President Obama Needs to Provide Indian Government Encouragement to Resolve Kashmir Dispute: Professor Bonney
Chicago, Illinois: Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, Executive Director, Kashmiri American Council/Kashmir center said during a panel discussion entitled, Overcoming Barriers to Realizing the Right of Self-determination” that the Kashmir dispute is primarily the issue of self-determination which is a basic principle of the United Nations Charter that has been applied countless times to the settlement of international disputes. The applicability of the principle of self-determination to the specific case of Jammu and Kashmir has been explicitly recognized by the United Nations. It was also upheld equally by both India and Pakistan when the Kashmir dispute was brought before the Security Council in 1948. All the above mentioned statement may be regarded as history but there is no reason why, when the human, political and legal realities of the dispute have only not changed but have become more accentuated with the passage of time, it should now be regarded as irrelevant.
It is no less relevant to the settlement of the dispute than the termination of the Indonesian mandate was to the question of East Timor or than the circumstances of the incorporation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in the Soviet Union were to the reassertion of their independence.
No settlement of Kashmir will hold unless it is explicitly based on the principle of self-determination and erases the so-called line of control, which is in reality the line of conflict, Fai concluded.
Professor Richard Bonney, Chairman, Europe–Islamic World Organization, England said Kashmir may, in reality, be a more difficult nut to crack than even Palestine. India rejects third party mediation, and the US is therefore unable to act as anything more than a covert honest broker. There is no infrastructure for peacemaking.
