ISLAMABAD: Foreign Office Spokesperson Asim Iftikhar Ahmad on Friday rejected his Indian counterpart’s “false claims and tendentious remarks” on SAARC and Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK).
“India’s obstruction of the SAARC process was an established fact. Motivated by its partisan reasons, and acting in violation of charter provisions requiring exclusion of bilateral issues, India was responsible for stymieing the 19th SAARC Summit scheduled to take place in Pakistan in 2016,” said Ahmad in a statement.
The spokesperson said that New Delhi’s “myopic attitude was rendering a valuable platform for regional cooperation increasingly dysfunctional”.
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“Pakistan hoped that India would review its self-serving approach and enable the SAARC process to move forward for the progress and prosperity of the peoples of South Asia. For its part, Pakistan remained ready to host the next SAARC Summit as soon as the artificial obstacles created in its way were removed,” said Ahmad.
On Kashmir, the FO said that “no amount of obfuscation and misrepresentation” can hide India’s state-terrorism in IIOJK.
“The egregious violations of human rights of the Kashmiri people had been extensively documented by the international human rights machinery, including in the two Kashmir reports issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in 2018 and 2019. In addition, Pakistan had...
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