Asia-Pacific, Headlines, Human Rights

RIGHTS-KASHMIR: India Bristles Over Comparisons with East Timor

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 1999 (IPS) - The international intervention in East Timor has been a hopeful sign for many diplomats here but an annoyance for India, which has had to fend off comparisons between Indonesia’s occupation of Timor and its own role in Kashmir.

As world leaders convened here this week for the 54th session of the UN General Assembly, Pakistani Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz launched into a lengthy comparison between the East Timor crisis and Kashmir’s problems.

“Human rights must be upheld, not only in Kosovo and Timor, but also in Kashmir,” Aziz argued.

Meanwhile, India blocked several leaders of the All Parties Hurriyet Conference (APHC), a separatist Kashmiri coalition, from flying to New York next week to bring their case to the United Nations.

Indian officials have been quick to dismiss any parallels between the problems in East Timor – which was invaded by Indonesia in 1975 but voted for independence in a UN-organised ballot last month – and Kashmir.

“There is no comparison between the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and East Timor,” Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh told IPS.

He voiced concern about the recent humanitarian interventions in Kosovo and East Timor, arguing that “new postulates and theories about intervention need to be debated fully, and not selectively applied.”

In his own address to the General Assembly, Singh made clear that India – along with other developing nations like China and Algeria – was worried that the recent military deployments in Kosovo could hurt national sovereignty.

“It would be an error to assume that the days of the state are over,” Singh said. “The state continues to have a crucial role and relevance…The UN was not conceived as a super-state, and it will not ever become so, principally because there is no viable substitute to the sovereign state.”

While India laid down its objections to the concept, proposed in recent days by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and others, of “humanitarian intervention,” Pakistan tried to make the case that one was needed in Kashmir, a disputed territory which has been on the UN agenda for 50 years.

“We learned valuable lessons from Kosovo and East Timor,” Sartaj Aziz said. He argued that in those cases, the right of self- determination, exercised in an environment free from coercion and supervised by the United Nations, had been indispensable for peace.

“These conclusions were already accepted for Kashmir 50 years ago,” he argued. “The UN Security Council decided that the final disposition of the disputed state would be determined by its people, in a free and impartial plebiscite under UN auspices.” But India never held that vote, he noted.

Comparisons with East Timor were made even more enthusiastically by supporters of Kashmiri independence, including Ghulam Nabi Fai, executive director of the Washington-based Kashmiri American Council.

“While 80 percent of East Timorese voted for independence, an equal or greater percentage of Kashmiris de facto voted for a plebiscite and against India’s military occupation by massively boycotting India’s ongoing parliamentary elections,” Fai claimed in a statement issued Thursday.

In the legislative elections, Kashmiri voters largely heeded a call by the APHC to stay away from the polls, with voter participation estimated at only about 15 percent, down from more than 40 percent in last year’s elections. Voter turnout was especially low in Srinagar, winter capital of Jammu and Kashmir.

“India knows Kashmir cannot be distinguished from East Timor under either international law or humanitarian grounds,” Fai contended.

That view is not shared by Western diplomats, who have dismissed arguments that their response to East Timor’s crisis should also be applied to Kashmir.

“Kashmir is not East Timor,” US State Department spokesman James Rubin said, calling any parallel between the two “facile.”

Ambassador Antonio Monteiro of Portugal, East Timor’s former colonial power, was more specific. “India’s annexation of East Timor (in 1976) was never recognised by the United Nations,” he said, so the Pacific island state’s status was never in dispute, with Portugal still deemed its “administering power.”

By contrast, the United Nations never clarified the status of Kashmir once it deployed a small observer force there in 1949 after the outbreak of Indo-Pakistani war over the territory. Currently, India lays claim to Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan holds about a third of the territory as Azad (‘Free’) Kashmir, and China controls the small Aksai Chin enclave.

Although Pakistan clearly attempted to garner support for Kashmir during the current Assembly proceedings, Islamabad’s embarrassing involvement in fighting in Kargil – on India’s side of the Line of Control between the two countries – has left New Delhi in a stronger position on Kashmir for now.

Despite Pakistan’s effort to deny involvement, Pakistani troops clearly assisted an offensive by separatist forces on Kargil, withdrawing only after US President Bill Clinton secured an agreement on Jul. 4 with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that the troops should depart.

Aziz called the Kargil crisis “a manifestation of the deeper malaise spawned by the unresolved Kashmir problem” and claimed that “Pakistan acted with restraint.” But Singh countered that the insurgents wanted “to hold ransom the world, through an act of aggression.”

Nevertheless, Singh told reporters, the Kargil crisis would not prevent continuing efforts by India to improve relations with Pakistan, which had led to bus links between New Delhi and Lahore this year.

 
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