|

To call Kashmir a territorial dispute is to dehumanize it: Ambassador Buch

Articles, Uncategorised

November 12, 2017. New York. “It was an honor to have an hour-long meeting with Ambassador Yusuf Buch at his residence in New York City,” said Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, Secretary General, World Kashmir Awareness Forum. While paying homage to Ambassador Buch’s life in exile, Fai said: “Ambassador Yusuf Buch born in Srinagar (Capitol City of Kashmir) was along with few other promising and brilliant youth exiled from the state in 1947 for his political beliefs. Mr. Buch was the Senior Advisor to the United Nations Secretary General for 20 years. His contribution to Kashmir cause has been legendary ever since Kashmir dispute was brought to the United Nations by India in 1948. Working in tandem with Kashmiri diaspora, Ambassador Buch had added vibrancy to the Kashmir cause. The nation of Kashmir salutes his commitment and dedication, and pay tribute to his inspirational spirit. Ambassador Buch is undoubtedly, a living encyclopedia on Kashmir.”

Ambassador Buch told me that “It is of utmost importance to counter the impression that the Kashmir issue has somehow lost its urgency or shed its significance or is being addressed in some kind of a mythical peace process. The impression needs to be countered because it is false, because it ignores the agony of the people of Kashmir and because it thereby hardens the psychological underpinning of the current diplomatic inaction regarding the issue. We owe it to the tens of thousands whose blood has consecrated the cause of Kashmir’s Azadi to try and disentangle it in whatever degree we can.” Buch Sahib added “The attitude that needs to be fought in the context not only of Kashmir but of every major international problem is that of turning our backs to the Charter of the United Nations. The Charter is not scripture or a book of morals but, let us not forget, a multilateral treaty as binding on the largest or most powerful member state of the world organization as on the smallest or weakest. The sanity of international agreements must remain one of the bases of a sane and stable international order. The Kashmir issue involves that principle most pointedly.”

When asked whether Kashmir was a territorial issue between India and Pakistan, Mr. Buch replied “Not much argument is called for to refute the proposition that Kashmir is just a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. To call it a territorial dispute is simply to dehumanize it. And to go as far as saying that the dispute is not really about Kashmir amounts to saying in effect that Kashmiris are but a mythical people.”

Buch Sahib responded when I asked: Why do the Kashmiris call for third party mediation? “The breaking of the impasse over Kashmir between India and Pakistan would be greatly facilitated by the presence of a mediator who would define the obligations of the parties under the agreements concluded between them, spell out the contentious issues and the conflicting positions and remove the confusion about what needs to be done to narrow the gap.”

Ambassador Buch suggested: “The Governments of Pakistan and India have ample opportunities to articulate their positions and make them known to the world. Not so the people of Kashmir. I neither pretend impartiality nor claim a thorough knowledge of, or adherence to, the position of any particular section of Kashmiri opinion. But I think that an attempt to see the conflict from a Kashmiri – and human – perspective may not be useless in any mental exercise towards its resolution.”

Similar Posts

  • |

    Intervention of the United Nations Must for Peace In Kashmir

    New York, October 1, 2017. In a memorandum submitted to Mr. Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, Secretary General, World Kashmir Awareness Forum and Barrister Sultan Mehmood Choudhary, former Prime Minister of Azad Kashmir highlighted the following:

    We are writing to urge a leadership role of the United Nations in resolving the 70-year-old Kashmir conflict that has inflicted pain, agony, and injustice on a scale that makes East Timor, and Southern Sudan pale in comparison: more than 100,000 killings in the past two decade alone, and routine rape, torture, mutilation, plunder, disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and ruthless punishment of peaceful political dissent.

  • |

    Kashmir: Where the Truth Doesn’t Matter

    NPR’s Julie McCarthy was in Kashmir earlier in September and reported on how different the unrest seems now compared to previous years. “First of all, there’s this unprecedented kind of force being used. There’s these high-velocity pellet shotguns for crowd control. And it’s left thousands of people riddled with pellet injuries. And a lot of them have damaged eyesight. And some demonstrators have thrown stones, attacked police stations and government buildings. And, unusually, this started in rural areas. And it has spread throughout the Kashmir Valley. And it’s lasted over 60 days. That’s also unusual.”

    Perhaps it’s not enough to point out that the champion of this latest uprising, a person who was slain in a fashion frequently called “extrajudicial” by others in the press, and whose killing was the primary provocation for the current uprising, was a self-declared militant who had used social media to resist the Indian occupation. He was someone who had become a symbol of the true spirit of resistance in the hearts of all Kashmiris.

  • |

    India – US Trade and How It Will Impact Kashmir

    While the hullabaloo over Modi’s rise on the international stage has been on the verge of being a circus, with all the elephants of trade on parade, it is a distraction from the recent collective beating of chests being put on by joint Naval forces of India, the United States and Japan in the South China Sea, called Exercise Malabar, an annual event since 1992 bilaterally between India and the U.S.  Japan joined just last year.  It has been held in previous years in the Indian Ocean and other areas closer to home for India.  But the hegemonic ambitions of this odd couple now reflects the deepening commitment the two countries have made to sharing a strategic military alignment against China for dominance in South and Southeast Asia.
  • |

    Kashmir Dispute: A Way Forward

    The dispute over the status of Kashmir can be settled only in accordance with the will of the people which can be ascertained through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite, internationally supervised. This was the common ground taken by all the three parties to the dispute – viz.: the people of Kashmir, India and Pakistan. It was supported without any dissent by the United Nations Security Council – and prominently championed by the United States, Britain and France.

  • |

    Kashmiris’ Wishes Must Be Respected: Dr. Fai

    Washington, D.C. June 29, 2012. “Any Kashmir solution that fails to command the consensus of the 17 million people of Jammu & Kashmir is doomed to shipwreck moments after launching. Indeed, any process that ignores the wishes of the people of Kashmir will not only prove to be an exercise in futility but can also cause incalculable human and political damage. Thus, it makes no sense to negotiate over their heads. The best that could result from these meaningless negotiations would be sound and fury signifying nothing, as at Tashkent, Simla, Lahore and elsewhere,” said Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai at a reception held in his honor in Darnestown, Maryland.

    Dr. Fai thanked the members of the Kashmiri American community for becoming instrumental in highlighting the issue of Kashmir not only in Washington, D. C. but in New York City as well. He told his well-wishers that the people of the Indian Occupied Kashmir remain indebted to them for their relentless and consistent advocacy for the just cause of Kasshmir.