UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had voiced his support for international investigation into the atrocities being committed by the occupation forces in Indian occupied Kashmir, while also calling on India and Pakistan to find a political solution to the Kashmir dispute.
“All the action of the (UN) human rights high commissioner is an action that represents the voice of the UN in relation to that issue,” the UN chief said in reply to a question during a press conference at UN Headquarters in New York last week. It is worth to mention here that in a landmark report published last month, High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein had urged the Human Rights Council to consider establishing a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) to conduct a comprehensive independent international investigation into allegations of human rights violations in Indian occupied Kashmir. The decades-old Kashmir dispute “has robbed millions of their basic human rights,” Zeid said at that time.
Mr. Guterres, while responding to a question about his efforts to resolve the Kashmir dispute, said, “It is clear for me that only political solutions can address political problems”. “Whenever I meet the leaders of both India and Pakistan, I always offer my good offices and I hope that in the future (they) will be able to create the mechanisms of dialogue that will allow for this problem to find an adequate political solution that the people can benefit from”, he added.
The statement of UN Chief is a positive development, which speaks about growing concerns at international level vis-à-vis the peaceful settlement of lingering Kashmir dispute that as a matter of fact is the major cause and the consequence of rights violations in the region. Now that the UN chief had taken a bold and clear cut stand on the matter, it is time for international community to realize the gravity of the situation and come forward in a big way to impress upon New Delhi to accept the UNHCR demand for establishment of Commission of Inquiry to conduct comprehensive independent international investigation into the human rights violations committed by its troops in the held territory besides paving a way for holding a free and fair plebiscite so that people of the region could exercise their birth right guaranteed to them by no less an authority than the United Nations.
Pakistan has always supported and welcomed mediation offers from the United Nations but India rejects the idea by paddling baseless age-old narratives and fallacious reasoning vis-à-vis the Kashmir dispute. Rather than weaving cobwebs of confusion it is time for New Delhi to accept this bitter reality that a political solution to the Kashmir problem was the only way forward.