Daily Times

“If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.”

(Mao Tse-tung)

Brutality is the linchpin of oppression.

When oppression fails to garner popular support, it resorts to orchestrating the deadliest of genocides to straitjacket the vox populi. Several instances can be rehashed to establish the veracity of this fact.

In 1994, communal tension erupted between ethnic majority Hutu and minority Tutsi in Rwanda. Hutu nationalists started to kill people of Tutsi in Kigali that was the capital of Rwanda. On April 6, 1994, the killings spread to the whole country and turned into a genocide; particularly after shooting down a plane, carrying Habyarimana and Burundi’s president, Cyprien Ntaryamira. Within the next three months, more than 800,000 people were slaughtered from both sides. Around two million people fled to refugee camps in Congo and other neighbouring countries. The world’s response to the genocide was tepid at best and totally indifferent at worst. Even the UN kept her eyes closed. Later on, peacekeeping missions were sent, and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda took more than eight years to complete the trial against instigators of the genocide.

Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali uncovered the reality by stating, “The failure of Rwanda is 10 times greater than the failure of Yugoslavia. Because in Yugoslavia the international community was interested, was involved. In Rwanda, nobody was interested.”

More than 100,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croatian civilians were killed by 1995 after declaring independence in 1992 by Bosnia-Herzegovina from Yugoslavia in the result of atrocious crimes. UNO intervened with peacekeeping troops. On July 11, 1995, Serb forces killed approximately 8,000 Bosniaks. Most of the girls were raped brutally in the period, and the human race again suffered from gross violation of human rights under the nose of the UN. Later on, the political vacuum was filled up by the intervention of NATO and the UN, after a long time when people were killed, girls were rapped, and houses were burnt.

Darfur genocide in Sudan was the first genocide of the 21st century. More than 400,000 Darfuris were killed, and more than three million people were displaced. The eyes of the global community were on the success of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to weed out conflicts between Northern Sudan and Southern Sudan, violence erupted in the western region of Sudan-Darfur.

In spite of having Convention on the prevention and punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1948 and support of the rest of the world, the UN could not stop countries from being trapped in genocides

In 2003, two groups–Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and Sudan Liberation Army (SLA)– raged bloodiest conflicts on the allegations of inequality, economic marginalisation, communal subordination in an organised way, political monopoly to the legitimate rule of certain groups and many other allegations. Later on, the fight shaped up the war between Arab groups and non-Arab groups that aggravated the situation by breaching Universal Declaration of Human Rights on minor and major levels. So, the war was termed as genocide. Still, the law and order condition is not satisfactory. People are bound to live in refugee camps and have a severe shortage of food. From 80,000 to 500,000 people have been killed. The UN peacekeeping missions have been working in the war-torn region for many years, but the UN could not resolve the issue even with the support of abundant of legal documents for the protection of human rights, global community and comprehensive problem discussing forum of world leaders, intellectuals and jurists.

China has been persecuting the Uyghurs community, located in the western region of Xinjiang. Modern ways of torturing, technological methods of snubbing their voice and depriving them of the rights, which have been protected and termed as “non-derogable” in Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That is the silent cultural genocide of the Uyghurs community. On the other hand, the blatant genocide and persecution of Palestinians are visible to the ethically blind world. All eyes are towards the UN with diminishing hopes for protection of human rights.

The more dreadful perspective is that in spite of having Convention on the prevention and punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1948 and support of the rest of the world, the UN could not stop countries from being trapped in genocides. So, is it possible for the UN and the human race to get afflicted with another genocide in Kashmir at the hands of Indian forces after the abrogation of Article 50-A and Article 370?

About 100,000 people have been murdered in extrajudicial killings in the Indian Occupied Kashmir since 1989. Thousands of girls have been abducted and raped in the occupied state by Indian Army, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and Border Security personnel. Many resolutions have been passed by the UN to address the Kashmir issue through a referendum, and both parties of the conflict have acceded to the resolutions. Now, the state is again in the formal genocide condition, where millions of army men have been deployed, internet service has been suspended, unended curfew has been imposed, and people do not have access to information, food and independent movement; gross violations of Declaration of Human Rights.

Article 2 of the Genocide Convention states, “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

So, the Indian government is planning to launch a fake military operation of border infiltration to legalise its genocide to avoid legal liabilities. Because article 3 of the same legal instrument defines severe punishment as “the following acts shall be punishable: (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide.”

Thus, the UN should implement its resolutions on the matter of Kashmir. It ought to ensure fair enforcement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which would avoid a human race being trapped in another genocide, which may aggravate the security situation of the South Asia region because of soaring religious militancy. Over the murders, rapes, torture and deprivation of fundamental rights, the breached articles of the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide are to be observed and investigated by an international tribunal.

The writer is a senior content writer at WANGARD International, a leading IT Solutions company in Lahore