Published: 07:54 PM, 15 November 2026
PoJK Burns Again as Pakistan Chooses Violence Over Negotiations
Five months after it began killing civilians in Pakistan Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK), the Pakistani state has settled on force as the whole of its policy there, and the emerging situation in Rawalakot confirms that the June crackdown was never an aberration but a working template to control the region. The sequence is now familiar enough to be predicted in advance. Sit-ins across different parts of PoJK are cleared before dawn, communications are severed so nothing can be verified, bodies are held back until families accept Islamabad’s version, and the civilian movement is reclassified as “terrorism.” What follows will not be accommodation but deeper centralisation, more paramilitary deployment, and a regional government in PoJK that is fully controlled by the military-backed government in Islamabad.
The security operation in the early hours of 5 November targeted peaceful sit-ins at the Matialmera bus terminal, Umar Farooq Chowk and other points in Rawalakot. Three men were named as killed: Atif Jardees, Ehtisham Younis and Adil Rashid, with at least 18 seriously injured. Protest organisers and Kashmiri diaspora parties allege the use of heavy machine guns, armoured vehicles and drones by Pakistani security forces. That asymmetry is not accidental, because fact-checking in the region has been made impossible to cover up state brutality. A reporter who travelled into the district in September found mobile internet gone past Kahuta, made three or four telephone calls in four days, and watched residents dial dozens of times for a signal while rumours of deaths circulated unchecked. Pakistan Rangers had dug trenches on main roads in different parts of PoJK to stop vehicles reaching the protest. A delegation of national opposition parties attempting to enter the region this month was stopped at Kahuta and turned back.
In the recent case, the refusal to return the dead bodies of protesters is the cruellest element and the most revealing of the Pakistani state’s inhuman treatment of the people from PoJK. Both the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) and the opposition alliance have demanded the dead be handed to their families. This tactic was started in June this year when relatives of Fahad Barkat were reportedly told they would receive his body only after signing a statement declaring him a ‘terrorist’ killed in a police encounter. Extracting a fake confession of terrorism from grieving family as the price of a funeral is a clear technique of forced occupation of PoJK.
Several human rights violations have taken place in PoJK since June, with no inquiry reported and nobody held responsible. Instead, regional authorities proscribed JAAC June under the “anti-terrorism” statute, suspended internet and mobile signals for a week, ordered outsiders out, arrested more than 100 people in 48 hours, sealed JAAC’s Muzaffarabad office, and detained journalist Sohrab Barkat under cybercrime law for covering it on YouTube. The activist Shahzaib Habib was shot that night.
Despite these violent measures, what the Pakistani state authorities have been unable to break is the civilian sit-in itself, which has held at the Dareek Eidgah without interruption since 10 June and drew thousands again this month. The protest has built what amounts to a parallel civic administration. A medical camp opened on 9 June has become three centres whose administrators say they have treated more than 150,000 people until now, and which received several dead bodies and hundreds injured on 27 July, a day now marked in PoJK by roadside plaques bearing the names of the young men killed for demanding their fundamental rights. Women hold a daily gathering at the Eidgah, and markets open for a few hours on days JAAC permits.
That is the real offence, because a civilian movement running medical clinics, checkpoints and markets has demonstrated the competence the Pakistani state has never shown. The response has been to criminalise rather than negotiate with the protesters. On 11 June, the government reinstated 177 criminal cases against activists, formally withdrawing the concessions it signed in the Muzaffarabad agreement of October 2025. Elections followed in July-August, with JAAC proscribed and polling postponed in parts of the territory, producing a Muslim League government under Barrister Iftikhar Gilani. Since the central grievance is that 12 of the 45 assembly seats are reserved for Kashmiri refugees from the Indian side, a legislature built to dilute local representation in PoJK was reconstituted by a boycotted vote, then declared the voice of the people.
To stop the future rebellion in PoJK, centralisation is proceeding through the increasing security apparatus in the region rather than through addressing genuine grievances of the local population. Sindh Rangers, a federal paramilitary force with no connection to the territory, are now policing Kashmiri towns. Proscription converts a civic movement over electricity tariffs, flour prices and assembly seats into a national security file, placing it where the Pakistan army prefers all difficult questions to sit. Federal ministers have added claims of a “foreign agenda” with zero evidence, the standard device for denying that people’s grievances are domestic.
International reaction has been loud, well documented and entirely free of consequence for Islamabad. Amnesty International called the proscription disproportionate, unlawful and a violation of freedom of association, and demanded an independent inquiry into killings of civilians. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has repeatedly sought an impartial investigation and received none. Imran Hussain, MP for Bradford East and chair of the British all-party group on Kashmir, tabled an early day motion and wrote to the Foreign Secretary, backed by around 50 parliamentarians, and raised concerns regarding the latest violence against civilians in Rawalakot. The United Kashmir People’s National Party (UKPNP) appealed to the United Nations and the European Union from Geneva and diaspora Kashmiris have protested outside Pakistani missions in London and Birmingham.
That lack of cost for Islamabad for its brazen human rights violations signals what comes next in PoJK. The civilian movement has survived terrorism proscription, bounties, internet and communications blackouts and five months of funerals without fragmenting, because its structure is district-based rather than leader-based and it now delivers services the Pakistani state does not. Whereas Islamabad has concluded it can absorb the reputational damage indefinitely to suppress the people’s movement in PoJK. Both views are diametrically opposite, which is why the Pakistani state will continue to use brute force in PoJK, as the international community pays only lip service and imposes no real consequences on Islamabad.(by Paul Antonopoulos)
>> Source: Greek City Times
