With the retraction of his purported Kashmir statement, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has added no feather to his cap except recording an ignominious fall. The statement had only urged restraint on the Indian State's military in its occupied Kashmir, not alluding at all even obliquely to the resolutions of the world body that Ban heads for the grant of right to self-determination to the Kashmiris.
Those solemn decrees of the Security Council, the UN's top decision-making authority, remain unimplemented and forgotten, anyway. And Ban too has shown himself not such a tall man as to stick his neck out and bring alive a dead horse once adopted by this UN apparatus which has virtually been reduced into a page boy of the world powers and into an extended arm of particularly the US state department. His immediate predecessor Kofi Annan did demonstrate a measure of manliness and publicly proclaimed the US-led war party's invasion and occupation of Iraq as illegal. But that show of masculinity cost him his job.
The US stiffly opposed his third time in office and others fell in line too, even as very many were agreeable to his staying on for another term. Ban has exhibited himself no such risk-taker. And it is beyond imagination if at all he would have ventured speaking out the dreaded "K" word that has been erased from their vocabularies by the world capitals not to incur the displeasure or ire of India. And if at all he had counselled restraint on the Indian military's actions in the Indian-occupied Kashmir, he was not quite out of tune of the voices, even if few, coming out of India itself.
Those voices too are critical of the Indian army's excesses and atrocities on the bottled-up Kashmiris. Indeed, as Indian home minister P. Chidambaram, as usual, raised the bogie of Lashkar-e-Taiba to explain away the latest wave of unrest in the occupied territory on account of wanton killings of Kashmiri youth by the Indian occupation forces, quite a number of Indian voices called his bluff. Although with coercion, threats and bullying the rights activists in India have largely been silenced over the brutalisation of Kashmiris by the Indian military, some daring hearts amongst them spoke up.
To blame for this unrest was none else but the Indian military inflicting bleeding wounds with abandon on the Kashmiris unaccountably, they screamed. And they called for reining in the Indian occupation forces and stopping them from savaging the innocent Kashmiris with impunity. Chidambaram, statedly, set out to somewhat bridle the heady horse of Indian occupation forces in the occupied territory, if only to take out some sting out of the ongoing popular protest there, by making a few amendments in the Armed Forces Special Powers Act that gives sweeping authority to the Indian military to detain, arrest, interrogate and shoot to kill the Kashmiris. But the Indian army, which is above the law and the supreme voice in security matters in the territory, put its foot down and Chidambaram shelved his contrivance promptly.
According to a leading Indian newsweekly, India Today, "the army had raised concerns of a 'hot summer' in terms of militancy in (occupied) Kashmir. The ploy seemed to have worked as the amendments have not seen the light of day". Given this, no harm would have come to Ban as he was so in tune with certain strands of public opinion in India itself. Yet fearful of powerful friends of India in the world community and of India itself, he marked an ignoble retreat. He just disowned the statement.
His UN functionary who issued this statement on his behalf must be punished, but not for issuing it without his authority but for ennobling him with a dignity that he deserves not. His functionary projected him as a champion of human rights. With his retraction, he has demonstrated himself to no such noble thing. He has showed that he is a servant of big powers and their friends, and no friend of human beings and of occupied and colonised peoples. For which, he is a disgrace to the exalted chair that he occupies.
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