By Benazir Bhutto The whole world now knows that the hot potato of Held Kashmir is the cause of all this Indian indigestion but the Government of Pakistan has been slow to analyze how we got to the right royal rumpus in Madras . Even President Farooq Legahri was forced to concede in the wake of the dismissal of the PPP Government -- once his Government too -- had scored "foreign policy successes". At the United Nations, in Washington , at the O.I.C, our mission to internationalize the Kashmir dispute won victories that could not be gain said. But the jewel in the crown of those "foreign policy successes" was the victory in the then Opposition Labour Party conference in 1995 and its now famous "Brighton Declaration" on Kashmir . When I sent the distinguished journalist Wajid Shamsul Hasan to London as our High Commissioner I asked him three things. Triple locked and indissoluble. "Internationalize the cause of Kashmir ; mobilize our 400,000 strong cadre of British Pakistanis; market Pakistan as a progressive democratic Islamic state with tremendous potential for foreign investment" I told him, refusing to brook his reluctance to take up diplomatic chalice after a life at the typewriter. He performed miracles as even those vested interests in the bureaucracy who opposed his appointment were forced to concede. With his journalist's instinct he knew that Labour was going to win the British elections, then three years away. He lunched and dined the most important Laborites, reactivating old friends of Pakistan . He covered every square foot of the widespread Pakistani communities, organizing them as a lobby, in Galloway's National Lobby on Kashmir (now abandoned by the Pakistan High Commission) and the Association of Pakistani and Kashmir Councilors and Candidates which was commissioned to train and educate Pakistanis and Kashmiris to prepare them to become potential parliamentary candidates, it was being organized on the pattern of Lahore Party's Emly's List for selection of female candidates for the British Parliament -- an exercise which has been responsible for manifold increase of Labour women MPs. The whole concept and the practical measures taken by him have been now put under dust. I have shared the view that a proactive Pakistani community members could breathe down the neck of their MPs and candidates, make Kashmir an election issue. Hasan's International campaign against Child and Bonded Labour (ICACABL) which appointed me President -- with its programme of education and newspaper work and its hugely successful Round Table in the Parliament House nailed the lie that Pakistan was world's only sweat shop. It also nipped in the bud an Indian move to pillory Pakistan on the blown up issue of bonded labour in the Labour movement using child labour as a thin end of an anti Pakistan wedge. Our High Commission pitched its war tents on Bighton's green fields. The Community arrived in unvanquishable numbers. The Fringe meeting on Kashmir teemed with activists and supporters. Shadow Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Clare Short and Gerald Kaufman carried the day with their strong reiteration to the right of self-determination under the U.N resolutions. Even our Kashmir Committee Chairman Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan and Professor Khurshid Ahmed had flown there to express Pakistan 's solidarity with the people of Kashmir . Day and night phones hummed between Wajid's sea front hotel and P.M. House in Islamabad . Wajid was cruelly incarcerated for long months on trumped up charges that are a shame on those who framed them, is in a sick bed in London, his health almost broken by a his ordeal under pressure even in the hospital to confess lies rather than uphold truth. His father late Syed Shamsul Hasan who had served All India Muslim League as its Assistant Secretary from 1913 to 1947 and more close to the Quaid than most of the claimants, must have turned in his grave to see his son suffer at the hands of a party which says it is true heir to the Quaid's Muslim League. ICACABL) the APKCC, the National Lobby on Kashmir, the Pakistan Club and host of other organized efforts to counter anti-Pakistan propaganda and exposure of foreign sponsored terrorism have been dumped in the cold. The gallant Kashmiris are being abandoned in some squalid under hand deal with the Indian government, under foreign pressure, just at the time that the scales are falling from the world's eyes which now see their plight more clearly and sympathetically. The Kashmiris know that it is under the Bhuttos that they had Pakistani power at their elbow. Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto set the Kashmir issue alight between 1972 and 1977. His strike call for Kashmir was observed so overwhelmingly that everything in Pakistan and Kashmir had come to a halt. And when he was martyred nowhere burned like Kashmir . They knew better and more profoundly what all we had lost. By contrast Ayub Khan, Ziaul Haq and now his protégé Nawaz Sharif have fiddled while 700,000 Indian soldiers have incinerated Jammu and Kashmir . When the PPP Government was in power, as far away as Brighton that support and encouragement was felt and told for good. The freedom fighters knew it. The enraged Indian lobby knew it. The brave Jawans and their Generals knew it. And the masses of Pakistan knew it. And they shall never forget it. And one day they will remember it. |
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