LAHORE, April 9: Former chief justice Dr Nasim Hasan Shah has said the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was unjustified and against the norms of international law.

He was speaking at a meeting of Free Legal Aid Association held to discuss the attack on Iraq here on Wednesday.

He said under the international law the sovereignty of every country was sacred and no country could attack without the UN sanction or launch any pre-emptive strike against another country for fear of possessing weapons of mass destruction.

Dr Shah said it was absolutely wrong on the part of the US and the UK to presume that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as lengthy inspections of UN inspectors had proved that it did not have such weapons. The coalition forces had also failed to find any such weapons during three weeks of their war, he added.

He said the UN had failed to stop the war. It was a dead body now. It was shameful that it could even condemn the illegal war, he lamented.

Pakistan, being a member of the UN security council, should have called an emergency meeting of the council to condemn and stop the war but it had no courage to do so, he regretted.

He said it was not a war but a massacre in which thousands of innocent civilians had been killed and injured. There was no parallel of it in the history of mankind.

He said besides taking over the oil resources of Iraq, the main purpose of the war was to provide protection to Israel.

He said unless the spirit of Jihad was revived, the ummat could not save itself from the wrath of the super power. People the world over, including the US and UK, had opposed the war by holding massive rallies.

Chief minister’s special assistant Mowahid Husain Shah who had been working in America as a journalist said there were three purposes of the invasion; direct control of oil resources of Iraq as it has the second largest oil reserve of the world, ensuring supremacy of Israel in the Middle East and curbing the Muslim and Arabs militancy and resistance.

He said the war had proved certain basic facts: OIC had been exposed as it had failed to respond as the late King Faisal had responded using oil as weapon which had shattered the West; the UN had failed to protect the smaller nations; Muslim rulers had been exposed as they failed to stop the massacre of Iraqi people; beginning of the World War III in which the US would not be a winner; and the West stand divided.

He said there was also a blessing in disguise for the Muslim countries which were likely to unite and this unity was visible as their people, from Indonesia to Morocco, had raised their voice against the war.

He suggested that the OIC should be revived to make a strong Muslim block with a veto power in the UN, and an Islamic fund should be set up for the development of science and technology in Islamic countries.

Chief minister’s adviser Rana Ijaz Mahmood said the world would be no longer unipolar and America would not be a super power after the Iraq episode. He said there would be no peace in Iraq after the war as there was a likelihood of a civil war.

The meeting adopted a resolution condemning the war and demanded that concrete steps be taken to stop the war and the massacre of the people.