Muzaffarabad (POK), November 6 : An international news agency AFP has reported today that Kashmiri separatists are opposing the Indo-Pak trade pact, feeling it would harm the interests of separatists & terrorists in the region.
“Pakistanis should rise and compel their government to withdraw a decision to grant most favoured nation status to arch rival India,” a hardline Kashmiri separatist leader Sayed Ali Shah Geelani reported as saying from Muzaffarabad on Sunday.
Pakistan's cabinet last week announced that it had approved a proposal giving India the status of "most favoured nation" in a move towards normalising trade relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.
Kashmiri separatists rejected the deal saying it was being done under pressure from the United States.
"Pakistani government is taking dictation from America and this deal is also result of that dictation," Syed Ali Geelani said in a telephonic address to Muzaffarabad Press Club, from Shrinagar, the state capital of Jammu & Kashmir.
"It is a great source of pain for us to see Pakistan granting MFN status to India when Indian security forces are raping our women and destroying Islamic culture," said Geelani, who favours the region's accession to Pakistan.
"I appeal to the Pakistani nation to protest on this development so that the government is compelled to take back its decision," he said.
Raja Farooq Haider, Convener of Pakistan Muslim League-N of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Maulana Abdul Aziz Alvi, chief of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a organisation linked to the Mumbai attacks, assured support to Geelani.
The 2008 Mumbai attacks killed 166 people.
"The entire nation is ready. We will not step back an inch from our stance because freedom is our destination," Alvi said.
The 20-year separatist insurgency in Kashmir valley has left tens of thousands dead & left the valley ethenically cleansed of its entire Hindu Kashmiri Pandit population.
While formal trade between the two most populous and largest economies in South Asia is a paltry $2.7 billion annually, unregulated trade, much of it routed through third countries, is estimated at $10 billion.
Pakistan said on Friday it was hoping for significant progress on normalising trade relations with India at talks in New Delhi later this month
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