Masood Azhar will be banned even if China doesn’t object at UN

NEW DELHI: Backed by key UN Security Council members and other UN member states, India has pounced on a document submitted to the world body to strengthen its case to list Masood Azhar under 1267 based on evidence that Al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden helped Azhar to create JeM.

China is still the only Security Council permanent member which remains non -committal against India’s position ahead of March 13 deadline. Sources indicated that this will go down to wire and Chinese position can be known only before deadline expires.

The 1267 UN Sanctions list to declare Azhar a global terrorist requires to establish his links with Al Qaeda. A document was submitted in UN in 2011 establishing Azhar’s links with Osama. The UN is now taking cognizance of the issue on India’s rallying other members in the backdrop of a new proposal to list Azhar under 1267 sanctions committee.

The UNSC sanctions committee chair, currently Indonesia, has notified that unless it hears to the contrary by Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 3:00 p.m., the Security Council will take it that the members of the Sanctions Committee have no objection to Azhar’s addition to the 1267 ISIL (Da'esh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions List. Germany and Equatorial Guinea, among current non-permanent members of UNSC have decided to co-sponsor the resolution.

The UN Security Council in 2001 designated the JeM as an entity associated with Osama bin Laden, his terror network Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Security Council's documents also indicate that it acknowledged Azhar as the founder of the JeM at least since 2011. Yet it failed to place him under international sanctions in the past so many years, officials familiar with the matter rued.

An UNSC “narrative summary” on the JeM dated October 17, 2011 noted that it was an “extremist group based in Pakistan founded by Masood Azhar upon his release from prison in India in 1999 in exchange for 155 hostages held on an Indian Airlines flight that had been hijacked to Kandahar, Afghanistan,” officials recalled. The Security Council also acknowledged in its narrative summary back in 2011 that Azhar had “formed the JeM with support” from Laden, the Taliban and several other extremist organizations, officials pointed out.

India has long been drawing the attention of the Security Council to the “anomaly” of the JeM being under UN sanctions but not its founder leader. Yet Azhar remained out of the purview of the sanctions and lived free at Kausar Colony at Bahawalpur in Punjab province of Pakistan although the UNSC had long back acknowledged fact that he had met the criteria – being linked to Laden, Al Qaeda and Taliban – for being placed under sanctions by the international organization.

Delhi renewed its efforts to bring Azhar under UN sanctions after the JeM carried out attacks on the Indian Air Force base at Pathakot in Punjab in January 2016.

China, however, blocked all moves by the US, UK and France – three of the five UNSC permanent members – over the past three years to designate Azhar as an individual associated with the Al Qaeda and Taliban, although it was a fact that had already been accepted and acknowledged by the Security Council.

A month after September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, a committee of the UN Security Council on October 7, 2001 designated the JeM as an organization associated with Al Qaeda and Taliban. The outfit was immediately put under full spectrum UN sanctions – assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo – for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf or in support of,” “supplying, selling or transferring arms and related materiel to” or “otherwise supporting acts or activities of” Laden, his Al-Qaeda network and the Taliban.

The JeM members set up two humanitarian aid agencies to work as its fronts in Pakistan – Al-Akhtar Trust International and Alkhair Trust. The JeM top brass sought to give the impression that the two new organizations were separate entities. It also sought to use them as a way to deliver arms and ammunition to its members under the guise of providing humanitarian aid to refugees and other needy groups, says the UNSC narrative summary on the outfit.