NEW YORK: Global politics have stood in the way of promoting peaceful solutions for Kashmir and Palestine questions, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United Nations Maleeha Lodhi said in an interview published in Alquds Alarabi, a media outlet based in London.
She urged major powers to help in settling the “two oldest unresolved issues” in the interest of global peace.
“Palestine and Kashmir are similar,” the Pakistani envoy said as she highlighted both nations’ decades-long struggle for identity and right to self-determination.
“The question we ask in the Muslim world is: why is it that clear-cut Security Council resolutions on the two issues remain unimplemented?
On Palestine, she said, the roadmap was very clear: the UN Security Council had continuously endorsed a two-state solution. What stood in the way was Israel’s intransigence to accomplish that objective. In the case of Kashmir, it was India’s intransigence in refusing to engage in negotiations with Pakistan aimed at finding a peaceful solution to the UN-recognised dispute.
“In both cases somehow, the dynamics of great power politics have to be addressed and that is the challenge,” Ambassador Lodhi added.
In Indian occupied Kashmir, she said, the kind of human rights violations going on are unprecedented in scope and intensity, noting that those atrocities have been condemned by international media.
In South Asia, Ambassador Lodhi said that as the dispute involved two nuclear neighbours, Pakistan has always advocated a peaceful settlement “because that is the only path to take.”
Responding to a question, Ambassador Lodhi said Pakistan has and will always stand by the people of Palestine. She said, “We see divisions in the Muslim world today that need to be addressed as lack of unity plays into the hands of our enemies.”
“We are now an economically stable and growing country which is becoming a very attractive destination for foreign investment,” Ambassador Lodhi said.
On the security front, she said Pakistan had managed to beat back the forces of terrorism and extremism, but the job will not be complete until the long war in Afghanistan comes to an end.
Since 9/11, Pakistan has always advocated a political solution in Afghanistan, the military option had been tried and it failed. Pakistan has consistently called for insurgents to be brought into the mainstream.
No country has done more than Pakistan to dismantle and to eliminate al-Qaeda from the region, the Pakistani envoy asserted. “That doesn’t mean there is no al-Qaeda remnant left in our part of the world but the extent to which it exists is now nothing compared to the situation that it existed 16 years ago, and so Pakistan must get credit for it.”
The United Nations acknowledges that terrorism cannot and should not be linked with or be associated with any religion. But despite that international consensus, there were vested interests in certain countries who want to tarnish Islam by equating the two. “We reject this as a form of discrimination, Islamophobia.”
At the same time, she said Pakistan opposes foreign military interventions in the Muslim world, citing the “illegal” invasion of Iraq. The countries that carried out such invasions without any thought, had to face the unintended consequences of such actions.
