Dear Delegates:
Welcome to YMUNT IV! My name is Oleksa Alex Martiniouk and it is my distinct pleasure to welcome you to the United Nations Security Council. I am looking forward to the exciting discussion, learning, and debate that will take place in our committee and cannot wait to hear the innovative ideas and solutions that you will bring to the table as our sessions progress.
In my experiences with Model UN, I have served as both a chair and a Secretariat member on various occasions, but I have also participated plenty as a delegate. I have felt the feelings of excitement, wonder, and uncertainty that face you as you prepare to take part in fast-paced debate, address nuanced crises, and develop ideas through constant collaboration with your peers. I am prepared to help you along the way with any concerns or difficulties you may have and am incredibly excited to see the way in which you will address important contemporary issues with care, consideration, and collaboration as both you and your perspectives develop and grow throughout the process. Model UN is an unparalleled platform to grow as an individual, be it in the skills of public speaking, researching, debating, or cooperation with your peers, and I hope that you all take advantage of the great opportunities that YMUNT IV will present you with in this regard. We, the committee directors, have put in a lot of work preparing these topics, and we hope to see that mirrored in the work you put into your preparation for and participation in the committees.
Of course, I’d also like to share a little bit about myself. I am a rising junior in Berkeley College at Yale University. While I am still undecided in terms of academics, I am studying Global Affairs and Computer Science and have particularly strong interests in both the arts and the sciences. I was born and raised in New York City, but my family hails from Ukraine—I visit the country every year and even lived there sporadically in my youth. On campus, I am especially involved with the Yale International Relations Association (YIRA), of which YMUNT in a constituent program, and have served on the Secretariats of Yale Model United Nations, the Security Council Simulation at Yale, the International Relations Symposium at Yale, and Yale Model Government Europe. I am also currently the Secretary-General of YMUN XLIV. I also had the chance to travel to the Russian Federation on a YIRA foreign affairs research trip, a remarkably rewarding experience given my interest in Eastern European politics and the opportunity it provided to meet with opposition leaders and intellectuals. Outside of YIRA, I am part of the Yale Banner Publications, the 175 year-old organization that produces Yale’s yearbook, and have picked up writing for the Yale Daily News.
I am extremely excited to meet all of you this upcoming May and encourage you to take advantage of this topic guide and contact me with any questions you may have about this committee, Yale, or anything else you might be wondering about, really. Feel free to write to me at oleksa.martiniouk@yale.edu—see you soon!
Best,
Oleksa Alex Martiniouk
PROLOGUE
To a large degree, this committee will function as one would expect a simulation of the United Nations Security Council at any other model United Nations conference to function. There is an important twist, though—the committee will have both historical and contemporary components.
The first topic is historical and, thus, during the first half of the committee sessions, the committee will represent the United Nations Security Council that existed in 1948. The historical nature of this will extend to various facets of the committee experience; proposed solutions will be bound by the realities of the era in question, information of events and the geopolitical situation will be limited to everything preceding January 1, 1948, and the countries represented will be those that were on the Security Council in 1948 (with a slight modification—because there were fewer states on the Security Council in 1948 than there are in 2017, some states which were part of the UN but not the Security Council at the time were added to balance the numbers). Most importantly, I would like to stress that, even though these committee sessions will be ‘historical,’ the committee does not need to become a reenactment of history and new and innovative proposals are welcome and even encouraged.
The second half of the committee sessions will focus on the second, contemporary topic and the delegates will represent the states on the Security Council presently. The committee will function normally and, most importantly, delegates will represent states that are either the successor states of, or share similar regional or political characteristics to, the states they represented during the historical sessions For example, the delegate that represented the Republic of China during the 1948 sessions, will represent the People’s Republic of China in the 2017 sessions because the seat was transferred from the former to the latter in 1971.
The structure and nature of this committee will be bit more complicated than your standard model UN Security Council and may require more research on your part, but I do think that it will lead to incredibly interesting debate and provide us with a better understanding of how history can inform our perspective and ideas on the present.
