Kashmir is caught in a 69-year long conflict, one of the world’s longest ongoing conflicts since the division Subcontinent into of Pakistan and India.
The Kashmir crisis was one of the first for the U.N. in 1948 of the post-World War II era and U.N. involvement persisted for 23 years. It has been 68 years since the Kashmir dispute was first brought to debate in the U.N. but a solution has yet to be reached.
U.N. involvement in the region was relatively insignificant from the end of the second Indo-Pak War of 1965 to the third War of 1971, with the United Nations passing 23 resolutions calling for a free and impartial plebiscite under which the Kashmiri people could decide their own future. By 1971, the U.N. was completely out of the picture with India refusing to implement U.N. resolutions on Kashmir and refusing to hold a plebiscite.
It’s disappointing to see that India is not the only one closing its doors on any solution but the U.N. seems to be doing the same. The silence of the U.N. and the ineffectiveness of the UNSC is just further evidence of the challenging structure of the organization, which has failed to fulfill its claims to protect global peace.
The apathy of the world and non-implementation of UNSC resolutions paved the way for Kashmiris to take up arms opposing India’s brutality in 1989 and India subsequently used the tragedy of 9/11 as an opportunity to label the Kashmiri struggle for freedom as a form of terrorism. Regardless, the fact that both Pakistan and India are nuclear powers should scare the U.N. enough to compel them to get involved in the Kashmir conflict. The two countries, which have already gone to war three times, now have nuclear weapons to contend with and the subcontinent is heating up again.
This article is written by Merve Şebnem Oruç and was first published at Daily Sabah Turkey