UN Is Equally Culpable For Killings in Kashmir

Punchline

Call for UN Session

BY

Z. G. Muhammad

The ongoing bloodbath in Kashmir has been loudly calling for holding of an ‘emergency special session’ of the United Nations Security Council. Lives of a whole generation in the age group of 8 to 25 is at risk.

Like animals, they are killed with live ammunition, shot with hundreds of pellets in their faces and eyes –thrown in a dark world with ‘light denied forever’ and maimed and disabled for life. In scores of towns, hundreds of villages and desolate hamlets the dance of death are being enacted rapturously by troops with impunity.

Many youths like Riyaz Ahmad Shah an ATM Guard not part of protest rally or Intifada is pumped with hundreds of pellets in the abdomen and chest for sport.  On Friday 5 August 2016, three youth were killed and over three hundred wounded with bullets and pellets. The number of non-combatant youth killed during past 27 days has gone up to fifty-seven.  Those with bullet and pellet wounds has touching an alarming figure of five thousand. Interestingly and intriguingly when over eight million people were living a caged life, bullets and pellets were being showered on the people at scores of places, New Delhi was not telling the whole truth to the Supreme Court of India.

Many important international newspapers from the New York Times to the Time Magazine to the Guardian decried the blinding of Kashmiri children. Hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and academics across the globe expressed their anguish against the brutality. In a joint statement signed by over a thousand of well-known public figures of eminence including some Indian’s have expressed their solidarity with the people of Kashmir. Those who have signed also include Professor Noam Chomsky, MIT, USA; Professor Barbara Harris-White, Emeritus, Oxford University, UK; Professor Bobby Banerjee, Cass Business School, UK; Professor Pritam Singh, Oxford Brookes University, UK; and Dr Ravinder Kaur, University of Copenhagen.   ‘The humanitarian crisis unfolding in Kashmir currently’ the letter says ‘is not a one off, it has been an integral part of how India continues to rule over Kashmir. Such events have repeatedly occurred throughout the past three decades, with India continuing to look away from the writing on the wall.”

Notwithstanding, concern shown by some prominent citizen in the world, the UN   is yet to live up to live up to its Charter. Through a various resolution passed on the floor of the floor of the Security Council, it is committed to holding a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir. There can be no denying that the Secretary General, Bon Ki-Moon expressed his concern over the situation in Kashmir and regretted killings. Nevertheless, mere issuance of a statement is not sufficient for putting an end to the killing and blinding of youth and teenagers.  The ongoing killings and blinding are part of sixty-seven years saga of dances of death enacted in the State just two months after the departure of the British from the Sub-Continent.  The UNSC, as guarantor of the right of self-determination to the people of the State, is equally culpable as the perpetrators of these rights violations. The current wave of protests in Kashmir should wake up the UNSC and the World Powers to harsher realities that these could lead to a nuclear conflagration between the two South-Asian nuclear powers. Since the birth of Dispute, with the forces of the two countries deployed along the eight hundred Kilometre long ceasefire line (LOC) and working boundary having been facing each other eyeball to eyeball.  ’ Having fought four wars over Kashmir, the two countries continue to be on tripwire till date. The 1999 fighting in Kargil had caused international concern that it might escalate into a general war between the two nuclear powers leading to nuclear disaster in the region. It was but for the intervention of President Bill Clinton saving the situation.  The acrimony that has been building up between New Delhi and Islamabad for past few months more particularly from July as was manifest during Home Minister, Rajnath Singh’s visit to Islamabad for attending the SAARC Home Ministers conference does not portend well for South Asia.   The visible belligerent attitude on both the sides could move beyond diplomatic arena to the battlegrounds.    As pointed out by a Pakistani commentator and analyst Shahzad Chaudhry, “Both nations are nuclear and have vowed to use the arsenal in defence were a need to do so arise. The only other border where such levels of readiness exist is the Korean border, minus the ‘mutual’ nuclear threat. The people that inhabit this region, almost 1.4 billion – twenty-five percent of the world population – are only a nuclear flash away from being consumed, nay annihilated. Such are the stakes.” (News August 05, 2016)

Kashmir is continuing to be on its agenda it bounden duty of the UN under various resolution for preventing Kashmir situation flaring up into a war between India and Pakistan- the presence of UN Military Observers testifies that. Equally, the organisation is charged to see the Kashmir Dispute resolved according to the resolution of 1948, 1947 and 1957.

To prevent another war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the UNSC needs to call an ‘emergency special session’  under the resolution 377 A (V) titled “Uniting for Peace,” adopted by the General Assembly on 3 November 1950. The session can be called within twenty-four hours of the request maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression. There is no need for unanimity amongst the permanent members. Such emergency special session can be called if requested by the Security Council on the vote of any seven members, or by a majority of the Members of the United Nations.

The OIC has fifty-six members. Notwithstanding, its image of a toothless tiger, it is the biggest forum in the world outside the United Nations and has a say in the world affairs.   It is high time for the OIC to go beyond its ritualistic resolution on Kashmir and make a request to the UN for holding an ‘emergency session’ of the United Nations Security Council for debating the Kashmir situation- where bloodbath has been going for the past one month with impunity.

Published in Greater Kashmir on 8-8-16