By Arul Louis,
United Nations: The killing fields of Peshawar inspired anew an international resolve at the Security Council to combat terrorism by adopting Friday a resolution urging nations to choke the flow of resources to the extremist organisations and to increase cooperation to fight them, even as India criticised the ineffectiveness of sanctions against them.
During the debate leading up to the resolution speaker after speaker invoked the massacre of the innocents this week in Peshawar and Pakistan vowed to go after the “jugular” of the terrorists. “Pakistan mourns today but we will, Insha’Allah, ensure the total annihilation of terrorists and their twisted ideologies,” Sahebzada Ahmed Khan, its Deputy Permanent Representative, declared.
With his country reeling from the Taliban killing 132 school children, Khan admitted that states bore the primary responsibility for taking effective measures against terrorism. Bilateral, regional, and international cooperation, including exchange of information, was crucial to fighting terrorism, he said.
Bhagwant S. Bishnoi, India’s Acting Permanent Representative, criticised Council’s Sanctions Committee as ineffective the in dealing with the “open and brazen violations” of the Council’s sanctions against terrorist organizations. He said that putting a group on the list of terrorist organisations “is supposed to lead to travel bans, freezing of assets and an arms embargo. In other words, cutting off the lifeline that sustains terrorism. This unfortunately, does not always happen.”
He cited the example of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, which is on the roster of terror organisations and whose role in the attack on the Indian Consulate in Herat in May had been documented in the latest report of UN’s Al Qaida/Taliban Monitoring Team.
“Lashker-e-Tayyaba obviously does not live on love and fresh air.,” Bishnoi said. “They have more than adequate funding. Regrettably, there seems to be little that the Council’s Sanction Committees can do about such open and brazen violations of the sanction regime. This is area which would benefit from consideration by the Council.”
He referred to the international web of crime, trafficking and ideology that sustains organizations like the ISIS, Al Shabaab, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, the Taliban and the Al Qaida and said the revenue from poppy cultivation in Afghanistan helps fuel the Taliban and other terrorist networks. Bishnoi said, “International solidarity is required to meet an international threat. Countries that have been preyed upon by a global network of terrorism simply cannot cope with the challenge alone.”
Briefing the Council, Under Secretary General Jeffrey Feltman said that the Al Qaida/Taliban Monitoring Team had reported to the Council on specific instances of cooperation between crime syndicates and the Taliban and its associates.
Almost a decade ago world leaders at their 2005 summit had decided to create a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism but that is still languishing. “The price that we pay for procrastination is in human lives,” Bishnoi said. “That should not be allowed to continue. Terrorism takes away the foremost of human rights, the right to life. It is truly a crime against humanity.”
(Arul Louis can be contacted at [email protected])