One of the latest outbursts in between two nations is the contentious Kashmir Crisis. Kashmir, a majority-Muslim region in the northern parts of both India and Pakistan, has been partitioned between the two countries since 1947. It’s become a rather popular space for disagreement ever since, inciting intermittently continuous war between the South Asian nuclear powers as they fight each other for control of it. This crisis has generally been deemed a “problem of territorial cohesion” at an international level, and the UN has mostly remained passive toward this issue. However, more recent events of unrest and conflict have brought the crisis into the limelight.
The main issue stems from the fact that Indian governments have largely ignored the Kashmiri people’s desire to unite with Pakistan. This has been the case ever since the partition in 1947. Today, the Kashmir region is divided between China, India, and Pakistan. The most problematic region of Kashmir with respect to social and political violence is the Kashmir Valley, which hosts half of the entire region’s population and constitutes the primary source of income to the region.
The human rights violations in Kashmir are in alarming abundance, and the numbers continue to rise: loss of life, use of excessive force, torture, illegal abduction, restrictions on health and educational services, suppression of human rights activists, sexual harassment… the list, unfortunately, goes on. It’s estimated that militancy in Kashmir has claimed over 40,000 lives between 1990 and 2017 — over 10,000 of which were civilians. Put into perspective, that’s an average of 4 deaths per day in that region alone.
As the UN has been mostly a spectator in the face of this crisis, Pakistan’s foreign minister recently insisted that the UN “launch an international investigation” into the crisis, pointing out the potential risk of “genocide” in the Kashmir region. In late July, the US President first offered assistance in “mediating” the interaction between India and Pakistan at a White House news conference. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had initially welcomed the offer, but India holistically declined the offer, bluntly refusing any external interference concerning its relations with Pakistan surrounding the Kashmir region or any other subject for that matter.
Darlon Riviere - Contributing Writer