Gilgit-Baltistan [PoK], February 3 (ANI): A high school in Pakistan's illegally occupied Jhang area was raided by assailants, when the President of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Barrister Sultan Mehmood Chaudhry, was busy meeting senior United Nations officials, Islam Khabar reported.

It said that the assailants attacked the school staff and then molested school girls in the incident that shook the entire community already reeling under a severe food crisis and power breakdown.

A gang of thugs ransacked the school and held the entire school hostage. Policemen were stoned and teachers were assaulted with knives. One of the assailants even whipped out a gun to threaten them. It was mayhem in the school. Children and their parents have since been petrified, Islam Khabar reported.

Crime graph has been rising rapidly in Gilgit-Baltistan in the wake of widespread food shortages and power breakdowns, according to Islam Khabar.

The crime index is being pushed higher by the day due to the increasing population, shrinking resources, rising joblessness and poverty, it said.

The root cause of the problems of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is the territory's occupation by Pakistan and therefore the demand should be simple and focused - freedom from Pakistan - writes Amjad Ayub Mirza, a human rights activist from Mirpur in PoK who currently lives in exile in the UK.

According to Mirza, the mode of relations between Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is not of equality but of subjugation.

Several waves of protests have surfaced in the past only because Pakistan cannot and will not deliver.

Several political and social organisations in Nakyal in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir on January 30, held an All Parties Conference.

It was held against the backdrop of massive cuts in subsidies that Pakistan-occupied Kashmir has enjoyed for the past 75 years.

At the end of the one-day conference, a joint declaration was issued. Demands were made to add the Gojri and Pahari languages and tribal identity to any future census that may be carried out in the region. The declaration rejected irregularities in the state-subject rule of Maharaja Hari Singh of 1927, according to Mirza.

The Nakyal declaration made a demand for the empowerment of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir's legislative assembly. A demand to reverse the perks and privileges of the assembly members and government employees above 18 grade and spend the money on the welfare of the public was also added.

The problem is that the declaration issued at the Nakyal conference is making the above-mentioned demands from a government that itself is bogged down in negotiation with the International Monetary Fund in Islamabad, Mirza wrote.

Mirza wrote that Pakistan cannot deliver. Therefore, these demands will frustrate any protest movement unless it informs itself that the real cause of the economic atrocities they face is the occupation by Pakistan and not the mismanagement of a certain sector of economic or political life. (ANI)