India Monday reiterated its support to the right of the Iraqi people to freely determine their own political future and exercise control over their natural resources.
Only a fully inclusive political process leading to a truly representative government of Iraq can effectively deal with the challenges of fighting insurgency and rebuilding of the economy, said Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee in New Delhi.
In this context, Mukherjee urged the international community to ensure that peace and normalcy gradually returned in Iraq.
"We believe that the United Nations has a crucial role to lay in the process of political and economic reconstruction of Iraq," he said.
Mukherjee was inaugurating the Eighth Asian Security Conference organised in New Delhi by the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses with the theme being 'Changing Security Dynamic on West Asia: Relevance for the Post-9/11 Systemic'.
The three-day conference has scholars and analysts from over 20 countries within and outside Asia gathered in New Delhi to examine the issue of changing security scenario of West Asia and its implications for the region and the world.
Observing that the unprecedented revolution in communication technology had activated cross-state linkages among non-state actors, Mukherjee warned against the threat of intra-state conflicts snowballing into international crises.
"This makes it necessary to isolate the factors causing international security today and work in a cooperative manner to make our societies safer and more secure. As the traditional concept of militaristic state security is yielding ground to a more comprehensive notion of security, we now need to identify non-traditional threats to security," he said.
Pointing to the menace of international terrorism increasingly causing concern at large, Mukherjee said it took the tragic events of 9/11 to focus world attention to the threat even though India had been a victim of the scourge for much longer.
"The international community can no longer afford to find excuses for not dealing with this problem in a concerted manner and our fight has to be directed not only against those who perpetrate the terrorist crimes, but also those more powerful interests which harbour and support terrorist elements for their narrow and short-term, but ill-conceived gains," he added.
IDSA has been organising the Asian Security Conference as an annual event since 1999.
This conference provides a forum where a specific theme or issue is addressed in terms of its larger relevance to Asian security. Participants are eminent scholars, experts and officials from both within and outside Asia.
The conference seeks to examine whether the changing security dynamic in the West Asian region will affect the international security system in unalterable ways.
