The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (60 page)

As ceasefire violations continued to take place, the Council continued to demand that the parties ‘honour their commitments to the Council to observe the ceasefire’ and called upon both parties to withdraw their troops from the CFL.
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However, the situation remained volatile. In November 1965, the Council passed a resolution expressing its regret over the delay in the ‘full achievement of a complete and effective ceasefire and a prompt withdrawal of armed forces personnel’ and demanding that representatives of the two countries meet ‘with a suitable representative of the Secretary-General’ to agree to a plan and schedule ‘for the withdrawals of both parties’.
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The Second Kashmir War formally ended with a peace agreement brokered not by the Security Council but by a member state, the Soviet Union, in Tashkent on 10 January 1966. In the Tashkent Agreement both Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Pakistani President General Ayub Khan agreed on the withdrawal of all armed forces personnel of both sides to the positions they held prior to 5 August 1965. This was to be completed not later than 25 February 1966, with both sides agreeing to observe the terms of the ceasefire on the CFL.
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Both sides also agreed to exchange the territories captured by either across the CFL, thereby restoring the status quo ante.
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The UN Secretary-General also set up, as a temporary measure, the United Nations India-Pakistan Observation Mission (UNIPOM) to supervise the ceasefire along the India-Pakistan border beyond the CFL.
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On 22 January 1966, the Indian and Pakistani military commanders agreed to a plan for disengagement and withdrawals, which had been negotiated by their representatives under the auspices of the UN Secretary-General’s representative. Three days later, again under the auspices of the UN Secretary-General’s representative, they agreed on the ground rules for the implementation of the disengagement and withdrawal plan. UNMOGIP and UNIPOM were to ensure that the action agreed upon was fully implemented. On 26 February the Secretary-General reported that the withdrawal of troops by India and Pakistan had been completed on schedule the previous day, and that the withdrawal requests made by the Council had been fulfilled by the two parties. UNIPOM was subsequently terminated on 22 March 1966.

Towards the end of 1970, relations between India and Pakistan deteriorated dramatically over events in East Pakistan. Following rising discontent between the dominant West and the weaker East Pakistan, and the indefinite postponement of the convening of the new National Assembly which would have been dominated by Bengalis, West Pakistan unleashed military repression over the numerically dominant Bengali-speaking citizens of East Pakistan. This led to a civil war in Pakistan in March 1971, forcing some 10 million people, both Hindus and Muslims, to seek refuge in neighbouring India. As a result, in early October 1971, Indian and Pakistani troops in the eastern theatre exchanged gunfire, and later that month clashed with each other in a growing number of military encounters. India also aided, trained, and supported East Pakistani armed resistance fighters, the Mukti Bahini (Liberation Front), in an effort to divide Pakistan strategically. In an attempt to consolidate its position in East Pakistan, Pakistan launched a pre-emptive air strike against eight Indian airfields in the western theatre in Punjab, Haryana, and Indian-controlled J&K on 3 December 1971. This resulted in an Indian military response.

During the ensuing fourteen days of war, Indian and Pakistani forces fought each other in both the eastern and western theatres. On 6 December, Bangladesh declared its independence. Ten days later, Lt. General A.A.K. Niazi, the commander of Pakistan’s eastern military command in Dhaka, surrendered. A day later, on 17 December 1971, India ordered a unilateral ceasefire in the western sector. This was reciprocated by Pakistani President General Yahya Khan, bringing to an end the third India-Pakistan war.

India justified its military actions again Pakistan mainly on the grounds of humanitarian intervention, in view of the Pakistani military’s human rights violations against the Bengali population in eastern Pakistan and the urgency of responding to the arrival of ten million refugees on Indian territory. On 4 December 1971, the Indian representative to the UN boldly stated: ‘We are glad that we have on this particular occasion nothing but the purest of motives and the purest of intentions: to rescue the people of East Bengal from what they are suffering.
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When India failed to gain support for the human rights justification, other than from the Soviet Union, it reverted to legitimizing its military actions on the basis of self-defence. This shift in rationale followed the Pakistani air strikes on Indian airbases on 3 December 1971, which marked the formal start of the war.

During the war, the Council was paralysed because of the support of the US and the USSR for Pakistan and India respectively. The Soviet Union, which had signed a twenty-year friendship treaty with India only in August 1971, vetoed three draft resolutions in the Security Council, all calling for a ceasefire and the mutual withdrawal of troops.
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In the light of the Council’s paralysis, the US and its allies passed a ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution transferring the matter to the General Assembly,
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which called upon both governments to implement an immediate ceasefire, withdraw their armed forces to their own side of the India-Pakistan borders, and support the return of refugees.
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Four days after the end of the conflict, the Council passed Resolution 307, demanding that a ‘durable ceasefire and cessation of all hostilities in all areas of conflict be strictly observed’
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It also demanded that the ceasefire remain in effect until withdrawals took place of all armed forces to their respective territories and to positions ‘which fully respect the ceasefire line in Jammu and Kashmir supervised by the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan’. Finally, the resolution called upon all member states to ‘refrain from any action which may aggravate the situation in the subcontinent or endanger international peace’, and called for support for the repatriation of refugees.
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Pakistan sufered a devastating blow in the December 1971 war with India. It lost East Pakistan, Bangladesh became independent (undermining the two-nation theory on which Pakistan had been created), and nearly 90,000 of its troops and citizens were held as prisoners of war by India. It was understandable that the Pakistani delegation to the subsequent peace talks in July 1972 in the northern Indian town of Simla was disheartened.

