All-Parties Hurriyet Conference Chairman Syed Ali Geelani has called on Pakistan to go beyond the political, diplomatic and moral support it extends to the Kashmir cause. While addressing a seminar over the phone on the latest situation in Kashmir in Islamabad on Friday, Mr Geelani called on Pakistan to act as a party to the dispute. His call came at a time when the resistance movement in Held Kashmir was intensifying, with three more people killed the same day, taking the death toll of the movement to 97 since it started in June. Though the Indians had recently held a meeting to deal with the situation there, they demonstrated by Fridays killings that the previous policy, of giving the occupation forces free rein to exterminate Kashmiris, continued. Mr Geelanis call should be seen in Pakistan as a cry for help. There is a silence, so strange as to be meaningful, over the movement, from the high officials of Pakistan. Only the Foreign Minister is left to issue any statements about the movement, as he did on Friday, when he pointed out that India was trying to exterminate a new generation of Kashmiris struggling to achieve self-determination, and rid themselves of the yoke of Indian occupation. Mr Geelani probably does not know why the current government is not busy highlighting the Indian human rights abuses in Held Kashmir at every possible forum, thus giving the lie to the Indian wish to give the impression that it will ultimately restore normalcy there. However, the Pakistan government wishes to please the USA, which wishes to prop India up as its regional bulwark, and thus wishes to engage with India in talks which it refuses to do. If that means selling the Kashmiris down the river, it will do so willingly. Pakistan should take the current struggle within Kashmir with the seriousness it deserves. It should not merely take it as the outburst of a new generation, but should view it as an opportunity to show the international community, which has turned away from it in the hope of gaining access to the large Indian market, the true face of so-called Indian secularism. The Kashmiri people look to Pakistan not just because they want to accede to it, but because they see its missions abroad as propagating the Kashmir cause, especially at times when, as now, the freedom struggle reaches a new pitch. If they see, as now, Pakistani officials joining in the conspiracy of silence which the Indian propaganda machine has worked so hard to create, their drive for freedom will be unaffected, but what they do once they have obtained it, becomes open to debate.