India seeks ISIS-like focus from UNSC on Pak-based terrorists.
Hindustan Times
July 10,2019
India on Tuesday sought to push the UN Security Council to not stop at proscribing terrorists and terrorist groups such as the Pakistan-based D-Company, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba but follow up by granting them a “similar degree of interest” as it did to “denude” the Islamic State.
Participating in a UNSC discussion on linkages between organized crime and international terrorism, Indian Permanent Representative to the UN Syed Akbaruddin also called for the world body to start collaborating its counter-terrorism efforts with the Financial Action Task Force, saying the Paris-based watchdog has been “playing a significant role in setting global standards for preventing and combating money laundering and terrorist financing”.
India has felt frustrated by the lack of on-going and committed collective action to degrade these sub-continental terrorists and entities as was undertaken by the UNSC to tackle the Islamic State (IS or ISIL, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). The UNSC did not stop after simply proscribing the outfit.
“They worked together to shut off ISIL’s main source of revenue, smuggling of crude oil (it drew from production facilities it had captured in Syria and Iraq),” a person familiar with the case India made at the open debate said on background. The collective effort also focussed on persuading Turkey to prevent its territory from being used for trading the crude for refined oil.
“The success of collective action to denude ISIL is a pointer that the Council’s focussed attention can and does yield results,” the Indian permanent representative said. “A similar degree of interest in addressing the threats posed by proscribed individuals, such as Dawood Ibrahim and his D-Company, as well as proscribed entities, including the Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba, listed as affiliates of Al-Qaeda, under the 1267 sanctions regime, will serve all of us well.”
All three entities have been on the UNSC’s sanctions list for the year now, recently joined by Masood Azhar, the founder head of Jaish-e-Mohammad. But they have remained largely free to conduct their business, collect donations, seek recruits, run sprawling training camps and carry out terrorist operations across the border in India and Afghanistan. India’s frustration over Pakistan is shared by a growing number of countries, and New Delhi will be hoping to tap into it to increase the pressure on Islamabad.
Akbaruddin did not name Pakistan, but as has become India’s practice at the United Nations in recent years, he left enough clues on the floor. Speaking about D-Company, he said it has been involved in gold smuggling, counterfeit currency, as well as arms and drug trafficking “from a safe haven that declines to acknowledge even his existence”. That’s Pakistan, which has sheltered the Mumbai don, Dawood Ibrahim, after he fled India following the 1993 Mumbai bombings.
India’s suggestion for the UNSC to collaborate with FATF also had a decidedly Pakistani context. The watchdog, which monitors terrorist financing money laundering, has put Pakistan on a grey-list of countries that it assesses have weak or compromised financial systems. It has been dissatisfied with corrective measures undertaken by Islamabad and may advance it to the black-list of most egregious offender countries.
The UNSC will gain a better understanding of the terrorism problem through this collaboration, it has been argued. The UNSC point of contact could be the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, which, according to its webpage, “carries out the policy decisions of the Committee, conducts expert assessments of each Member State and facilitates counter-terrorism technical assistance to countries”.
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