NEW DELHI: Inter Religious Strife in India is a destabilizing influence on world peace and order and the UN Commission on Human Rights should speak out in defence of the world’s oppressed Minorities and work actively to resolve conflicts involving minority groups, Geraldine Ferraro, US delegate told the Commission in Geneva.
A backgrounder released Feb.17 by the USIS here said Ferraro, while addressing the annual session of the 53nation Commission Tuesday, said that the issue of interethnic and inter religious conflict “is one of the most serious human rights problems facing the world today.”
Citing the crisis in the former Yugoslavia as the “most obvious example” of a country torn apart by ethnic and religious differences, Ferraro said that “inter-clan warfare in Somalia, religious and ethnic strife in Sudan and the Caucasus, violence against ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia, interreligious strife in India and interethnic clashes in Sri Lanka” are also examples of destabilizing influences on world peace and order.
Stating that such conflicts “threaten to reverse” the recent progress toward freedom and democracy, she said it was up to the UN Human Rights Commission to speak up for those who had no voice of their own.
Ferraro suggested that the advisory service program of the Commission’s center in Geneva could be called upon to provide the expertise needed to mediate among parties to conflicts in an effort to resolve disputes.
“There is no one who would argue that these are not hard times, and history shows that hard times are when forces of intolerance and conservatism speak loudest. Now is the time they plan on discontent and fear,” she said. “The surest way to make hard times harder is to divide ourselves, to make some citizens more equal than others,” she added.
Ferraro referred to the fact that there were certain countries in which the government was not responsible for the deprivation of the nights of members of minorities. Interethnic and interreligious hatred resulted in measures taken by one group of citizens to deprive other groups of their most basic rights or even their life.
“The question for us to consider is whether conflict resolution is not a skill which could be usefully applied to situations worldwide in which members of different groups face each other with hostility and should be persuaded to start talking to each other, to discuss their common problems and look for constructive solutions which would be fair to all,” Ferraro suggested.
If this was agreed upon, then it was necessary that expense in conflict resolution were linked with areas where their services were required, she said. It should be possible for the Commission’s center in Geneva to carry out a pilot project in conflict resolution in an appropriate country within existing resources, she added.
Article extracted from this publication >> February 26, 1993
