The UN must shed its ambivalence and act
For long now, India has been asking the United Nations (UN) to show spine in tackling global terror. It has been impressing upon the world body to go beyond paying lip service and act decisively. New Delhi has reasons to be upset. The United Nations has not even been able to define terrorism, let alone prepare a comprehensive plan to combat it in all its malevolent forms. The Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism (CCIT), a two-decade old idea, has remained a non-starter despite India's consistent push for its adoption. New Delhi revived the proposal at the UN General Assembly in September, in the wake of the terror strike in Dhaka.
A senior Indian official was then quoted as saying, “As the attack in Dhaka has shown, international terrorism has become the biggest scourge facing the civilised world. India has been trying to build convergence around the CCIT, pending since 1996, so that we can plug an important legal lacuna in the fight against terror.” Without an adoption of the CCIT, terror-sponsoring nations and those others who support such countries, will continue to indulge in legalese to avoid censure or consequent global action. This is how Pakistan and Pakistan-based terror outfits have been getting away for decades, and this is also how countries like China are able to brazenly support Pakistan's soft-peddling on terror and block UN moves to name the likes of Masood Azhar as terrorists and sanction them.
This is indeed ironical given that the UN itself has named outfits run by such people as terror groups. For instance, while Azhar's Jaish-e-Mohammed has been designated by the UN as a terrorist organisation, its chief is not banned because of China's veto. The United Nations' helplessness would have been, therefore, even comical were it not for the tragic consequences this has had — and is having. Terror outfits across the world function freely, without any concerted and coordinated action by the global organisation to choke their funding or crack down on them through UN-mandated actions. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has used every occasion he has had the world over, whether it be at the United Nations or at multilateral forums or in bilateral interactions with heads of Governments and states, to seek speedy finalisation of a global definition of terrorism and then act accordingly. Unfortunately, certain member-countries that are uncomfortable with the prospect, have blocked the process.
It is in this context that India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Syed Akbaruddin, has delivered a fresh reminder to the UN that the world body “must do more to send the right message”. Referring to the laxity in effective measures, he added that “inconsistent implementation of sanctions on some of these terrorist outfits eats away at the United Nations' authority and needs to be addressed”. And it's not just Pakistan-based terror outfits and their supporters, both in the open and in the shadows, who have had a free run because of the UN's failure to address the problem; Taliban's new leader, Mullah Haibatullah (Akhundzada), too remains out of the sanctioned list. Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani had appealed to the UN to ban Akhundzada. The Indian envoy too has raised the issue. How long can the UN escape the realityIJ