PAKISTAN’S acting Ambassador to the UN Usman Jadoon has said lasting international peace and stability will remain elusive until the people under foreign occupation, like those in Kashmir and Palestine, are allowed to exercise their right to self-determination. Briefing a 23-member delegation from the US War College at New York, he underlined that the right of self-determination is one of the fundamental pillars of the UN Charter.
During interaction with the delegation, the ambassador highlighted Pakistan’s stance on various regional and international issues, focusing on the decades-old Kashmir dispute and efforts to seek its resolution peacefully. This is what our missions abroad do to put across the country’s point of view on important issues of interest and to sensitize the world opinion to act responsibly to avert threats to peace. Pakistan has a just and principled-based stance on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir but we could not enlist the required support of the international community for its solution mainly because of our lacklustre approach to counter India’s false propaganda. This is despite the fact that the UN Security Council resolutions, which call for a UN-supervised plebiscite to decide the wishes of the Kashmiri people, provide the framework for the resolution of the Kashmir dispute. Countries like the United States can play an important role in the search for a just solution to the dispute in accordance with the aspirations of the Kashmiri people. In this backdrop, the robust briefing by the ambassador to a delegation from an important institution of the United States is appreciable and similar briefings should also be held for public opinion makers and vital institutions in other countries as well. It is era of social media but here again we have not been able to effectively utilize this tool to project the cause of the Kashmiri people in the right perspective and to unmask black deeds of Indian occupation forces against people legitimately demanding right of self-determination as also enshrined in the relevant UN Security Council resolutions.
