SOUTH ASIA: Bhutto Offers India Talks on Ending Arms Race

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 3 1996 (IPS) - The United Nations should endorse multi-party talks to resolve the outstanding military and political disputes between India.and Pakistan, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has proposed.

Appearing before the U.N. General Assembly Thursday, the prime minister pledged Pakistan’s commitment to a dialogue on military issues, not only with India but also with the five permanent members of the Security Council: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. Germany and Japan could also participate, she said.

The objective of such talks, Bhutto proposed, would be to resolve the five-decade dispute over Kashmir, and to discuss nuclear restraint and conventional arms control in South Asia.

“India has the third largest army in the world today, almost all of which is deployed against Pakistan,” the prime minister accused.

As a result, she said, multilateral talks are needed as “a framework for genuine negotiations which can lead to a resolution of disputes, arrest the nuclear threat and promote prosperity in South Asia.”

Bhutto’s proposals are the latest of Pakistan’s efforts to seize the initiative since India blocked consensus approval for a nuclear Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva in August. Pakistan subsequently voted in favour of the treaty last month at the General Assembly, but has insisted it will not sign the CTBT until India also does so.

Those holdouts will likely prevent the treaty, which bans all nuclear test explosions and was signed by more than 100 nations last week, from taking effect anytime soon. India and Pakistan, both of which are believed to have nuclear weapons, are among 44 nations that must sign the treaty within the next three years before it can enter into force.

“We are prepared to sign any and all nuclear treaties if India simultaneously signs with us,” Bhutto promised the 185-nation Assembly. But she warned: “Any step of nuclear escalation by our neighbour will find a response from us to preserve our national security.”

“Our neighbours possess nuclear weapons, declared or undeclared,” countered Inder Kumar Gujral, India’s foreign minister, who is also visiting the United Nations this week. “No government in India can remain indifferent to this fact.”

The Indian envoy insisted, “We have no desire to go nuclear ourselves — but we cannot give up our nuclear option in this environment.”

While the Pakistani leader was offering a multilateral solution to the continuing arms race in South Asia, Gujral was telling another audience in New York that bilateral efforts could ease tensions instead.

Gujral told the Foreign Policy Association Thursday that his prime minister, H.D. Deve Gowda, has already offered Bhutto a resumption of bilateral talks on “all outstanding issues,” which have been stalled for two years.

“While we are waiting for Islamabad’s response, we have unilaterally taken several measures to improve the relationship at people-to-people levels,” he added.

Those efforts fit squarely with India’s contention that the Kashmir dispute in particular not be ‘internationalised,’ an aim both sides pledged to uphold in the Simla Agreement which followed Pakistan’s defeat in a 1971 war between the two nations.

Pakistan has lost three wars, fought at least partly over the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, since 1947. India, meanwhile, has been unable to quell an insurgency in its portion of Kashmir, where some 40,000 people have been killed since a separatist rebellion began in 1989.

Bhutto maintains that the United Nations must address the Kashmir crisis, citing an early U.N. Security Council resolution that the region’s status would be resolved “through the democratic means of a free and impartial plebiscite conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.”

“To thine own resolutions be true,” Bhutto told the Assembly. “There is no statute of limitations on resolutions of the United Nations.”

India has argued otherwise, and the United Nations has in fact maintained a discreet silence on the Kashmir issue for several decades. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has repeatedly offered his services to both sides if they both were to request his help, but New Delhi has shown no interest in the offer.

India, meanwhile, has taken the initiative on the issue by holding largely peaceful elections in Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir over the past few weeks. The moderate National Conference, led by Farooq Abdullah, is leading early returns from the election, which drew calls for a boycott from pro-independence and pro-Pakistan groups.

But Bhutto denounced the legislative vote as “a sham election,” and she contended, “Those very people who claim to be front runners in the elections cannot even enter the valley without armed escorts, much less muster popular support.”

Whether the Pakistani leader is serious about efforts for a new peace initiative with India, or is blustering for her own domestic interests, is equally in doubt.

Bhutto comes at a low time for her government, following disputes with President Farooq Leghari, the withholding of a tranche of loans from the International Monetary Fund, and the suspicious death of her brother (and political rival) Murtaza in a battle with police in her home province, Sindh.

Even as Bhutto arrived in New York, one of the police officers accused of killing her brother died mysteriously in police custody, with police accounts reporting that he committed suicide over the weekend.