Showing posts with label UN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UN. Show all posts

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Kashmir on The Backburner

Now that Even Pakistan has Woken up to The Evils of Terrorism (or has it?), Is it possible for The Two Countries to Work Together?

When Pakistan’s Gibraltar Operation against India failed in 1965, the then Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, vowed in frustration that “Pakistan would wage a war of a 1,000 years, a war of defence.” Stephen P Cohen, senior fellow at Brooking Institute, opined recently that “the Indo-Pakistan conflict, which includes Kashmir besides many other problems, will last for 100 years or even more.”

While putting a number to the years is really ignoring the gravity of the situation, this acrimony really doesn’t appear to be vanishing very soon. And interestingly, this is despite Kashmir going on the back burner in recent times. Discussion on the same between the two nations came to a standstill post the 26/11 attacks. Since then, the prime agenda for high level diplomatic interactions has been terrorism. In three diplomatic meetings between the foreign secretaries of both nations – in July 2009 on the sidelines of NAM meeting, then in September on the eve of the annual UN General Assembly session, and in February 2011 during the SAARC conference – the main agenda was terrorism, a speedy probe on 26/11, Rana, Headley, et al. The agenda remained the same when the Prime Ministers of both countries met in Pittsburg for the G20 summit. America’s successful ‘hunt Osama’ expedition in May followed by a series of terror strikes on Pakistani soil further enhanced the focus on terrorism.

So while Kashmir may remain important over the long term, given the fact that confidence building measures build anything but confidence, this is a good time for India to perhaps earn sincere brownie points by engaging Pakistan economically.


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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

With a Defence like This...

Debris Dumped into The Sea by Military Operations causes havoc for Marine as well as Human life. Unfortunately, all Advice is yet Unheeded

Ex-British PM Margaret Thatcher had a doctrine regarding ocean pollution caused by perilous military activities: conservatism is good for actions with long term negative consequences! Her vision formed the cornerstone of the London Dumping Convention that banned the release of military debris into the seas. Consequences notwithstanding, a majority of countries do not have such a convention and freely release military debris into the oceans, causing enormous damage to marine lives.

At the recent UN International Marine Debris Clearance conference, Paul Walker, director of Global Green inferred that a massive 8000 tonne of hazardous material has been plunked near Hawaii by the US army. US vessels have been dumping 34 million litres of untreated liquid waste and 16 tonne of plastic waste every month! Alarmingly, more than 400,000 rockets and bombs are drifting around US coasts! During the Cold War, under the shield of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union released 2.5 million curies of radioactive material into the Arctic Ocean, the Sea of Japan, the Barents Sea, and the Kara Sea, according to the Yablokov report. France carried out 137 nuclear tests under the sea between 1975 and 1996, creating an artificial crater with a diameter of 140 meters. The tests conducted in French Polynesia caused havoc to 1 million cubic meters of sand and coral. Japan’s seas are contaminated with chemical weapons with a total bulk of over 6,600 tons. And that is not counting the most recent irradiated water being released from the Fukushima plant.

But if military debris isn’t dumped in oceans, then where? Research institutes like Coastal Zone Enhancement Program in US or Swedish Geotechnical Institute talk about measures like recycling and reuse of oceanic debris.


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