GCC countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait.
Out of the total 28 million foreign workers in the GCC countries, 16.9 million (60%) workers hail from South Asia. Among the South Asians, 31.5 % are from India, followed by Bangladesh (11 %), Pakistan (10.8 %), Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan.
A World Bank report states that India earned the highest remittances in the world both in 2017 and 2018. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said that 52% of remittances to India came from the Gulf i.e. Muslim countries.
In 2018 India pocketed $79 billion as remittance : $36.3 billion just from Saudi Arabia ($11.2 billion), Kuwait ($4.6 billion), Qatar ($4.1) billion, Oman ($3.3) billion and UAE ($13.8 billion).
Besides, Indians also send home huge amounts from other Middle Eastern Muslim countries like Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordon, Lebanon, Syria, etc. Bangladesh, Iran, Azerbaijan, Brunei, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia and all other Muslim countries of the world, which are also India’s sources of remittances.
If the Muslim countries, particularly the GCC countries, could jointly threat to boycott India, it would not dare to look at Kashmir or its neighboring countries.
The OIC, the apex body of the Muslim countries, remains inactive and indifferent to the Kashmir crisis. Its summits, conferences, etc. are turned to mere picnics or get-togethers. All of its resolutions and decisions centering on Kashmir and all other problems of Muslims are confined to papers.
The role of the international community is equally disastrous in the case of Kashmir. To end the Kashmir dispute, UN Security Council member-countries are obliged to hold a plebiscite on Kashmir, something India welcomed and pledged to implement. Seven decades passed by, but the UN resolutions remained unimplemented. Such a role of UN and influential western powers indulged and dared India to ignore UN resolutions, even delete the special status of Kashmir guaranteed by the Indian constitution. The world doesn’t know what type of atrocities, humiliations and annihilation India commits now inside the curtained Kashmir.
On July 9, the Trump administration imposed punitive measures on China protesting human rights violations against the Uighor Muslim. The Trump administration imposed sanctions on Chen Quanguo, a member of China’s 25 member ruling Politburo and party secretary of the Xinjiang region, Zhu Hailun, a former deputy party secretary for the region, Wang Mingshan, director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau and Huo Liujun, a former party secretary of the bureau.
Kashmir is not that different from the Uighor tragedy. But the Trump administration is mum against harsher atrocities and genocide against the Kashmiris where murders, blindings, kidnappings, disappearances, rapes and gang rapes occur daily. About one million Kashmiris lost their lives. Hundreds of thousands of mass graveyards exist in Kashmir. The Trump administration could take the same punitive measures against India to justify their commitment to human rights, justice and impartiality.
The role of the all of western powers, even human rights bodies, is not also appreciable. It seems, the whole world allows India to continues it’s illegal occupation in Kashmir and annihilate the Kashmiris using its brutal forces.
Such indifferent policy to Kashmir may appear suicidal for the whole world, something Prime Minister Imran Khan indicated. International communities have no room to allow India to keep Kashmir under its illegal occupation and crush a nation which struggles to liberate its motherland. India needs to be halted immediately to avert an unpredictable catastrophe.
Any war centering on Kashmir, even in a low scale, will ultimately lead to a disastrous one, as both the contending countries, India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. As both the countries are desperate to get Kashmir, required pressure needs to be applied on them to compel them to agree to a logical and appropriate solution prescribed in the UN resolution to avert worldwide human miseries and destruction.
*Mohammad Zainal Abedin is a New York-based Bangladesh-origin journalist and researcher.
