United Nations, February 15, 2022 (PPI-OT):A Pakistani diplomat has urged the UN Security Council to hold accountable the “masterminds” behind supporting, financing, and sponsoring hundreds of cross-border terrorist attacks against Pakistan.

At the same time, Umer Siddique, a counsellor at the Pakistan Mission to the UN, said it was also “essential” that Afghanistan’s territory was not used as a platform or a safe-haven by any terrorist group. “We trust the new authorities in Afghanistan will succeed in ensuring this in accordance with their commitments,” he said in his remarks to the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) on Monday.

It was the first open briefing on the work of UN CTC after India assumed its chairmanship in January 2022. While in the past the focus of such meetings had been on exchanging views on best practices, capacity building and technical cooperation in countering terrorism, diplomatic observers here took note of India’s move to turn the meeting into a venue for casting negative aspersions on Pakistan, contravening the norms of behaviour by Security Council Committees’ chairpersons.

Delivering India’s statement, Rajesh Parihar, a counsellor at the Indian mission, said that the world had witnessed the horrors of the 2008 Mumbai terror attack, the 2016 Pathankote attack, and the 2019 Pulwama terrorist attack, adding, “We all know from where the perpetrators of these attacks came from.”

Rejecting the Indian insinuations, Siddique, the Pakistani representative, stated that irrefutable evidence has been provided to the 15-member UN Security Council on external sponsorship of cross-border terrorism against Pakistan, and, in an reference to India, added, “We all know who has been supporting and financing” terror groups like the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA).

Drawing attention to the ongoing human rights violations by Indian occupation forces in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, he called for preventing the misuse of counter-terrorism norms to deny the inalienable right of peoples to self-determination under foreign occupation.

Referring to India’s bid to politicize UN technical bodies, the Pakistani representative said, “We must not allow the hijacking of technical bodies such as this to serve bilateral programmes of hate and aggression.”

He also called out India for opposing UN initiates to address the rising number of terrorist attacks directed against Muslims based on Islamophobia, pointing out that it was “only those giving state patronage to mainstream Islamophobia in their domestic political discourse as manifested by calls of genocide against Muslims, who were opposing such initiatives.”

In this context, Siddiqui welcomed the recognition of terrorist threats arising from xenophobia, racism and other forms of intolerance by the UN Security Council and called for greater focus on the issue. After the meeting, several diplomats expressed serious concern at India’s attempt to use the occasion to push its domestic agenda that they believe was detrimental to the credibility of the UN body.

They voiced apprehensions that India’s chairmanship would undermine the work of the Committee for “bilateral zing” its work, and compromising its impartiality. “Our worst fears have been realized today,” a UN diplomat commented on the condition of anonymity. “It is quite unprecedented. The biggest casualty of such an approach will be the trust in the UN mechanisms,” she said.

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