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Indictment of UN on Kashmir in "Tower of Babble"

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HinduThought, "Pranawa C. Deshmukh"

<pcdeshmukh> wrote:

Ambassador Dore Gold is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public

Affairs http://www.jcpa.org/dgold.htm. He was the eleventh Permanent

Representative of Israel to the United Nations (1997-1999).

Previously he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to the former Prime

Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu , Excerpts from his latest

book , where he charged UN for internationalizing KASHMIR ISSUE .

and loop hole of Article 2 of UN Charter .

http://www.jcpa.org/tower-of-babble.htm

 

 

 

 

The UN crated a kind of false symmetry between the fundamental

grievances of each side and placed them on the same moral plane.

Indian government ultimately rejected the UN's latest intervention,

arguing that resolution 726 made India look a "co-accused" with

Pakistan.

 

India had brought what it felt was a clear-cut case of aggression

to the UN and come up empty-handed, with the UN's only response

being to form a committee. This was hardly the decisive action Lord

Mountbatten had promised.

 

The British, as well as the Americans, who followed their lead,

had greater interests in Pakistan, which was immediately contiguous

to the Eurasian landmasses, and could provide strategic bases to the

West in the emerging Cold War. These military interests, and not any

abstract principles about aggression, would determine their approach

to the Indian complaint at the UN.

 

 

 

Tower of Babble

 

 

The moral clarity of the 1945 UN was becoming obfuscated; standards

for distinguishing right from wrong could not be so easily applied

in the new political universe that was forming, in which aggression

could be excused and morality judged in relative terms.

 

 

 

Since Pakistani forces were involved in a conflict on Indian

Territory, Nehru considered expanding the confrontation into a full-

scale counterattack against Pakistan. But Lord Mountbatten persuaded

him to go to the UN instead .He convinced Nehru that the UN would

promptly direct Pakistan to withdraw the raiders who had invaded

Kashmir. So on January 1, 1948, India turned to the UN Security

Council.

 

 

 

India accused Pakistan of forthright aggression. Further damning was

the Indian claim that many of 19,000 "invaders" who had entered

Kashmir were Pathan tribesmen from NWFP, near the Afghan border, who

had been transported across all of the Pakistan in order to reach

Kashmiri territory. The Indians insisted that the Security Council

call on Pakistan to stop these attacks, warning that the situation

in Kashmir was a "threat to International peace and security with

which it is pregnant if it is not solved immediately".

 

Press reports at the time supported India's charge. For example, the

Time of London wrote on January 13, 1948, "That Pakistan is

unofficially involved in aiding the raiders is certain. Their

correspondent has first hand evidence that arms, ammunition and

supplies are being made available to the Azad Kashmir forces. A few

Pakistani officers also helping direct their operations "

 

Pakistan countered the Indian Charges at the UN and flatly denied

that it has provided any assistance to the tribesmen who had invaded

Kashmir. and Pakistani foreign Minister questioned the validity of

Kashmir's accession to India , though India's representative had

promised the security Council that the Kashmiri people would have a

plebiscite to ratify the accession .

 

 

 

The UN Security Council adopted a policy of strict evenhandedness in

its treatment of both India and Pakistan .On January 20, 1948, the

UN passed a resolution establishing a three-member commission on

India and Pakistan UNCIP to travel to Kashmir and determine the

facts of what exactly had happened. The resolution said nothing

about a Pakistani insurgency or "tribesmen" that appeared in India's

complaint. India had brought what it felt was a clear-cut case of

aggression to the UN and come up empty-handed, with the UN's only

response being to form a committee. This was hardly the decisive

action Lord Mountbatten had promised.

 

 

 

At the UN, Indian officials felt, Pakistan " had succeeded, with

the support of the British and American members, in diverting the

attention from that complaint [of Pakistani aggression] to the

problem of the dispute between India and Pakistan over the question

of Jammu and Kashmir. As a result, " Pakistan's aggression was

pushed into background." Sardar Patel, the Indian Official

responsible for the States Ministry, concluded that by referring the

Kashmir issue to the UN, India had unwittingly prolonged the dispute

and obscured the merits of its case. Indeed, the Conflict appeared

to be escalating after the UN's first engagement. In short, for

India, going to the UN was a mistake.

 

 

 

What went wrong for India at the UN Security Council? Didn't the

Indians have an Open-and –shut case of Pakistani aggression against

their territory? It turned out that Mountbatten's suggestion to

Nehru that he would get a fair hearing at the UN had been somewhat

disingenuous. British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin wrote to PM

Clement Attlee that London had to be very careful about siding with

India at the UN, given the tensions that had arisen in the Islamic

world over Palestine. Against this background, one can see how it

would have been difficult for India to get a fair hearing inn the UN

Security Council. The British, as well as the Americans, who

followed their lead, had greater interests in Pakistan, which was

immediately contiguous to the Eurasian landmasses, and could provide

strategic bases to the West in the emerging Cold War. These military

interests, and not any abstract principles about aggression, would

determine their approach to the Indian complaint at the UN.

