The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | Pak mission behind an ‘omission’
New York, Nov. 15: Pakistan’s acting permanent representative to the UN, Amjad Hussain Sial’s pretension in the General Assembly last Thursday that “an inadvertent omission” in the annual report of the Security Council had left out Kashmir as “one of the oldest disputes on agenda of the Security Council” is a desperate attempt by Islamabad to revive the issue in the UN.
Pakistan sees its hope of once again internationalising the dispute through the UN fade rapidly as India prepares to join the Security Council for a two-year term next January and campaigns for a permanent seat in the council, a claim now endorsed by US President Barack Obama.
But by admitting in a General Assembly speech that the UN was no longer seized of the Kashmir issue, instead of lobbying quietly for its re-inclusion, Sial has alerted the world to Pakistan’s predicament and may have seriously damaged his country’s pet cause against India.
A thorough review of UN records by this reporter following Sial’s statement has revealed that throughout this new millennium the annual reports of the Security Council had never even once mentioned Kashmir by name.
A review of the secretary-general’s annual report on the work of the UN has also not cited the Kashmir dispute since 2005. In that last year when Kashmir figured in the report, it was only in the context of welcoming a resumption of bilateral dialogue between India and Pakistan, a reference that was favourable to New Delhi.
A European ambassador to the UN, echoing the near-unanimous view at the UN, told this reporter today that as an issue before the world body, Kashmir was “dead as a dodo”. Kofi Annan had admitted when he was secretary-general that Security Council resolutions on Kashmir “cannot be enforced and are not self-implementable”.
The latest Security Council report, the subject of Sial’s pretension, does not mention Kashmir by name even when a passing reference to the Indian state would have been routine in the course of the council’s work. In a reflection of general weariness at the way Islamabad continues to revive this “dead dodo”, the report curiously used the euphemism “the India Pakistan question” when Kashmir actually cropped up in an obscure communication.
The mention of “the India Pakistan question” surfaced in a chapter on “Matters brought to the attention of the Security Council but not discussed at meetings of the Council during the period covered” in Part V of the 230-page annual report.
It was occasioned by a letter from Syria’s permanent representative to the UN, Bashar Jaafari, to secretary-general Ban Ki-moon merely conveying the final communiqué of an annual meeting of foreign ministers of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) in New York last year.
Although Syria is a friend of India’s, Jaafari had to send the communication to Ban in his capacity as chair of the OIC group in New York. The communiqué called for implementation of UN resolutions on Kashmir, but it was quietly filed away by whoever received it here and no action was taken.
In New Delhi, the ministry of external affairs said “we condemn and reject” the OIC communiqué, adding that “the OIC has no locus standi in matters concerning India’s internal affairs.”
UN reports continue to mention the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) set up under UN resolutions, but notes that there were no resolutions about it in 2009-2010.
The Pakistani diplomat who spoke in the General Assembly last week may have had no option in the matter. It is the policy of the Asif Zardari government and the present leadership of the army in Rawalpindi to do everything possible to internationalise Kashmir. But at the UN at least, it is strategy that is failing, at least for now.