When will peace finally break out?

For India as for a number of other countries terrorism has emerged as one of the major threats to freedom and peace. It was important, there...

For India as for a number of other countries terrorism has emerged as one of the major threats to freedom and peace. It was important, therefore, to focus on ways of defeating terrorism at the end-of-the-millennium session of the United Nations General Assembly. As the world’s statesmen look around them during the closing months of this century, they will be relieved that there are no big millenarian visions about to threaten the stability of nations and the global system. All that is dead and buried. What’s left is only the practical business of making money and everyone, more or less, is united in the pursuit of it. So the world community ought to be optimistic about a future with fewer wars. The hope is that if there is blood to be spilled it will be around conference tables and during trade negotiations. But peace has not only not broken out generally, it is threatened everywhere by terrorism…

Every new flare-up of terrorism in some part of the world results in fresh calls for international cooperation to combat it. Collective action has been difficult to bring about. It has taken an unconscionably long time to draft and get acceptance for an international convention which requires states to prosecute or extradite those accused of terrorist bombings. India has just now ratified that convention but it will only come into force when another dozen or so countries similarly ratify the convention. There is also talk of more anti-terrorist conventions; India would like one on state-sponsored terrorism, Russia one on denying them weapons of mass destruction and France one on denying them access to the international banking system. All worthy causes but when are they going to be drafted and signed and go into effect? People around the world want to see tough action follow the denunciation of terrorism.

Excerpted from an editorial in ‘The Indian Express’, September 24, 1999