The cries of those dying in Kashmir are heard from Ankara too

An Algerian friend of mine, an intellectual, politician and also entrepreneur, phoned two days ago. He had come to Ankara to continue work on a huge investment he has wanted to make in Turkey for some time. Since he was here, we had to meet. I said I was at the conference "The Kashmir Crisis: Threats to Peace and the Role of the International Community," organized in cooperation by the Institute of Strategic Thinking (SDE) and the Lahore Centre for Peace Research (LCPR), and that we could meet when it ended.

We got together in the evening. There was an exhilaration, a joy in his eyes; when I asked the reason after the first exchange of greetings, he explained that it was probably the effect of the speech the President had made at the 3rd Turkey Agriculture and Forestry Council, which he had just listened to. While I was asking myself what I had missed in this speech, he went on with his words.

He is talking about his own country's agricultural problem, an apparently very local subject, but even in handling this subject, how he goes beyond local limits and speaks from a global horizon, as a world leader. Problems that all the countries in the world face in one way or another, whatever their geographical position or level of development, such as climate change, obesity, migration, income injustice, drought and global warming, are not even on the agenda of many Islamic countries. As for the advanced countries, they are the very source of these problems, and there is no one but Erdoğan who directs a criticism at them and invites them to a more just line. He courageously expresses his criticisms to the countries that rule the world today, or rather, rather than ruling, are sharing out its resources:

"Nature is being used and plundered, especially by large Western companies, more ruthlessly than perhaps ever before in history. The same struggle that was waged over underground resources in the last century is today being waged over the control of agricultural lands and water resources. Developed countries are making extraordinary efforts to guarantee their food security and their future. This is one of the reasons why many African and South American countries rich in agricultural land and water resources are struggling with instability."

"This was the voice that our world, and especially the Islamic world, has been longing for for years," said our Algerian friend.

Then, I said, let me tell you too about the meeting I attended today, and I told him.

As you know, on 5 August India abolished Article 370 of the constitution, which had granted Jammu and Kashmir special status for more than half a century, eliminating the region's special-status structure, and divided the state in two.

Following this unjust decision taken as a fait accompli, Indian soldiers intensified their pressure on the people with operations launched in Jammu and Kashmir, and the leaders and members of all the local parties in the region were detained.

No one in the world made a proper sound about this practice, until the moment when, at the UN General Assembly, President Erdoğan announced that India's decision was unacceptable and that the massacres, torture and grave human rights violations taking place there should be a matter for the whole world. In voicing the world's problems that no one there mentioned or saw, the President was in fact also filling in the content of the "the world is bigger than five" policy.

Turkish civil society and think tanks have also done their duty in light of this policy that the President expressed on the UN's most important platform. SDE organized the most comprehensive meeting held so far on the Kashmir Crisis, discussing the subject thoroughly for two days and trying to bring it to the world's agenda.

The President of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Sardar Masood Khan, who attended the conference, explained that a genocide was quietly taking place in Kashmir, that this silence was being maintained through the extreme pressure and control exerted by the Indian occupation forces over every kind of means of communication, but that whatever they did, they could not hide the crimes against humanity taking place there:

"13 thousand Kashmiri youths have been taken to prisons in northern India with very bad conditions, they suddenly disappeared and we do not know what has happened to them. People are being arbitrarily collected from the streets. A genocide is being carried out. In fact we are going through different stages of this genocide. Today every young Kashmiri man is considered a terrorist and every young girl is seen as a treat offered to the invading forces. They are carrying out their filthiest desires on the bodies of Kashmiri women. Women are being gang-raped by the invading forces."

In the place where a people subjected to such intense human rights violations is dying, being tortured, being raped, its voice is cut off. That choked voice rises again from Turkey, from Ankara. Without looking at who will say what, without caring what balances require what, Turkey simply voices the voice of the oppressed.

"This is precisely the difference of the Turkey that Erdoğan leads. With all his discourse he shows that he is the voice of the world's oppressed," says my Algerian friend, joining in fervently, but he also adds: "Oh, if only the Islamic countries would show a minimum of cooperation on some issues. For example, on the Kashmir issue, if the leading Islamic countries were sincere, India could not have had the courage to make this move. Likewise, the persecution taking place in Myanmar could be ended in an hour by the existing means and relations of some Gulf countries, but they do not want to, they prefer to be partners in those crimes."

Why, I wonder?