LONDON, January 18: A large number of Kashmiri youths who were clandestinely taken across the border to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) "want to give up violence and return home", according to the Indo-Pak Peace Forum. The forum's UK based spokesman, Surinder Kaul, who recently undertook a 20-day tour of Pakistan, has urged the Pakistani and Indian governments to let these youths return to Kashmir.Kaul, who spent a week in the POK capital of Muzzaffarabad and Mirpur, felt that Jammu and Kashmir Government headed by Farooq Abdullah had a "special responsibility to get these misguided youth back home." "The boys, mostly in their teens, are desperate to shun violence and be re-united with their families," Kaul, one of the first Kashmiri Pandits to visit POK in recent years, said. "They approached me when they came to know that I was from the Valley and vented out their feelings," he said. Kaul, a longtime advocate of amity between India and Pakistan, also met the chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation
Front Amanullah Khan, the so-called deputy prime minister of POK and senior officials of both POK and Pakistan.
He lamented that there was little progress in POK compared to the prosperity in Jammu and Kashmir. "Except for a few pockets in Mirpur, which receives funds from residents settled abroad, most of the areas remains very backward," he said. Kaul's views and observations are in complete contrast to those of some of the pro-Pakistan members of British House of Commons, who try to paint a rosy picture of POK.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
