UNITED NATIONS: Pakistan has urged the United Nations to strengthen its observer mission in India and Pakistan to enable it to play a more effective role in preserving peace and security along the Line of Control (Loc).
“We believe the observer mission has been and continues to play an important role in the maintenance of peace and security along LoC in Jammu and Kashmir in accordance with the relevant Security Council resolutions,” Pakistani delegate Ansar Shah told the UN Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations also known as C-34, which held its first meeting in the new year on Thursday.
The committee institutionalizes the General Assembly’s oversight on policy and execution of UN Peacekeeping Operations.
The UN observer mission was deployed in January 1949 to supervise the ceasefire between India and Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir. While Pakistan allows UN observers to monitor the LoC, India does not.
He said Pakistan had always fulfilled its commitments in the implementation of UNMOGIP’s mandate, said Mr Shah, first secretary at the Pakistan Mission to the UN.
The Rawalpindi-based group, which Pakistan hosts, comprises 44 military observers supported by 75 civilian staff, including 25 international.
However, Colonel Tarunendra Pratap Singh, military adviser to the Indian Mission at the UN, called Pakistani delegate’s remarks “unwarranted”, saying they reflected Pakistan’s “compulsive obsession” with India.
“We yet again emphasize that the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir has been, and will be an integral part of India, ” Singh claimed.
Ansar Shah sharply reacted, declaring that Jammu and Kashmir is not, never has been, and will never be an “integral” part of India.
“It is a disputed territory, whose ‘final disposition’ is to be decided by the people of Jammu and Kashmir through a UN supervised plebiscite, as demanded by numerous resolutions of the Security Council,” the Pakistani delegate asserted, while exercising his right of reply.–APP
