Protest outside the EU: “If Kosovo can, why not Kashmir as well?”
Organizations favoring the secession of Kashmir from India protested outside the headquarters of the European Commission and the Council of the European Union in Brussels on Tuesday, demanding that the Kosovo precedent be applied to Kashmir and that this region be given the right to unilateral secession from India.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The protesters chanted slogans stating: "If Kosovo can, why not Kashmir as well".
Ali Raza Syed, president of the Brussels-based Kashmir Center which organized the protest, said they had "come to remind officials of European institutions and the international community that Kashmir, like Kosovo, has the right to self-determination. We have been fighting for independence from India for sixty years, but to no avail. Our struggle evidently is of no interest to the media, they are only interested in Kosovo. Why Kashmir cannot be independent like Kosovo?".
India is opposed to the independence of Kosovo, among other things, because it fears Kosovo would set a precedent for the case of Kashmir.
Nevertheless, the European Union is trying to convince the global public opinion that the case of Kosovo is unique, in an effort to justify its unilateral moves - moves that bypassed the United Nations Security Council and violated the UN Charter.
EU "guarantees" have so far not persuaded many.
In Bulgaria, Sofia Mayor Bojko Borisov has demanded strong guarantees from the European Union and NATO that Kosovo will not become a precedent.
"I feel sorry for the Serbs, but I also understand the Bulgarians who dread the possibility that one day, Bulgarian Turks might want independence as well ... This is why I demand a one billion-percent guarantee that Kosovo is not going to become a precedent" he said.
In New York, Georgian permanent representative to the United Nations Irakli Alasania said Tbilisi would not recognize Kosovo's secession.
Alasania said that Tbilisi believed that it was completely evident that states' territorial integrity had to be observed.