The Simla Agreement, signed by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the new President of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, on 3 July 1972, essentially laid down the principles for future bilateral relations between the two countries. It stated that India and Pakistan resolved to ‘settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between them’.
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° Indian and Pakistani forces were to be withdrawn to their side of the international border.

The Simla Agreement converted the CFL into the Line of Control (LoC), resulting from the territorial gains made up until the ceasefire of 17 December. In essence, this reflected minor variations in the CFL – some as little as 100 yards – including Indian gains in the north around Kargil and Pakistani gains in the west in the Chammb sector. The 460-mile LoC was subsequently demarcated and reproduced in detail in two sets of maps by both sides in the Suchetgarh Agreement of 11 December 1972. In accordance with the Simla Agreement, the LoC was to be respected by both sides, with neither side seeking to alter it unilaterally.

The Simla Agreement also stipulated that force withdrawals were to be completed within thirty days of its entry into force. It also stated that the two sides were to meet to discuss further the establishment of durable peace and normalization of relations, ‘including the questions of repatriation of prisoners of war and civilian internees, a final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir and the resumption of diplomatic relations’.
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Nonetheless, differences over the interpretation of the Simla Agreement soon arose. While India perceived the agreement’s focus on bilateralism as superseding the internationalization of the Kashmir dispute through Security Council resolutions, Pakistan disagreed. Pakistan maintained that the Simla Agreement noted that ‘the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations shall govern the relations between the two countries.’ As Bhutto subsequently noted, there was ‘nothing in the Simla agreement to prevent Pakistan from taking the dispute to the UN’.
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Subsequently, Kashmir has been raised both at the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Commission. Another key difference was that whereas India saw the LoC as virtually an international boundary, Pakistan disputed this. The latter’s argument was that even the Simla Agreement noted the requirement for a ‘final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir’.
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On 11 and 13 May 1998, India carried out a series of five nuclear weapon tests. In his statement to parliament on 27 May, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee proclaimed that India was now a nuclear-weapon state. These were India’s first nuclear tests since its single ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ on 18 May 1974. Within a fortnight, Pakistan responded with six nuclear weapon tests of its own on 28 and 30 May. The explosions - the first nuclear tests by non-P5 states for nearly twenty-five years – shocked the international community. Their challenge to the normative framework on nuclear weapons was compounded by the fact that neither of these two countries had signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968. For the Security Council, such a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction constituted a threat to international peace and security. This was therefore quite different from previous situations in which the Security Council passed resolutions over disputed territory.

As a result, on 6 June 1998, the Security Council condemned the Indian and Pakistani actions and demanded that both countries refrain from further nuclear tests.
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In Resolution 1172, the Council expressed strong concerns over the tests in terms of their impact on the global non-proliferation regime, peace and stability in the region, and the risk of a nuclear arms race in South Asia. It also reaffirmed its full commitment to the crucial importance of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and urged both countries to become parties to the NPT and the CTBT. This was a very strongly worded resolution, which called upon both India and Pakistan not only to stop their nuclear weapon development programmes, but also to ‘refrain from weaponization or from the deployment of nuclear weapons, to cease development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons and any further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons’.
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In a direct reference to the Kashmir dispute, the resolution also urged both India and Pakistan to resume a dialogue to remove the tensions between them, and encouraged them ‘to find mutually acceptable solutions that address the root causes of those tensions, including Kashmir’
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This was followed by a statement of the Foreign Ministers of the P5 on 24 September 1998, which requested both countries to undertake ‘serious discussions to address their bilateral disputes and to implement comprehensively and without delay all the provisions of Resolution No. 1172.’
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However, to date neither India nor Pakistan has agreed to implement this resolution.

The Council has had mixed success in its involvement in the India-Pakistan wars. Clearly, it played a critical role in mediating the ceasefire between the two countries in 1949 and 1965, to end the First and Second Kashmir Wars. This required patience, focused engagement in the region, and deft negotiating skills, all of which the UN had plenty of. During the 1965 war, the influence of the US and the UK, especially their arms embargo on both India and Pakistan, assisted these efforts. The Council also played a key part in the Karachi Agreement of July 1949, which established the CFL between the two countries, and the military disengagement and withdrawal plan of 22 January 1966, which reverted to CFL status quo. It also established UNMOGIP, currently the second-oldest ongoing UN peacekeeping mission, and, for a brief period, UNIPOM.

But, with the Simla Agreement of July 1972 and the Suchetgarh Agreement of December 1972, India lost interest in UN involvement. It argued that as the agreed establishment of the LoC superseded the UN-mandated CFL, UNMOGIP had no role to play in the supervision of the LoC. Pakistan countered this view by stating that with the CFL being only slightly altered by the LoC, the 1949 Karachi Agreement was still valid, and UNMOGIP was therefore still relevant. For Pakistan, the mere presence of UNMOGIP enhanced the perception that Kashmir was an international issue. UNMOGIP can only be wound up with reference to the Security Council and with the consent of Pakistan; India has not made a formal request to the Security Council for the withdrawal of UNMOGIP.
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In the absence of such a decision, India has unilaterally restricted its interactions with UNMOGIP on its side of the LoC, and, since January 1972, refuses to lodge any complaint of a ceasefire violation. This is in marked contrast to Pakistan’s view of UNMOGIP and the number of complaints of ceasefire violations it has lodged over the past years. However, as the ceasefire on the LoC, initiated by Pakistan in November 2003 and reciprocated by India, has held, such complaints of violation are today the exception rather than the norm. UNMOGIP currently has forty-four international military personnel, twenty-three international civilian personnel, and forty local civilian staff.
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