Muzaffarabad (PoK), March 6 (ANI): Many families are facing starvation due to the closure of crushing machines and developmental works in several parts of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK) including Muzaffarabad, Pakistan vernacular publication Siasat reported.

According to Siasat, it was said that thousands in PoK have lost jobs and their families are in great distress after sanctions from the environment and mineral resources departments on developmental and crushing works.

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Pak Military Monitor recently reported that Gilgit-Baltistan in PoK, which is also called Pakistan's "soft face" is a neglected region where all-around shortages have reduced its people to "begging" before the federal government.

From fuel to food to power, the shortages have triggered street protests in recent weeks by the local people. They have little by way of political power, share in the administration and no way out of the "anomalous" situation in Pakistan's polity.

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Pak Military Monitor reported that the mood is getting anti-federal in the PoK area of Gilgit-Baltistan. Elected representatives do nothing to bring relief to the local people.

The Awami Action Committee leading the street protests has begun to say that the national parties have used Gilgit Baltistan as a 'colony' to be exploited by the federal authorities. This will continue unless they are rejected in elections, the Pak Military Monitor reported.

Gilgit Baltistan was forced into the Kashmir dispute after Pakistan illegally occupied a part of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947.

In 1949, without the consent of the people, Gilgit-Baltistan was made part of the Kashmir issue by the government of Pakistan. Right from the beginning, "no local resident of Gilgit-Baltistan was considered competent. The region was ruled through the notorious Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR). Only during Zulfiqar Bhutto's rule, in the first half of the 1970s, the FCR was abolished in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pak Military Monitor reported.

Gilgit-Baltistan Awami Action Committee has announced that if the Pakistan-occupied regional government does not fulfil their demands including the end of load shedding and revival of subsidies on flour, by March 5, then they will initiate the protest from March 10, writes Dr Amjad Ayub Mirza, an author and a human rights activist from Mirpur in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir who currently lives in exile in the UK. (ANI)

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