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Showing posts from April, 2017
Erdogan's visit to India likely to provide fresh fillip to India-Turkey relations in a changing                                           world India and Turkey waited fourteen years to see this moment once again. It's former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who should be credited for redefining India-Turkey relations, now waiting for a breakthrough to qualify for another qualitative step forward. In 2001, deputy prime minister LK Advani was the first high-level dignitary of the NDA government to have visited Turkey which concluded with an important agreement on an extradition treaty. Later, in 2003, prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had gone on his landmark visit to Turkey - no Indian prime minister since then had gone to Turkey until prime minister Narendra Modi, in 2015, went to Antalaya to meet the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the margins of the G20 summit which was followed by another meeting on the sidelines of G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China in 2016
“ …the revelations in 2004 of sexual exploitation and abuse by a significant number of United Nations peacekeeping personnel in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have done great harm to the name of peacekeeping. ” These are the words of Kofi Annan from the letter that he submitted to the president of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in March, 2005. He further acknowledged in the letter that measures in place to deal with the problem were “manifestly inadequate” and demanded a “fundamental change in approach”. Annan was then the UN secretary general, the highest administrative officer of the organisation. His actions led to the tabling of the  Prince Zeid report  that executed a robust investigation and gave an accountability-based analysis of the sexual violence perpetrated by peacekeeping troops, that were operating with impunity granted to them by the UN itself. Since the report’s submission, the UN has taken several administrative measures to hold the defaulting troops acco