 

 

 

On April 21, 1948, the UN Security Council adopted another

resolution on Kashmir, this one expanding UNCIP's membership to five

states and stating that "tribesmen and Pakistani nationals not

normally resident there " needed to withdraw from Kashmir. With

resolution 726 , it looked as though the UN was slowly beginning to

acknowledge aggression . But the resolution did not suggest strong

and immediate steps to remedy what had occurred, and it also called

on India to reduce its forces in Kashmir "to minimum strength

required " for maintaining Law and order. Moreover, it very

carefully balanced its call for Pakistan to withdraw insurgents with

a call for India to hold a plebiscite on Kashmir. It was as though

both states were equally fault: Pakistan for promoting an insurgency

in Kashmir, and India for delaying the plebiscite that infact, had

originally proposed.

 

 

 

The UN crated a kind of false symmetry between the fundamental

grievances of each side and placed them on the same moral plane.

Indian government ultimately rejected the UN's latest intervention,

arguing that resolution 726 made India look a "co-accused" with

Pakistan.

 

 

 

When UNCIP prepared its first report, it finally recognized

Pakistan's direct involvement in Kashmir. Despite that UN still was

not willing to determine that aggression had occurred and to take

measures accordingly. Rather being punished by the UN for its

aggression, Pakistan was deriving distinct territorial and strategic

advantages.

 

 

 

The Legacy of early failure:

 

The UN's failure to deal with conflicts in Israel and Kashmir had a

profound impact. These tests came almost immediately after the

organization's formation, and by failing to take firm stand against

well-documented cases of aggression; the UN betrayed the vision of

its founding fathers. In each case it was not difficult to

establish that a country had been the victim of armed attack.

 

The natural tendency of UN diplomats was to accept the arguments

of warring parties equally, rather than penalizing the aggressor,

rewarding the defender; and thereby deterring armed attacks in

future. It is no wonder that India eventually regretted that it had

turned to the UN in the first place. The UN not

only "internationalized" the issue of Kashmir's fate, which from

India's perspective was an internal matter, it also prolonged the

conflict with Pakistan, which lead to at least 2 full scale wars on

the Indian Subcontinent. It repeatedly created a false equivalence

between those who tried to work within the norm of the UN and those

who rejected them.

 

 

 

The UN's failure with Israel and India were particularly

problematic because these cases set precedents.

 

 

 

 

 

Article 2 of the UN charter prohibited the use of force against

the "territorial integrity " of another state. Many states,

disputing the borders of their neighbors, could argue that this

fundamental UN prohibition was not applicable in their case, because

their military incursion did not violate their neighbor's

territorial integrity. Dozens of states with irredentist claim could

exploit this loophole, leading to worldwide anarchical conditions.

Why rely on the caveats of the UN charter when Pakistan had moved

into Kashmir and was not condemned? Why shouldn't they follow that

lead?

 

 

 

Communist China was one nation, which took the advantage of the UN's

failures. In October 1950, a half million PLA soldiers invaded Tibet

to assert China's territorial claim. The question of whether the

status of Tibet was an internal affairs or a matter of International

dispute has been settled by overwhelming force.

 

 

 

The problem wasn't that Chinese specifically examined that cases of

Indian or Israel and then decided that they could grab Tibet with

impunity. The problem was that the UN's failure to act decisively

had made it difficult to discern a clear and broadly applied UN

doctrine against aggression. Stopping aggression was one of the main

purposes for which the UN had been founded; yet even in the few

years since it was born, aggression was spreading. In June 1950,

just before the subjugation of Tibet, a massive force from North

Korea had invaded South Korea.

 

 

 

The absence of a firm norm against aggression plagued the UN in the

subsequent decades as well, India took the law into its hands in

1962, when it overran the tiny Portuguese colony of Goa India could

argue that since the UN had NOT openly condemned Pakistan's invasion

of Kashmir, India had also a right to use force, especially against

an outdated colonial outpost whose legitimacy, it would argue, the

new global consensus in the General Assembly did not accept.

 

 

 

The use of force to consolidate new states became the norm in the

Third World.

 

 

 

The UN was designed to fill a unique role. It was supposed to create

international standards that would help shape a more stable world

order. The UN Charter specifically empowered the UN Security Council

to determine whether an act of aggression had taken place (Article

39). The mandate was clear, but unfortunately the UN has not been

able to follow the mandate consistently. The problem is that the UN

Security Council is not a court that determines the guilty or

innocence of states by trying to use objective legal criteria. It is

first and foremost a political body, and it has been grossly

inconsistent in judging cases of aggression. Moral relativism was an

inevitable by-product of the UN's work; often the attacker was not

treated very different from the victim of aggression.

 

 

 

As early as the 1940's and 1950's the UN did not meet its

responsibility to respond to acts of aggression, and therefore it

did not advance the sense that there was an agreed basis for a new

world order. Instead what healed the international community

together was the alliance system created by the Cold War

 

 

 

 

 

Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less.

 

 

--- End forwarded message ---

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