TOPIC HISTORY
Kashmir under British Rule
Prior to the Sepoy Rebellion, or the First Indian War of Independence, in 1858 the Indian subcontinent largely fell under the jurisdiction of the British East India Company, a London-based trading company that effectively ruled large swaths of India with private armies and administrations from 1757 onwards. The Jammu and Kashmir Princely State was first established in 1846 following a treaty between the British East India Company and Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu—with the failure of the Sikhs to fulfill the terms of their surrender in the First Anglo-Sikh War, jurisdiction of Kashmir was transferred to Raja Gulab Singh in return for monetary payment, acceptance of British sovereignty, and collaboration against the Sikh rulers of Punjab.
Within just 11 years, the British East India Company lost governance of the Indian subcontinent as a result of the two-year Sepoy Rebellion, which began as a single mutiny which then spread to larger civilian rebellions in central India, when jurisdiction was formally transferred to the British Crown. The Maharaja at the time, Ranbir Singh, aligned with the British and the state of Jammu and Kashmir continued to be ruled by the Hindu Dogra dynasty, despite the predominantly Muslim demographic of the region.
CURRENT SITUATION
“Quit Kashmir” Movement
The tyranny of the Dogras has lacerated our souls. The Kashmiris are the most handsome people, yet the most wretched looking. It is time for action … Sovereignty is not the birthright of a ruler. Every man, woman and child will shout 'Quit Kashmir'. The Kashmiri nation has expressed its will.
Thus, in 1946, Sheikh Abdullah launched the “Quit Kashmir” movement against the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. After a failed attempt to appeal to the Maharaja with his memorandum entitled “Naya (New) Kashmir” calling for a constitutional monarchy, Abdullah challenged the monarchy’s existence in total. The movement was aimed at Dogra rule, which Abdullah felt was a manifestation of colonial brutality, and aligned itself with the larger Indian struggle for independence. The movement failed to gain a widespread following and, to an extent, antagonized the Hindu and Sikh minorities of Kashmir. The Muslim Conference, in particular, refused to support the slogan. Abdullah was sentenced to 9 years in prison for the act of sedition. In what is known as the “Quit Kashmir” trial, Abdullah phrased his opposition to the monarchical rule as such:
[Leave] it to history and posterity to pronounce their verdict on the claims that I and my colleagues have made not merely on behalf of the four million people of Jammu and Kashmir but also of the ninety-three million people of all the States of India [under princely rule]. This claim has not been confined to a particular race or religion or color…I hold that sovereignty resides in the people, all relationships political, social and economic, derive authority from the collective will of the people.
Public displays of outrage in response to Abdullah’s harsh sentence were put down quickly and, though the Indian National Congress condemned the punitive measure and provided Abdullah’s legal aid, Pandit Nehru, the first prime minister of India, acknowledged that the demands of the movement strayed significantly from the All India States’ Peoples’ Conference policy on recognizing the jurisdiction of constitutional princes.
Indian Independence and Partition
The Partition of India is a vast and complicated topic, but, in short, it represented the largest mass migration in human history, saw a significant outburst of retributive genocide across sectarian lines, and led to the creation of two separate states, the mainly muslim Dominion of Pakistan and the mainly hindu Union of India. The one exception of the partition was the fate of the Princely States, of which Jammu and Kashmir were one.
Princely States during the Indo-Pak Partition
The Mountbatten Plan, engineered by Earl Mountbatten of Burma, established the framework for the partition of India and aimed to preserve as much unity as possible while dividing the Indian subcontinent into two separate states across sectarian lines. The plan, importantly, lacked any answer to the question of princely states and their sovereignty, though Earl Mountbatten himself encouraged the princely states to join either of the two new states instead of remaining independent. With the formal passing of the Indian Independence Act which dealt with partition, Britain officially abandoned suzerainty over the 560 princely states.
