Alas! United Nations stands up for protection of religious sites
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New Delhi, Jan 25: The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a resolution on safeguarding religious sites across the world. The resolution was titled “Promoting a culture of peace and tolerance to safeguard religious sites”. India supports the resolution and ironically, Pakistan was one of the co-sponsors of the resolution along with Saudi Arabia and other twenty countries.
The resolution condemns offences against religious sites and symbols and rejects the use of violence to express a point of view regarding the protection of religious practices. The resolution also condemns forcible conversions of religions. It condemns acts of violence that destroy religious sites all over the world. Therefore, the United Nations Plan of Action to safeguard religious sites has been adopted. In order to remind the universality of religious sites, mapping of religious sites all over the world is to be developed. The principles of 'Respect, Responsibility and Dialogues' have been adopted under the plan; Respect for the people all over the world irrespective of their faith, history and culture and Responsibility to build cooperation among member countries.
The principle of 'Dialogues' is for the facilitation of better communication among member countries. The World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue organized biennially is one of the main global platforms for promoting intercultural and inter-religious dialogue. It is organized by Azerbaijan in cooperation with Islamic education, scientific and cultural organization and Council of Europe. 'Standing together and Staying Together as one' is another principle incorporated to ensure unity. Besides, the promotion of educational programmes on protecting the religious sites is also to be implemented, whereby education is to be used as a tool to address hate speech issues.
The United Nations Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech has been launched to reduce hate speech and violence related to communal and religious hate speech in the world.Pakistan, despite of the increasing religious atrocities taking place in the country, has been counted as co-sponsor of the resolution.
“According to India, the co-sponsoring of Pakistan was a great irony. This is because, Hindu temples were attacked in Karak, Pakistan. In Dec 2020, the supporters of Jamiat Ulema e Islam party had attacked and burned a Hindu temple in Karak district.”
In fact, Pakistan's reputation in this area has never been even close to satisfactory about the fact that the country is not propagating the superiority of one religion over the others and is not involved in communal and religious atrocities against the religious minorities of its own nation. The leading spokermen of the country had termed terrorist like 'Osama Bin Laden', who work on the motivation of spreading the message of Jihad around the world, a 'hero' in their own parliamentary session.
The Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, that has been home to several Buddhist heritage sites since centuries is another region where Pakistani hypocrisy can be effectively observed. The Buddhist sites along the Karakoram highway, that are being compromised because of the CPEC projects, have been a huge concern for the Buddhist community around the world. His Holiness the Dalai Lama too had made a request for the responsible authorities to look into the issue and take the right steps for the protection of the Buddhist Heritage sites in the Gilgit-Baltistan region.