Daily Times

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi was right when he said, while addressing the 75th anniversary of the United Nations via video link, that disputes in Kashmir and Palestine were the institution’s most glaring failures. Indeed, one does not even need to get into the breakdown of all that has happened to delay and deter any progress on both counts over the last seven decades or so, just the knowledge that the issues have stood where they were over all this time is proof enough that the UN is not the right forum to have them settled. The main problem is that the organisation allows a select few the right to veto, regardless of how the concerns of veto exercising powers are tilted at any given point in time, and once one of the top few pull the plug on any matter there is only so much all the others, even put together, can achieve.

Palestine never got anywhere and will never get anywhere because of the close friendship, and many arms deals, etc, between Washington and Tel Aviv. And whenever anything at all regarding the rights of the Palestinians or the continuous theft of their territories and olive gardens comes up the American ambassador simply vetoes the said resolution and that is the end of the matter till next time the same exercise is repeated. If this practice hasn’t ended in seventy years there’s nothing to suggest that it will at any point in the future either. The Indians on the other hand, have the enormous pull of their giant market. And by now it has become very clear that the countries in the world that matter and that can make a difference in the lives of millions of people are far more interested in the material gains coming out of potential partnership with Delhi than championing any human rights causes by standing up for poor, suffering Kashmiris.

In this backdrop there is little a country like Pakistan can accomplish by leveraging the platform of the UN, except remind them every now and then that its resolutions and decision are flouted all the time and it has very little if any integrity left, especially in the eyes of all the occupied people in the world right now. That is not to say, of course, that the UN can do nothing right. Over the years its work has proved crucial to many societies in the world, but from the point of view of the oppressed and the occupied, it has failed to achieve much. *