JAKARTA: Indonesia, the current president of the UN Conference on Disarmament, has called for an end to military support and weapons sales to Israel.
The Conference on Disarmament, consisting of 65 member states including permanent members of the UN Security Council, was established in 1979 and is the world’s only multilateral forum for disarmament negotiations.
Indonesia holds the rotating presidency for a four-week term until March 15 and is leading the high-level segment of the conference in Geneva this week. During the ministerial-level meeting, Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi called for a stop to arms shipments to Israel.
“At the end of my statement, I conveyed condemnation of Israel’s plan to use nuclear weapons to threaten the residents of Gaza. I also urged a stop to weapons shipment to Israel to prevent more fatalities,” Marsudi said in a video briefing on Tuesday.
She also attended a side event on Palestine during her time in Geneva, where she highlighted Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza and the fight against double standards within the international community.
“With the current situation in Gaza and Palestine, I asked if we will remain silent. Ideally, the answer should be no … In closing, I conveyed how we need to remain united, we must continue to work together to fight against the injustice that has gone on for so long against the nation of Palestine.”
Nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October, with about 1.9 million people displaced in the besieged enclave where intense Israeli bombardment from air, land and sea have continued for the last four months.
UN experts called on Feb. 23 for an immediate end to arms exports to Israel, saying that “given the facts or past patterns of behavior,” any weapons or ammunition transferred there would be used to violate international law.
“Such transfers are prohibited even if the exporting State does not intend the arms to be used in violation of the law — or does not know with certainty that they would be used in such a way — as long as there is a clear risk,” the UN experts said.
“The need for an arms embargo on Israel is heightened by the International Court of Justice’s ruling on 26 January 2024 that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and the continuing serious harm to civilians since then,” the experts said. “All States must not be complicit in international crimes through arms transfers. They must do their part to urgently end the unrelenting humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