Kashmir’s Short-Lived Independence
Following the partition, Kashmir was presented with three options—accede to India, accede to Pakistan, or remain independent. Given the Maharaja’s reluctance to accede to either dominion, it appeared that, at least in the short run, the Maharaja had decided on independence. A day after the Muslim Conference declares its allegiance to Pakistani accession on July 22, the Prime Minster of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, Ram Chandra Kak, on a visit to Delhi, expresses that the State has decided to remain independent. For this endeavor, the Maharaja signed a standstill agreement with Pakistan on August 16 and hoped to do the same with India, though India refused.
Pakistani Tribal Interference in Kashmir
Spillover from the sectarian rioting in the divided territories of neighboring Punjab eventually contributed to a rise in communal rioting against Muslims in Kashmir. In response, Muslim insurgents in the southwestern Poonch district of Kashmir, who were supported by the Pakistani army covertly through supplies of arms, transportation, and men, revolted against the Maharaja and established an Azad (Free) Kashmir government. Pakistani tribesmen from the North-West Frontier Province approached the capital of Srinagar by October, worrying the princely state’s administration.
Jammu and Kashmir’s Accession to India
Following the armed invasion of Kashmir by Pakistani tribesmen and servicemen, the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir reaches out to the Indian Union for aid, where the response stresses that India will do nothing until Jammu and Kashmir formally signs the Instrument of Accession and cedes jurisdiction to the Indian state. On the 26 of October, Jammu and Kashmir officially sign the document and accede to India—Pakistan, importantly, does not recognize this accession. India agrees to the request for armed assistance and the first Indo-Pakistani War begins.
Request to the Security Council
On January 1, 1948, India submitted a complaint to the United Nations Security Council. The complaint states that “Under Article 35 of the Charter of the United Nations, any Member may bring any situation whose continuance is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security to the attention of the Security Council.” The formal complaint focused on the infiltration of Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistani tribesmen and requests that Indian troops be allowed to enter sovereign Pakistani territory to deal effectively with the raiders and invading tribesmen.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
If you want a quick overview of Kashmir and the issues surrounding the region, outlets such as the BBC or CNN offer quick facts, brief histories, and/or timelines of the situation in the region.
→ Quick Facts and Timeline (CNN)
Considering that this topic is the historical component of the committee, a great place to start is a scholarly database such as JSTOR. What’s particularly good about using a journal database for this topic is that you can almost always filter the results you get when you search for relevant information. Because the committee sessions will be run as if the year is 1948, you can actually set the filter on JSTOR so that only documents published in or around 1948 appear when you search relevant topics and keywords. News outlets such as the New York Times offer similar functions. This is a great place to start if you want to get a sense of what information was available on the issue at the time and what perspectives and positions different scholars and national governments had on the Kashmiri crisis at the time.
Obviously, you need not, and probably should not, restrict yourselves to sources and documents published in the 1940’s and 50’s and more contemporary works can offer more nuanced understandings of the events that transpired or provide possible inspiration for the policy ideas we will be discussing in committee sessions. In particular, you can read through UN resolutions on the Kashmiri Question and get a sense of the solutions and proposals of the time.
→ November 1948 Resolution of the UN Commission for India and Pakistan
(Our committee takes place prior to the adoption of this resolution, but it may be good to look through it and consider why certain ideas were suggested and why certain solutions worked or failed to alleviate the crisis.)
An important thing to keep in mind when researching the Kashmiri Question, or the Indo-Pak Partition in general, is the particularly strong prevalence of national narratives and biases. Because the conflict over Kashmir is still active to this day, many of the sources you may find will possibly be strongly in favor of India or Pakistan to the point where you may be reading conflicting information. This is not a problem, per se, as it is important to understand the differences in country and bloc positions on the issue, but it’s definitely something you should be aware of when reading up on the topic. Sources that may carry a particularly strong bias are those with ties to the Indian or Pakistani governments, though individual scholars, journalists, and journals are equally likely to promote a particular national, historical narrative of the situation.
