PTI AJK welcomes US body hearing on Kashmir.

MIRPUR -- Former prime minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir and president of Pakistan Tehreek-e-insaf AJK chapter Barrister Sultan Mehmood Chudhary on Thursday welcomed the US House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on human rights situation in Indian occupied Kashmir.

Terming it as an important development Barrister Chaudhary said in a statement Thursday that the committee held threadbare discussions besides voicing serious concern over the worsening political and human rights situation in Kashmir.

He also hailed Nitasha Kaul, Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, and Angana Chatterji, co-chair of the Political Conflict, Gender and People's Rights Initiative at the University of California, for highlighting the plight of Kashmiris and exposing Indian state-terrorism in the held territory.

Referring to Nitasha Kaul and Prof Chatterji's statements presented before the committee the PTI president said that the duo had rightly pointed out that the Indian state and its repressive policies have been main cause and consequence of widespread violence and rights abuse in the region.

Thanking Congressman Brad Sherman, for convening the hearing the PTI chief expressed the hope that the historic hearing will be instrumental in breaking the myth of so-called normalcy narrative on Kashmir being peddled by India.

On US diplomat Alice Wells remarks that the US was monitoring the situation in Kashmir closely Barrister Sultan said that the simmering situation in the disputed territory demands that the international community and the US in particular should act and take effective measures to end the suffocating siege in Kashmir that has crippled the region and its inhabitants mentally, physical and economically.

Terming Kashmir as an internationally recognized dispute he said that world powers should come forward in a big way to help resolve the lingering dispute that has been bedeviling bilateral relations between the two...