By Hussain Zahid

The nefarious role of the UN in abetting the American invasion of Iraq has only yet again shown how the agency functions as simply an appendage of American imperialism.

That the UN has been pressed into service to play this role is hardly surprising, for from its very inception it has functioned as a vital instrument of global imperialist powers, notwithstanding its rhetoric of working for global peace and prosperity.

The foundations of the UN were laid in June 1945, and in its foundational charter it professed to be passionately opposed to war.

Yet, hardly had the ink dried on the treaty that brought the UN into being that one of its major sponsors, the United States, dropped two atom bombs on Japan, leading to the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

It was America as well as allied imperialist nations that were victorious in the Second World War that had brought the UN into existence.

Indeed, initial membership of the UN was open only to those countries that had been at war with the Axis powers.

The US pressurised a number of Latin American allies, which had been neutral, to declare war in order to qualify.

More than half a century after its founding, the power balance at the UN remains heavily skewed in favour of leading imperialist powers.

The US, Russia, Britain, France and China are the only countries that have permanent seats at the UN Security Council, which is the only UN body that can direct, rather than simply recommend, policies, including issuing declarations of war.

All other states have to remain content with a seat in the toothless General Assembly and a slim chance of a two-year stint at the Security Council without any veto powers.

As events over the past half century so clearly suggest, the aim of the UN has not been to prevent war, but, rather, to structure conflict on terms favourable to America and to its imperialist allies.

The period between 1945 and 1989 saw a total of 138 wars erupting in different parts of the world, in which several millions of people were killed.

In most of the major conflicts the UN simply stood by and let the superpowers get on with it, such as in Vietnam, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan and Cambodia.

Some of these wars were even sponsored by UN observers.

The UN turned a blind eye to France's brutal wars against the Algerians and the Indo-Chinese struggling for independence, in which several million people were killed.

Likewise, the UN failed to act when China invaded Tibet, when Britain violently suppressed the liberation struggle in Kenya, when Israel defied all resolutions calling for the vacation of Palestinian lands, when Indinesian troops invaded Timor and when India and Pakistan refused to heed international opinion on Kashmir.

In short, it did not suit the imperialist powers, particularly the US, to have the UN unnecessarily meddle in these affairs, and the UN willingly danced to the imperialist tune.

The UN's nefarious role in unabashedly promoting American imperialism is clearly evident in its involvement in Palestine.

In fact, the UN can be credited with having played a major role in creating the present-day Middle Eastern problem in the first place.

Under American and British pressure, the UN passed a vote in 1947 calling for the partition of Palestine, providing the Jews who had settled there from Europe almost 60 per cent of the territory, although they were less than a third of the population and then owed less than six per cent of the land! Moreover, the territory given to the Jews included the fertile coastal belt, while the Palestinians were left with the largely mountainous and sterile parts.

Several states that might well have opposed the Partition plan were pressurised by the US to fall in line.

Thus, two years after it was established, the UN was used by the US to promote the partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel in order to suit its own hegemonistic designs in the region at the expense of the dispossessed Palestinians.

The US-enforced vote in the UN General Assembly then paved the way for the ethnic cleansing of almost a million Palestinians as the client state of Israel came into being, grabbing much more land than the Partition plan actually had envisaged for it.

Thanks to America's support for Israel, UN resolutions on Palestine and critical of Israel have been consistently ignored by the Israelis.

The US has, in fact, repeatedly intervened to shield Israel from hostile world opinion.

In the Security Council the US has used its veto 34 times since 1972 to defend Israel from censure.

Yet, despite this blatant defiance of the UN and world opinion, no western country, least of all the US, has ever proposed that Israel be attacked and forcibly occupied for non-compliance with international law.

This is, of course, in complete contrast to the attitude of America, other western powers and the UN vis-a-vis Iraq.

The brutal occupation of Iraq is the latest example of the UN being simply a cover-up to promote the designs of western, particularly American, imperialism.

UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, mostly children.

