MUZAFFARABAD: Leaders of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) delivered a memorandum to the UN military observers here on Tuesday after participants of their march were subjected to teargas shells and batons by the local administration in the early hours of Tuesday.

Nadeem Ahmed Janjua, Deputy Commissioner of Muzaffarabad, said in a statement that local JKLF leaders had given him an application on June 22 in which they had stated that at the conclusion of their long march in support of their incarcerated chairman Yasin Malik they would hand over a memorandum to the UN observers on Monday (June 27).

However, Mr Janjua said, when the participants of the march crossed the Quaid-i-Azam Bridge at Domel at about 8:30pm on Monday, they decided to stage a sit-in there throughout the night and ended it “only after holding dialogue with and delivering their memorandum to [some] special representative of the UN secretary general”.

“We tried to persuade them to shift towards a particular side of the road and let the traffic move freely for the convenience of public, but to no avail,” he said, adding that the “administration was then left with no choice but to resort to use of batons and teargas shells” and take some of them into custody to break up the sit-in.

According to JKLF sources, while many of the activists had suffered injuries, more than one hundred activists were arrested and lodged in different police stations of the capital, including organisation’s chief spokesperson Rafiq Dar.

On Tuesday, a group of JKLF activists remained on the press club’s premises while vice chairman Saleem Haroon and others held talks with the administration for unconditional release of their colleagues.

In the meanwhile, at about 10:30am Mr Haroon, Raja Haq Nawaz, Javed Hanif, Adil Gilgiti and some others presented a memorandum to the UN observers, in which they urged the world body to play its role in grant of unconditional right to self-determination to the Kashmiris and prior to that immediate release by India of Yasin Malik and other political prisoners.

Mr Dar and other detainees were released at about 4pm.

Though JKLF was yet to formally give any statement to media on this issue, the Central Bar Association of Muzaffarabad issued a strongly worded statement, condemning “the worst torture on peaceful JKLF demonstrators” and urged the AJK government to clarify whether it stood by incarcerated Yasin Malik or India’s agenda.

Bar president Fazal Mahmood Baig also urged the superior judiciary to take its notice and penalise those responsible for it, or the legal fraternity would come onto roads to record their protest against the reprehensible incident.

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2022