DISARMAMENT-UN: India, Pakistan Make Strange Bedfellows

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 5 1998 (IPS) - Although Indian and Pakistani leaders heaped abuse on each other while renewing their arms race these past weeks, diplomats from the two countries appeared united in an effort to avoid U.N. criticism of their nuclear weapons programmes.

Both Indian and Pakistani diplomats are trying to head off action by the U.N. Security Council when it takes up a resolution which could be the first step in enacting sanctions against either country if it continued with its nuclear tests. The council could begin debate on the resolution Friday, although some diplomats believed this unlikely.

Delegates here said that both countries had lobbied hard with such friendly national groupings as the Non-Aligned Movement and Organisation of the Islamic Conference, to persuade those nations not to allow the Council to take action agaimnst them or on other developing nations which sought to test nuclear weapons.

Those efforts have borne fruit, officials told IPS. Of the 10 non-permanent members of the Security Council, Bahrain, Gabon, Gambia and Kenya have resisted calls to co-sponsor a resolution that would demand that India and Pakistan “refrain from further nuclear tests.”

Currently another four non-permanent members – Japan, Costa Rica, Sweden and Slovenia – are co-sponsoring the resolution to be discussed by the 15 nations on the Security Council.

The battle for support was crucial, because the five permanent Security Council members – Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States – also comprise the world’s five declared nuclear weapons states. Therefore they were in a poor position to criticise India and Pakistan for their tests, officials said.

The resolution is sponsored primarily by Japan, the only nation to have suffered the effects of a nuclear attack. It contained only a vague reference to further punishments if, as expected, India and Pakistan reserved the right to continue testing and refused to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

The draft resolution declared the Council’s “readiness to consider further measures if it deems that India and Pakistan have not taken sufficient steps” to back off from their nuclear weapons programmes. Last month, India conducted five nuclear test explosions and Pakistan conducted six following the decision by the right-wing government of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to “weaponise” the country’s nuclear programme.

The draft text, however, included other language which could prevent its acceptance even by the nuclear states which were concerned by the arms race in South Asia.

China, which has been accused of supplying advanced weapons technology to its ally, Pakistan, reportedly opposed the draft’s encouragement to countries “to cease to supply India and Pakistan with equipment, material and related technology, which could be used to develop their nuclear weapons capacity.”

Russia meanwhile also objected to the draft, which Moscow worried could harm its own ally, India. Still, all five nuclear states, whose foreign ministers met in Geneva Thursday, agreed on the need to prevent exports of nuclear-related technology to India or Pakistan, as well as on the necessity for both countries to halt nuclear tests.

The five nations called on India and Pakistan to adhere to the CTBT “immediately and unconditionally,” and for both to commit themselves not to deploy nuclear weapons or missiles. Vajpayee, however, has rejected any Indian signing of the CTBT, while Pakistan has insisted it will only sign the test ban pact once India has also done so.

The five nuclear states also pledged in Geneva that they would “actively encourage India and Pakistan to find mutually acceptable solutions, through direct dialogue, that address the root causes of the tension, including Kashmir.”

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who has lobbied her counterparts on the other nuclear powers for tougher sanctions, indicated that other nations should become involved in the Kashmir dispute – a key Pakistani demand, which has been rebuffed repeatedly by India.

But few diplomats here expected Washington to be able to secure any outside participation in the Kashmir dispute while India insisted the conflict must be addressed bilaterally between Islamabad and New Delhi. The United States, the main force seeking sanctions on the two countries for their nuclear tests, faced an additional problem: an increasing indifference, particularly among developing nations, toward all sanctions.

Mindful of the uphill battle to end embargoes against Libya and Iraq, many diplomats have shrugged off the idea of new sanctions regimes.

“In any case, what sense does it make for (the five permanent Council members) to punish India and Pakistan for testing weapons that they already have?” one African diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, asked. “If they want sanctions, then let it apply to all countries who maintain nuclear weapons.”