“If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.”

Mao Tse-tung

Brutality is the linchpin of oppression. Oppression, in turn, when fails to garner popular support, resorts to orchestrate deadliest of genocides to straightjacket the voxpopuli. Several instances can be rehashed to establish the veracity of the fact.

In 1994, communal tension erupted between ethnic majority Hutu and minority Tutsi in Rwanda. Hutu nationalists started killing people of Tutsi in Kigali that was the capital of Rwanda. On April 6, 1994, the killing spread to the whole country and got the shape of genocide, particularly after shooting down a plane, carrying Habyarimana and Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira. Within the next three months, more than 800,000 people were slaughtered from both sides. And around 2 million people fled to refugee camps in Congo and other neighboring countries.

The world’s response to the genocide was tepid at best and totally indifferent at worse. Even the UN kept its eyes closed. Later, peacekeeping missions were sent, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda took more than 8 years to complete the trial against instigators of the genocide.

Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali uncovered the reality by stating, “The failure of Rwanda is 10 times greater than the failure of Yugoslavia. Because in Yugoslavia the international community was interested, involved. In Rwanda nobody was interested.”

More than 100,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims) and Croatian civilians were killed by 1995 after declaring independence in 1992 by Bosnia-Herzegovina from Yugoslavia in the result of atrocious crimes. The UN intervened with peacekeeping troops. On July 11, 1995, Serb forces killed approximately 8,000 Bosniaks. Most of the girls were raped in the period, and the human race again suffered from gross violation of human rights under the nose of the UN. Later, the political vacuum was filled up by the intervention of the NATO and the UN after a long time when people were killed, girls were raped, and houses were burnt.

Darfur genocide in Sudan was the first genocide of the 21st century. More than 400,000 Darfuris were killed, and more than three million people displaced. The eyes of the global community were on the success of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to weed out the conflicts between northern Sudan and Southern Sudan, Violence erupted in the western region of Sudan- Darfur.

In 2003, two groups-the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) – raged bloodiest conflicts on the allegations of inequality, economic marginalization, communal subordination in an organized way, political monopoly to the legitimate rule of certain groups and many other allegations. Later, the fight shaped up the war between Arab groups and non-Arab groups that aggravated the situation by breaching the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on minor and major levels. So, the war termed into genocide. Still, law and order is not satisfactory; people are bound to live in refugee camps, and they have a severe shortage of food. From 80,000 to 500000 people have been killed. UN peacekeeping missions have been working in the war-torn region for many years, but the UN could not resolve the issue with the support of abundance of legal documents for the protection of human rights.

The more dreadful perspective is that the UN, in spite of having the Convention on the prevention and punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1948 and support of the rest of the world, could not stop countries from trapping in genocide. So, is it possible for the UN and the human race to get afflicted with another genocide in Kashmir at the hands of the Indian forces after the abrogation of the Article 50-A and Article 370?

About 100,000 people have been murdered in extrajudicial killings in Indian Occupied Kashmir since 1989. Thousands of girls have been abducted and raped in the occupied state by the Indian Army, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and Border Security personnel. Many resolutions have been passed by the UN to address the Kashmir issue through a referendum, and both parties of the conflict acceded to the resolutions. Now, the state is again in the formal genocide condition where millions of army men have been deployed, the Internet service has been suspended, persistent curfew has been imposed, and people do not have access to information, food and independent movement which is a gross violation of the Declaration of Human Rights.

The Article 2 of the Genocide Convention states, “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” So, the Indian government is planning to launch a fake military operation of border infiltration to legalize its genocide to avoid legal liabilities. The Article 3 of the same legal instrument defines severe punishment as “the following acts shall be punishable: (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide.”

Thus, the UN should implement its resolutions on the matter of Kashmir. It ought to ensure fair enforcement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that will lead to avoid a human race to trap into another genocide that may aggravate the security situation of the South Asia region because of soaring religious militancy. Over the killing, rapes, and torture and depriving Kashmiris of fundamental rights, the breached articles of the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide are to be observed and investigated by an international tribunal.