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Indo-Pak
Rivalry Jeopardises Disarmament Conference
BY
RAMESH JAURA
Will
the persistent distrust between Pakistan and India continue to litter
the bumpy road to nuclear disarmament with shrapnel and spikes and bring
to naught the multilateral conference in Geneva?
Or, will the nuclear armed neighbours bury the hatchet defying legacy of
the British divide-and-rule that culminated in partition in 1947, and
rescue the Conference on Disarmament?
Bilateral peace talks -- begun in 2004 and suspended by India following
the attacks in December 2008 that killed more than 160 people in the
megacity of Mumbai -- are scheduled to resume on February 25 in New
Delhi.
India has accused Pakistan of doing little to bring under control
extremists allegedly based in Pakistan, whom it blames for the attack.
New Delhi has proposed fresh talks which it wants to address
counterterrorism and other matters that weigh on peace and security
issues.
Islamabad however favours what it calls comprehensive peace negotiations
that would involve the disputed Kashmir region.
The fear that the Conference on Disarmament, the single multilateral
disarmament negotiating forum of the international community, set up in
1979, might become “irrelevant” was expressed by the
Secretary-General of the Conference, Sergei Ordzhonikidze, on February
11.
Ordzhonikidze, who is also the Director-General of the United Nations
Office at Geneva, underscored that what the 65-nation Conference had
done for the previous four weeks -- “for the enormous financial
expenditure out of the United Nations budget -- was nothing”. They had
to recognize that.
That was not only intolerable in the Conference, but it was also
becoming intolerable in international relations -- with the most
important United Nations body dealing with disarmament not able to do
anything but even regressing.
Ordzhonikidze warned the participants that unless the Conference was in
tune with current trends in international relations it was “not
relevant”.
While it remains to be seen whether the Conference would advance in the
new round beginning February 16 under the presidency of Ambassador
Mikhail Khvostov of Belarus, Ordzhonikidze’s unvarnished remarks
tinged with deep disappointment were unprecedented but not groundless.
In 2009 the Conference broke a deadlock that had lasted for more than
ten years. It agreed on a work plan that dealt with four issues: nuclear
disarmament, a fissile material control treaty addressing
highly-enriched uranium and plutonium, the prohibition of space-based
weapons, and an agreement by nuclear-armed states not to use their
strategic weapons against nations that do not possess such arsenal.
Pakistan initially approved the plan, but later withdrew its consent and
demanded further consideration of the programme.
When the Conference resumed in January in Geneva, Pakistan temporarily
blocked endorsement of an agenda for the year. Decisions at the
international body must be made by consensus, and Pakistan allowed the
agenda to be approved on January 27.
"It was not my government's intention to block adoption of the
agenda," a news agency report quoted Pakistan’s Ambassador to the
United Nations Zamir Akram. "We are very keen to move beyond
consideration of the agenda to the more important task of working out a
programme of work. We will make our contribution in this regard."
While this assurance sounded promising, Conference sources said that
"Pakistan doesn't want to hear about" a fissile material
cutoff treaty.
On behalf of the UN Secretary-General, Ordzhonikidze appealed to members
to be "a little more flexible" and overcome the bickering over
which items to tackle in 2010, known as the programme of work.
"It is not the finalization of the elaboration of any treaty, it is
just the programme of work," he said.
Parallel to deliberations at the Conference, a senior Indian diplomat
said that a universal, transparent and verifiable regime of nuclear
disarmament was the only way to prevent terrorists from acquiring
nuclear weapons.
"India is deeply worried about the potential nexus between
clandestine proliferation and terrorism and the ever-present danger of
such weapons or vulnerable nuclear materials falling into the hands of
jihadi and nonstate actors," Shyam Saran, who led the team that
negotiated the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, told the Global Zero summit in
Paris on February 2.
"However, over the long term, it is also our view that it is only
through the complete elimination of nuclear weapons and by putting in
place universally applicable, nondiscriminatory and fully transparent
verification procedures, that we can fully prevent and deny nuclear
materials from falling into dangerous hands," Press Trust of India
news agency quoted Saran.
India, like neighbouring Pakistan, possesses a nuclear arsenal and has
refused to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to be reviewed
at a landmark UN conference in May 2010.
But Saran reaffirmed India’s intention to maintain a suspension of
nuclear testing and its interest in discussing a treaty that would
prohibit member nations from producing fissile material for weapons
purposes, the Indo-Asian News Service reported.
"Despite our well-known reservations on the Comprehensive (Nuclear)
Test Ban Treaty, India is committed to its voluntary unilateral
moratorium on nuclear explosive testing," he said at the summit in
Paris.
"We are prepared to negotiate a verifiable fissile material cutoff
treaty (FMCT) in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. We are not a
party to the NPT and cannot respond to calls for universal adherence to
that treaty as a non-nuclear weapons state," he said.
Saran also raised the matter of the proliferation network once operated
by former top Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer (A. Q.) Khan
widely regarded as the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program.
A.Q. is viewed in Washington as a “serious proliferation risk” in
view of allegations that he supplied critical nuclear technology to Iran
and North Korea.
"India's security has been adversely impacted by the clandestine
proliferation of nuclear weapons in its neighborhood, often ignored and
on occasion, encouraged by certain important countries," Saran
said.
"The activities of the so-called A.Q. Khan network is an ominous
reminder of the threats India continues to face in this respect,"
he added.
Whether such remarks, though justified from India’s viewpoint, would
facilitate the forthcoming Indo-Pak talks and the Conference in Geneva
is unlikely.
Despite Pakistan’s crucial role in stabilizing the situation in
Afghanistan, much to the chagrin of influential circles in Islamabad, it
has ceased to be a “blue eyed boy” of the United States since the
end of the Cold War when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
India, on the other hand, has come to be accepted as a “responsible
nuclear power” in addition to having proved its credentials as “the
world’s largest democracy”.
Now it is for the two South Asian neighbours to guard against falling
into a new ‘divide-and-rule’ trap -- and stop diverting their
economic and financial resources from development to weapons of mutual
destruction.
[Source:
IDN-InDepthNews
| Analysis That Matters]
_____________
Ramesh
Jaura is chief editor of
IDN-InDepthNews
and GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES that belong to the GLOBALOM MEDIA group.
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