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Pak used Gilgit's people as cannon fodder: Amanullah Khan

Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front chief Amanullah Khan has deplored the treatment meted out to the people of Gilgit in the name of jehad during Pakistan's military operations in Kargil.

In an article published by the Urdu daily Khabrain of Lahore, Khan, who himself belongs to the area, wrote, ''I am well aware of what all was done to the people in Gilgit in the name of jehad making Kargil as the excuse, but I will not delve into it because this (his disclosures) will not be in the interest of Pakistan.''

Amanullah did not disclose details of this treatment nor did the Pakistani newspapers write anything about it, but the way the government tried to appease them during the Kargil invasion and then on the country's independence day by giving most of the awards to the members of the Northern Light Infantry hints at something amiss.

The Nawaz Sharief government has also promised the residents of the northern areas that it will soon come out with a package of reforms to give them basic rights (they have been denied these rights for the past 52 years).

The JKLF leader alleged that successive Pakistani governments have not allowed the indigenous Kashmir movement to develop since 1947. It were Pakistani regulars who were involved in the invasion of Kashmir but Pakistan kept on denying it until then foreign minister Sir Zafarullah Khan made a clean breast of it to a delegation of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan when it came to Karachi for the first time.

It was for this reason that the first UN resolution asked Pakistan to withdraw its forces from Kashmir but allowed India to maintain its forces in the state. ''This resolution was totally against Pakistan but it was the result of the idiocy committed by Pakistan at that point of time,'' he wrote.

Again in 1965 Pakistan infiltrated its nationals from Chakwal, Mianwali and other cities to Kashmir and claimed to the world they were ''Kashmiri mujahideen.'' Pakistan also set up a radio station in Murree but told the world it was in Srinagar. These lies proved costly for Pakistan, he wrote.

Amanullah wrote that Pakistan is telling the same lies now about its infiltration in Kargil.

UNI

The Kargil Crisis

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