America has used threats of retaliation and the cutting off of aid to countries who have not supported it in its invasion of Iraq, putting paid to all rhetoric of human rights and freedom.

In America's war against Iraq launched in January 1991, UN-backed troops slaughtered thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.

All because a dictator whom the Americans had backed in his war against Iran had turned his sights to oil-rich Kuwait, a key American ally.

The war and the ensuing UN-imposed sanctions are said to have wrought complete destruction, leading to living conditions in Iraq dropping from near 'First World' to 'Third World' standards.

The role of the UN in abetting America's military designs in areas that it considers strategic must be seen along with its role as an important player in defending and promoting economic imperialism.

The UN is a fierce backer of neo-liberal economics, in league with other global imperialist institutions such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund.

Addressing a group of top capitalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared, 'The business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world'.

In a similar vein, unabashedly extolling the virtues of capitalism, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy declared at a conference at Harvard university, 'Indeed it is abundantly clear that without development and peace, trade and investment cannot occur and businesses cannot grow.

By the same token, thriving markets can help create the conditions necessary for development and peace.

If that were not enough to show the UN's support of crass, exploitative capitalism, albeit under a 'benevolent' guise, in 2000 the UN launched the much-touted 'Global Compact' with major multinational corporations, including some that have been looting and plundering entire countries in the so-called 'Third World' and are as well leading agents of western cultural imperialism.

At the event Kofi Annan shared the podium with the big wigs of such companies as Nike and Shell.

It appears that this 'Compact' is simply a face-saving device and a catchy PR-exercise for major multinationals who are under fire for their unjust labour and environmental records.

Singing up to the Compact thus provides them an aura of do-gooder respectability, without their having to do anything 'good' at all! All they need to do is to agree, in theory, to follow nine human rights, labour rights and environmental principles, in return for being publicly seen to be associated with the UN with its supposed mandate of care and concern for the well-being of the world.

However, and here lies the catch, the corporations that sign the pact are not monitored and there is no enforcement! In this way, the UN provides the multinationals with legitimacy and at the same time has effectively sanctioned their loot and plunder of the 'Third World'! For the people of Iraq and Palestine, and for millions of others struggling against western imperialism military, economic, cultural and political the UN then offers no hope at all.

Alternate international bodies free from imperialist control would necessarily be the answer, but these can only come into being through relentless struggle against imperialism itself.

And in that struggle we know whose side the UN will be on.

Role of religion and religious activists Civil society initiatives and peace in Kashmir By Yoginder Sikand Insofar as the basis of the Kashmir conflict is political, a lasting solution to the conflict can only come about at the political level.

Despite this, civil society groups in Kashmir, and in India as well, do have a crucial role to play in promoting a peaceful resolution of the ongoing conflict in the region.

My own involvement with civil society initiatives in Kashmir has been very limited, I must confess.

I have visited Kashmir several times (the last being three years ago), and have also traveled to Doda, Rajouri, Poonch, Ladakh and Jammu.

My own particular interest has been in Kashmiri Muslim religious traditions, and the possibilities that they might contain that can be used to promote more accepting, engaging and embracing notions of other religions and their adherents.

I started by traveling to various Sufi shrines in the Kashmir Valley and in the Jammu province, collecting material about the Sufi saints who still command the love and devotion of huge numbers of people.

This was part of an Oxfam-sponsored project on religious harmony in India.

I wrote several tracts based on my research and also published several articles in various Kashmiri and Indian newspapers on the subject.

We also arranged to have a video film made and a seminar to be organized on the subject in Srinagar.

Although not directly related to the Oxfam project, we also prepared and published a directory of NGOs in Kashmir.

In this paper I would like to focus on the possible role of religious, specifically Islamic, groups and organisations in working for a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict.

Clearly, insofar as the Kashmir dispute is linked to the larger Hindu-Muslim question and to the processes that led to the partition of India, the religious dimension of the conflict cannot be ignored.

The growing role of radical Islamist groups in Kashmir in recent years has only made the conflict more intractable.

