Kashmir an internal matter hints UN

An annual report of the UN Security Council to the UN General Assembly has once again dropped mention of Jammu and Kashmir, in keeping with a trend that started in 2006, leaving Pakistani diplomats crying foul. On Monday, Pakistan’s envoy Amjad Sial told the General Assembly debating the annual report of the UNSC that the absence of the J&K issue was “inadvertent”.
However, while welcoming the UNSC report, Indian diplomats said the issue has not been part of any UNSC report since 2006. In 2005, then UN secretary general Kofi Annan declared that the “plebiscite” issue could not be enforced or self-implemented. In other words, Indian officials said, it was a “dead letter”. The India-Pakistan issue has not been debated in the UNSC since 1965. But it was after Annan’s remarks, made in the context of resumption of India-Pakistan dialogue in 2005, that the UNSC dropped reference to the dispute. In the past five years, there has been no such mention.
The issue came up in the UNGA on Monday, in the debate of the UNSC’s annual report. Pakistan called it an “inadvertent error”, but Indian officials, fearing that Pakistan was seeking yet another excuse to bring Kashmir into the UNSC, said this was the norm, and had been so for the past five years. India will be a member of the UN Security Council from 2011, and Pakistan hopes to be a member in 2012.