At the UN, Pakistan called for resolving two longstanding and
internationally recognized disputes of Palestine and Jammu and Kashmir, says a
press release received here today from New York.
Speaking in the Security Council debate on challenges to
international peace and security, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the UN, Dr. Maleeha
Lodhi said that the Palestinian and Kashmiri people continue to suffer horrific
human rights violations at the hands of occupying forces, while the world
continues to watch without addressing these egregious situations.
She said their non resolution was compounding the
challenges the world is facing to peace and security.
She also called for implementation of all resolutions of the
Security Council uniformly and non-selectively. Selective implementation, she
said, weakens multilateralism and the credibility of the UN, compounds
conflicts and intensifies the suffering of the affected people.
The Pakistani envoy told the 15 member Council that efforts
to change the status of Jerusalem threaten to drive an already volatile Middle
East into further turbulence and chaos.
Painting a bleak picture of the challenges besetting the
world today, Ambassador Lodhi said that conflicts continue to rage across the
world, from Africa to Afghanistan. “Civil wars and factional fighting in Syria,
Libya and Yemen are becoming more vicious and consequential, generating record levels
of human displacement”, she added.
She also referred to Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who
had warned that in the Korean peninsula, ‘we may be sleep-walking into a
catastrophe’. “All this is compounding the challenges of a more turbulent and
volatile world”, she remarked.
Addressing the root causes of conflict, Ambassador Lodhi
said, remains the best conflict prevention and resolution strategy.
She said that to address the complex contemporary challenges
to peace and security a clear shift in approach from emphasis on military
action to negotiation and finding political solutions was required.
Ambassador Lodhi emphasized the need to identify the drivers
of conflict to effectively address these challenges that include unresolved
long-standing conflicts and disputes, foreign military interventions, political
and economic injustice, terrorism and violent extremism, and displacement of
populations due to persecution, poverty and conflict.
While describing UN peacekeeping as the most cost-effective
tool for the maintenance of international peace and security, Ambassador Lodhi
said that peacekeeping, on its own, would not be able to deliver the dividends
of peace. She underscored the need to strengthen Peacekeeping through support
for political solutions to make peace durable and sustainable.
She welcomed the focus on sustaining peace but added that to
sustain peace, we have to first build peace, address the drivers of conflict
and create the enabling conditions that allow peace to flourish.
Dr. Lodhi concluded by highlighting the need for urgent
action by the UN in view of the proliferation of conflicts today. The proposed
reform of the peace and security architecture, she said, was necessary but not
sufficient to make a real difference.
“Fundamental change in the way we deal with conflicts is
required. Only then will we be able to succeed in our collective quest for
sustainable and enduring peace and security”, she added.