Although this should not be taken as suggesting that the Kashmir dispute is essentially religious, rather than political, or that a solution to the conflict lies simply in a liberal or progressive understanding of religion, I believe that understandings of religion, both Hinduism as well as Islam, that are more accepting and tolerant of people of other faiths, if not of other religions themselves, can play a vital role in bringing about a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Kashmir.

In this paper I would like to focus on the possibilities of promoting more tolerant understandings of Islam in Kashmir, and the problems involved in such a project.

I would argue that the tradition of Kashmiri Sufism has enormous, although unexplored, potential to combat chauvinist and intolerant versions of Islam.

Historically, the spread of Islam in Kashmir owes almost entirely to the peaceful missionary efforts of various Sufi saints.

Many of these saints, particularly of the indigenous Rishi order, were also widely revered by the Kashmiri Hindus.

Their mode of missionary work was culturally rooted in the Kashmiri social ethos, which also partly explains why Hindus, too, would regularly visit their shrines to pay their respects to them.

Much literature exists, in Urdu, Kashmiri and Persian, on the life and teachings of the Sufis of Kashmir.

In recent years some books have been written on the subject in English.

For the most part, such texts are written in a hagiographic mode replete with stories of the alleged miraculous feats (karamat) of the saints, making it difficult to separate fact from fiction.

For many younger generation Kashmiri Muslims who have had the benefit of modern education such texts appear to exercise little appeal.

This explains, in part, the greater popularity among such youth of alternate forms of Islamic literature, such as published by the Jama'at-i Islami, that propagate an understanding of Islam that appears as strictly rational.

The declining appeal of Sufi forms of Islam is also to be attributed to growing awareness of exploitative practices associated with the custodians of the Sufi shrines (mujawirs, pirzadas, sajjada nashins).

To add to this is the widespread feeling that Sufism, as it is popularly practiced, is 'other-worldly', and not concerned with the actual real-world concerns of the people.

For many younger generation Kashmiris the cults of the Sufis are further suspect because of what are regarded as un-Islamic beliefs and practices associated with the cults of the Sufi shrines.

In this context, what possible roles can the Sufi tradition play in helping bring about a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict, countering radical Islamism and promoting more accepting notions of people of other faiths? I believe that although the possibilities for this are rather limited, it is certainly an important form of civil society action that needs to be promoted.

Clearly, one cannot expect any miracles to follow from this because, despite the progressive theological resources contained in the Kashmiri Sufi tradition that stress respect and love for people of other faiths, clearly, as a whole, it has been unable to effectively resist or radical Islamist groups that speak the language of hatred.

Many Kashmiri Muslims I have met who are associated with the Sufi tradition say that they are simply to scared to speak out, against both the Indian army and Islamist militants, for fear of their lives.

The matter is further complicated by the fact that many Kashmiris who describe themselves as followers of the Sufis do also support the political aims of militant groups_freedom from India, independence or accession to Pakistan_while not necessarily subscribing to their particular theology.

This is clearly apparent, for instance, in the case of many Kashmiri Muslims who might deeply revere the Sufi saints, but at the same time might support the attacks against Indian armed personnel by militants associated with the vehemently anti-Sufi Lashkar-i Tayyeba, which is associated with the Ahl-i Hadith school that regards Sufism as 'anti-Islamic'.

Yet, while keeping in mind these factors that clearly limit the possible role of Kashmiri Sufi tradition to help promote a peaceful resolution of the conflict, I feel that civil society groups could play a valuable role in this regard.

One way is by helping to promote a new genre of writing in Urdu and English on Sufism, particularly on the Kashmiri Sufis, that focuses on the social roles and ethical teachings of the Sufi saints, rather than on the miracles popularly associated with them.

In this regard, particular stress should be given to the role of certain Kashmiri Sufi saints in promoting inter-communal harmony based on an expansive understanding of Islam.

Such texts should take the form of booklets rather than, as is the rule, scholarly tomes, and should be modestly priced.

In addition to new forms of Sufi writing, seminars on Sufism and its contemporary relevance could be organized at Kashmir University, to which scholars of masters from India and elsewhere could also be invited.

