“China, you are shielding Pakistan sponsored terroism” – Deva Sarran

WASHINGTON: China, you are shielding Pakistan’s patronage of terrorism, is the sub-text of the message. But the statement itself was pure bureaucratese, making no mention of the two states that joined hands on Thursday to safeguard Masood Azhar, the terrorist chief of the proscribed Jaish-e-Mohammed, from being designated as such by the United Nations.

Amid an outpouring of pledges and platitudes at the fourth Nuclear Security Summit convened by President Obama, India let it be known that it was deeply unhappy with sections of the international community over its response to terrorism. A joint move by China and Pakistan to thwart India’s bid to designate Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar came in for withering criticism from New Delhi amid all the hoopla in Washington over nuclear terrorism.

“We find it incomprehensible that while the Pakistan-based JeM was listed in UN Security Council Committee established under UN Security Council Resolution 1267/1989/2253 as far back as 2001 for its well known terror activities and links to the Al Qaeda, the designation of the group’s main leader, financier and motivator has been put on a technical hold. The recent terror attack in Pathankot on January 2 has shown that India continues to bear the dangerous consequences of not listing Masood Azhar. Given the global networking of terrorist groups, this has implications for the entire international community,” India warned in a statement, without mentioning that Beijing played a key role in thwarting India’s application.

The statement implicitly criticized the working methods of the UN committee saying its principles of “unanimity and anonymity,” is leading to the adoption of a selective approach to combating terrorism.

“This does not reflect well on the determination that the international community needs to display to decisively defeat the menace of terrorism,” the statement said, following up Prime Minister Modi’s trenchant remarks in Brussels that the UN itself was unsure how to define terrorism.

Earlier, China’s President Xi JinPing was seated at the table on the other side of President Obama at a White House dinner on Thursdaynight when Prime Minister Modi urged world leaders to “drop the notion that terrorism is someone else’s problem and that ‘his’ terrorist is not ‘my’ terrorist.”

“The reach and supply chains of terrorism are global; but genuine cooperation between nation states is not,” Modi said at the forum to no apparent reaction from Xi. “Terrorism is globally networked. But we still act only nationally to counter this threat,” he added.

The Indian statement issued from New Delhi described the UN Security Council Resolution 1267 as an “important building block of the UN global counter terrorism strategy that should aim to protect all member states and their citizens from the activities of terror groups such as JeM and its leader Mohamad Masood Azhar.”

The porky, 47-year old Masood Azhar is a Bawahalpur-born graduate of Pakistan’s terrorism school run by the country’s military-intelligence establishment. He is said to have fought in Afghanistan and Somalia before he was captured in Kashmir.

He was considered such a valuable asset that his patrons captured four foreign tourists in 1995 to free him, executing three of them when they failed to secure his release. They then hijacked an Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar and succeeding his getting him released, whereupon he disappeared into Pakistan with the help of its military-intelligence establishment.

The Pakistani civilian government has periodically arrested him but the country’s shaky judicial system, undermined by the military-intelligence establishment and with judges terrorized by extremists, has invariably freed him. New Delhi believes he played a key role in the Pathankot terrorist attack.