# Kashmir Is Calling: Keynote at International War Crimes Tribunal, Bosnia | Dr. Omar Suleiman

**Author:** Dr. Omar Suleiman
**Series:** Lecture
**Published:** 2025-04-28
**YouTube:** https://youtu.be/eNCIwLf_0oA
**URL:** https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/lecture/kashmir-is-calling-keynote-lecture-international-war-crimes-tribunal-bosnia
**Topics:** Politics & Practical Theology, Social Justice

## Description
In this powerful lecture at the Kashmir Genocide Russell Tribunal from 2021, Dr. Omar Suleiman exposes the deep injustices faced by the people of Kashmir and draws critical parallels to other global struggles against oppression. From Kashmir to Gaza, from Yemen to Myanmar, injustice anywhere is a...

## Transcript
**[0:00]** Today, our heart is Kashmir. I'd like to remind myself and others here that our present narratives are often so distorted due to deceptive narratives about history that have found their

**[0:17]** ways into the discourse. When the British sold Kashmir to the Hindu Dogra in the 1800s, it was on the condition that they affirm British supremacy. We today are not subjected to that delusion. There were a people in Kashmir before the British arrived, and there

**[0:36]** were a people in Kashmir before the British left behind a mess of casualties that manifested most prominently in the partition that followed. In fact, there were a people in Kashmir before the creation of the states of India or Pakistan. Martyrs' Day speaks to a massacre in 1931

**[0:53]** before either were established. And it's just as important to understand the reality of 1931 in Kashmir as it is to make sense of the bloody occupation in 1947, just like it's important to understand what 1917 meant for the Palestinians as it is 1948. What's

**[1:13]** at stake is that Kashmir remains a playground of the global superpowers around it, the way we see happening in places like Syria and Yemen, and that a less-than-human status is maintained under blockade, as we see in places like Gaza. The contradiction that India is

**[1:31]** referred to as the world's largest democracy in the world, while not only recently enshrining Modi's fascism into law with citizenship act, but continuing to maintain the most militarized zone in the world in Kashmir with up to a million troops. It is an irony similar to

**[1:49]** that of Israel being referred to as the only democracy in the Middle East, with millions of occupied people without citizenship whose subhumanity is now written into the Jewish nation-state law. The tragedy of genocide is not just the genocide itself, but other

**[2:06]** compounding factors. That the legal determination of genocide is most often not enough for the world to actually act, nor is it when the people can no longer bear the crimes inflicted upon them. It's when our global conscience has been sufficiently disturbed that we're

**[2:27]** able to activate the necessary pressure to stop genocide. Working against us in that regard is that the purveyors of violence, settler colonialism, and ethnic cleansing maintain not just superior military capacity, but the ability to black out, bomb, and cripple

**[2:43]** the media exposure of those crimes. It's not just the technology of their drones, but the ability to hack phones abroad and shut down phones domestically, all while daring international bodies of law to stop them. We also have to reckon with our own desensitization, numbness,

**[3:01]** and apathy with the amount of collective tragedy that only emboldened the grip of oppressors while weakening the will to liberation. And lastly, that as these cases grow, the oppressed are forced into another layer of cruelty by having to compete for the attention of the

**[3:20]** world. Would Bosnia, which is again sensing the creeping factors that led to the awful tragedies in the 90s, still be front and center for us if it happened in 2021? Do Afghanistan or Iraq still matter? Is it Yemen or Syria, Ethiopia or Mali, Honduras or Guatemala, the

**[3:40]** Uyghurs or the Rohingya? To us, it must always be all of the above and more, with only our efforts being divided for the sake of being specialized, not our empathy selective on the basis of convenience or culture. So I'm here as many of you today, not as an expert

**[3:59]** of Kashmir, but wanting in fact to be further educated on Kashmir. Not as an eyewitness to the atrocities on the ground, but a witness with my ears, eyes, heart and mind to our brothers and sisters from Kashmir who can tell us how we can be better for them. The

**[4:17]** Foreign Minister of Bosnia informed us yesterday that she would arrange a meeting with some of the mothers of the martyrs of Srebrenica. While that is a great honor, I can guarantee you they would have much preferred our earlier intervention over our delayed condolences.

**[4:38]** So let's not continue to merely make symbols of the tragedies we could have stopped with the help of Allah and then our insistence on working together for a better world for all. Thank you. Wassalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.

**[5:00]** For more information visit www.yaqeeninstitute.org

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