Likewise, seminars on Kashmiri Sufism could be organized at Indian universities, where a total ignorance prevails about the rich cultural heritage of the Kashmiri Muslims.

In helping to promote a peaceful resolution to the Kashmir dispute, I believe that Indian Muslim civil society groups have a very crucial role to play.

If such groups have not been active in Kashmir it is not because of any insensitivity to the plight of their co-religionists in the region, but, rather, because of the fear of being accused as 'anti-national' simply because of being associated in any way with Kashmiris.

This, I believe is tragic, not only because as citizens of India they too have the right and the duty of trying to do what they can to help promote peace in Kashmir, but also because they are uniquely positioned to do so.

As a marginalized and increasingly threatened minority, the Indian Muslims, as a whole, see a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute as essential for their own survival and progress, for the continuing conflict in the region only further helps Hindu fascists in India in their anti-Muslim campaign.

As such, then, the Indian Muslims have a vital stake in peace in Kashmir.

Indian Muslim organizations and leading 'ulama continue to exercise a profound influence on vast numbers of Kashmiri Muslims.

Almost all the Islamic literature available in bookshops in Kashmir is published by Islamic groups in India, particularly Delhi.

In recent years a number of madrasas have opened in Kashmir, and almost all of these are associated with larger madrasas in India itself, particularly of the Deobandi, Barelwi and Ahl-i Hadith schools.

Some of the teachers in these madrasas are from north India (mostly Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh).

Most of their higher-level teachers have graduated from leading madrasas in India, and still maintain links with their alma maters.

Given this, I feel that Indian Muslim organizations and 'ulama could be encouraged to play a more active role in helping to promote peace in Kashmir.

With the respect that they command among large sections of the Kashmiri Muslims they could prove to be particularly effective.

A number of Indian Muslim groups and individuals have been involved in promote inter-faith dialogue and communal harmony in India, through practical work along with people of other faiths as well as through their scholarship and literature.

I believe that they need to be encouraged to extend their activities to Kashmir as well.

This would also be a test of their sincerity.

If they are consistent in their insistence that Islam envisions a just peace and harmonious inter-communal relations, this should hold true not only in a context of Muslim minority-ness, as in India, but also in a situation where Muslims are a majority, as in Kashmir.

In this regard, I feel that a valuable purpose could be served if Indian Muslim activists who have been involved in promoting inter-faith dialogue and communal harmony in India could visit Kashmir on a regular basis and interact with local Islamic and social activists.

I believe leaders of three Islamic groups in India have a particularly crucial role to play in this regard: the Jama'at-i Islami Hind, the Markaz-i Ahl-i Hadith-i Hind and the Dar 'ul-'Ulum madrasa at Deoband.

This is because Pakistan-based organizations sharing a common understanding of Islam with these three groups respectively, [the Jama'at-i Islami Pakistan, the Lashkar-i Tayyeba (associated with the Ahl-i Hadith Pakistan) and the Jaish-i Muhammad (associated with one wing of the Pakistani Deobandis)] are key players in the Kashmir conflict today.

The Indian Jama'at, as well as several Indian Ahl-i Hadith and the Deobandi 'ulama have adopted, on the whole, a markedly divergent position from their Pakistani counterparts on religious, including Islamist, extremism, stressing the need for inter-communal harmony and a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute.

I do not think it should be difficult to encourage them to take a more pro-active role in Kashmir, and since they exercise an important influence on the Kashmiri Muslims in different ways their intervention can prove to be invaluable.

To conclude, I believe that promoting alternate visions and understandings of Islam that are more accommodative of people of other faiths and that stress peaceful means of conflict resolution is an essential and necessary, although not sufficient, condition for a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict.

This said, I must also insist that more accepting and open understandings of Hinduism and of Indian nationalism, are an absolute necessity as well in this regard.

Islamist and Hindutva militancy feed on each other, and the one cannot be combated without consistently struggling against the latter as well.

Health facilities meant only for urban Indians