Un Urged To Act Over Genocide And To Facilitate Sikh Self-determination

[SaRpAnCh]

Friday 11th of July 2008

Ranjit Singh Srai

Geneva - Interfaith International, a Non-Governmental Organisation affiliated to ECOSOC, hosted an important event on the sidelines of the 8th session of the Human Rights Council at the UN in Geneva to mark the 24th anniversary of the notorious Indian military attack on the Sikhs in June 1984 and to provide a platform for the Sikhs to promote their roadmap for an equitable solution to the ongoing Indo-Sikh conflict.

Sikhs from Europe, Canada, the US and Punjab highlighted the need for international intervention to bring to justice those guilty of genocide and to bring about conditions that will enable the Sikh nation to exercise its right of self-determination in accordance with international law.

A Memorandum was delivered to the President of the Human Rights Council and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in order to press these demands; the human rights institutions of the UN were fully briefed on the genesis of the conflict and how Sikhs were pursuing freedom in the form of a sovereign state of Khalistan in a lawful, democratic and legitimate struggle. The Memorandum was endorsed by an impressive array of Sikh organisations and countersigned by Justice (Ret'd) Ajit Singh Bains, Convenor of Punjab Human Rights Organisation. Whilst he was unable to attend the session personally he also contributed by way of a joint keynote address delivered by Ranjit Singh Srai, Administrative Secretary of 'Parliamentarians for National Self-Determination', a cross party UK parliamentary group which has provided a platform for various nations struggling to exercise that fundamental collective human right in line with international law.

The organisations behind the Memorandum were the Akali Dal (Amritsar), Council of Khalistan, Dal Khalsa International, Sikh Federation (UK), Shiromani Khalsa Mission, Khalistan Govt in Exile, British Sikh Federation and Sikh Care Society. They sought, amongst other things, a UN sponsored plebiscite in Punjab on independence so that the Sikhs could once again demonstrate to the international community their freely determined wish to secure independence - as initially manifested by the decision of the historic Sarbat Khalsa (national gathering) held at Sri Akal Takht Sahib on 26 January 1986. The UN has confirmed that the Memorandum in receiving attention and Sikhs across the globe will be hoping that the UN's human rights bodies take effective action in the months ahead; next year will be the 25th anniversary of the June and November 1984 massacres of Sikhs in India. Despite the best efforts of New Delhi to create collective amnesia about those shameful episodes in the history of the sub-continent and to neutralise the freedom struggle, the Sikhs have laid down another marker on the international stage that they determined to secure justice and freedom.

The keynote address recalled the horrors of the full scale military attack on the Sikhs, a defenceless minority, in June 1984. The simultaneous assault on 38 Sikh shrines, the systematic cold blooded killings of thousands, the denial of access to the Red Cross, the destruction of the Akal Takht Sahib and burning of the Sikh Reference Library and the sealing off of the Punjab - clearly amounting to genocide - has not been the subject of a single enquiry. No person has been brought before any domestic or international court to answer for the crimes even as Sikhs across the globe continue, year after year, to demonstrate and call for the guilty to be punished. The perpetrators of the pogroms in Delhi and elsewhere in November 1984 - also genocide by any definition - remain similarly unpunished. The subsequent dirty war against Sikhs in Punjab, involving tens of thousands of extra-judicial killings and secret cremations follow the same pattern where the guilty are given immunity from legal action. Justice Bains was scathing about the appalling failure of the Indian judiciary to intervene in any of these cases even though it has the power to do so.

The underlying cause of the conflict, being the denial of the Sikh nation's right of self-determination, remains the core issue to be resolved. The Indian constitution - which outrageously categorises Sikhs as Hindus - is ample evidence of the blatant denial of national and religious rights which the civilised international community now takes for granted. The denial of Sikh political and religious rights, the theft of their land and natural resources, demographic change aimed at reducing the Sikhs to a minority in their homeland, the massive state terrorism used to subjugate them - all of these remain live issues and no credible alternative has been put forward as a solution other than the peaceful implementation of the Sikh nation's right to determine its own destiny in a process overseen by the international community.

Oppressive treatment has also been meted out to other nations and minorities by an increasingly fascist Indian state whose Hindutva ideology is the only possible 'justification' for the continuance of an artificial and completely illegitimate state which has no other possible raison d'etre. The Muslims (Kashmir generally, Babri Masjid 1992, Gujarat pogroms 2002), the Christians (Orissa 2007), the Dalits, the Nagas, the Assamese, the Manipuris, the Bodos and others have all been targeted by this so called 'democracy'. According to Justice Bains it is imperative that the world recognise that India is not a nation but instead a multi-national entity which demands the application of international law to deal with these conflicts that remain a grave threat to international peace and security as well as human rights and to deal with the illegal appropriation of natural resources, such as Punjab's precious river waters.

India's official and blatant refusal (by way of a formal 'reservation' when it acceded to the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) to accept that the right of self determination applies to the nations within its borders (which 'reservation' UN itself has rejected and formally requested withdrawal of), will be the key focus of the ideological battle in the years ahead. The UN has itself officially stated that the denial of the collective human right of self-determination renders individual human rights susceptible to wanton abuse and this has indeed been the tragic experience of tens of millions of people at the hands of the Indian state since 1947. India's credentials as a nuclear armed state that has demonstrated its wanton disregard for international law means that the international community, in the form of the UN, must intervene. There has been significant progress in state and UN practice in recent years leading to interventions to protect freedoms, rights and democracy - whether it be securing self-determination (break up of the USSR and Yugoslavia, re-unification of Germany, East Timor) or setting up criminal courts to deal with genocide (Rwanda, Yugoslavia) - and this should set the agenda for tackling India's past and ongoing abuses.

The UN's own human rights review of India's record on 10 April 2008 in Geneva exposed those continuing abuses, with attacks on minorities and impunity for the perpetrators being widely criticised by many leading states, including the US, UK and Canada. As a very important first step the Sikhs submitted that the UN should reject outright India's claims to a permanent seat on the Security Council - it would surely be the height of political naivety to give India the veto over the very international action that needs to delivered to restore democracy and the rule of law to the region. Instead, India should be expelled from the UN's human rights bodies until it complies with the basic requirements of humanitarian law.

It was pointed out that the Sikhs had never accepted the Indian constitution and therefore were not bound by it; certainly the recent public endorsement of Khalistan by the Joginder Singh Vedanti (Jathedar of the Akal Takht Sahib) showed that Sikh aspirations have not been met and will not be met within an increasingly corrupt and fascist state which has gone to great lengths to defame the nation on the world stage. They urged other nations oppressed by India to step up joint diplomatic action to achieve together the freedom that each of them deserves.

Dr Charles Graves, President of Interfaith International, concluded the session following Q&As from various other NGO representatives, by saying that bringing justice to the Sikhs is a worthy goal and that he would pursue action within the UN's human rights bodies. Manmohan Singh (Dal Khalsa) thanked Dr Graves and all those who had contributed and attended a significant event in terms of the internationalisation of the Sikh struggle.