Monday is United Nations Day – a holiday celebrating the anniversary of the day the intergovernmental organization was established on October 24,1945. In the three quarters of a century since its founding, the UN has proven successful in its main goal: preventing World War III. On other fronts, the organization’s record is far more modest.
The United Nations is “made for” times of crisis like the one the world is presently experiencing, Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said.
“The United Nations is the product of hope. The hope – and resolve – following the Second World War to move beyond global conflict to global cooperation. Today, our organization is being tested like never before. But the United Nations was made for moments like this. Now, more than ever, we need to bring to life the values and principles of the UN Charter in every corner of the world. By giving peace a chance and ending conflicts that jeopardize lives, futures and global progress,” Guterres wrote in his official congratulatory message on UN Day.
Since its creation 77 years ago by the victorious powers in World War II, the UN has proven instrumental in helping to resolve or at least temper dozens of civil, regional and global conflicts, from the Indo-Pakistan wars to the seemingly eternal Arab-Israeli conflict and the forty-year Cold War between the USSR and the USA, which saw the planet come dangerously close to nuclear Armageddon on multiple occasions.
From the early 1990s onward, through lavish funding and vigorous diplomatic courting, the United States sought to turn the UN and other international institutions into arms of the State Department, hoping to create the post-Cold War unipolar “New World Order” declared by former President George H.W. Bush in late 1991. But these efforts have not always proven successful, with the overwhelming majority of nations (including most of America’s allies) refusing to endorse the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and most of the Global South rejecting the West’s efforts to bully them into submission to condemn Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in February 2022.
Unlike its League of Nations predecessor, which collapsed into irrelevance after Germany withdrew from the body in late 1933, the UN has managed to remain a truly representative international authority, with its 193 member states representing over 99 percent of the world’s population, and all of the planet’s major powers. The organization’s endurance can be credited in part to the work of Andrei Gromyko – the Soviet diplomat-turned Cold War foreign minister instructed to enshrine the right of veto into the authority of each of the five permanent Security Council members during negotiations on the UN’s creation. The right of veto has stopped resolutions on key global security issues from becoming popularity contests and, for the most part, have prevented the international organization from being turned into a tool allowing one major power or bloc to pursue its interests.
The UN’s current setup allows nations to take their grievances directly to the body, have their perspective heard, and hopefully resolve conflicts before they escalate into a regional or global conflagration that could end humanity. For conflicts in progress, the UN is a key platform for brokering ceasefires and peace agreements, or at least facilitating talks between combatants. Pending approval from warring parties, the UN can deploy peacekeepers to put new conflicts on ice, or prevent frozen ones from reigniting.
Korean Crisis
But the UN has not always lived up to its role as peacekeeper. 72 years ago, the body faced the very real prospect of its own dissolution after voting to intervene militarily in the Korean crisis at Washington’s behest. On June 27, 1950, taking advantage of the Soviet boycott of the Security Council in protest of China’s UN seat being held by the Kuomintang government, rather than the People’s Republic, the US and its allies rammed through a Security Council resolution authorizing the deployment of UN troops to Korea under what would nominally become a ‘United Nations Command’.
Over 370,000 troops from 22 countries including the US, the UK, Canada, Turkey, Australia, and the Philippines fought in Korea under the UN flag, with the three year conflict claiming three million lives, and leveling 85 percent of North Korea’s infrastructure using more bomb tonnage than was used in the entire Pacific Theater in World War II. After China’s entry into the conflict in late 1950, US President Harry Truman and UN Command chief Douglas MacArthur pondered using nuclear weapons. Fortunately for the world, the situation never escalated to that stage, and in July 1953, an armistice was signed. Moscow learned its lesson, and in the years and decades since, the UN has never again been authorized to intervene directly into a nation-to-nation or regional warzone flying the UN flag.
Cambodian Quagmire
The Cambodian Genocide of 1975 and 1979, which saw the extermination of between 1.5 and 2 million people by the ultra-nationalist, ultra-Maoist Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime, is an embarrassing example of the UN’s capacity for complacency, as well as the cold, calculating logic of realpolitik and ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ logic.
After toppling the previous government in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge inherited Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. Even as the years wore on and evidence of Pol Pot’s brutality began to mount, particularly after the Vietnamese military intervened to topple Pol Pot in 1978, dogged US and Chinese intransigence at the UN led to an bizarre situation in which the intergovernmental organization continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge government even after it was driven out of Phnom Penh in January 1979.
Under the Cold War logic that anything supported by the Soviets is bad for the West and China, Washington and Beijing kept the Khmer Rouge flag fluttering at the UN’s New York City headquarters throughout the 1980s, ensuring political and economic isolation for the government succeeding Pol Pot’s. In late 1991, a United Nations Transitional Authority on Cambodia was finally established to implement the Paris Peace Accords, which marked a formal end to the Cambodian-Vietnamese War.
Rwanda Tragedy
In 100 days between April and July of 1994, over 800,000 ethnic Tutsis were systematically murdered in the tiny landlocked East African nation of Rwanda by the Hutu majority. The United Nations Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) – which arrived in the country in October of 1993, was made aware of Hutu extremists’ plans to wage a massacre, and of secret Hutu arms stashes hidden throughout the country.
However, as UNAMIR commander Romeo Dallaire would later attest, his request to intervene to seize the arms caches and halt the genocide was turned down by superiors, allowing the genocide to transpire and resuming the civil war in the country. In an award-winning memoir chronicling the UN’s failure to act to stop the violence, and the lack of authority, equipment and personnel to carry out the mandated peacekeeping mission, Dallaire would recall how the world turned a blind eye to the worst targeted genocide since World War II.
Dallaire’s experiences in Rwanda left him deeply embittered about the UN’s prospects as a true peacekeeping force. “I still believe that if an organization decided to wipe out the 320 mountain gorillas [in Rwanda] there would be still more of a reaction by the international community to curtail or to stop that then there would be still today in attempting to protect thousands of human beings being slaughtered in the same country,” he said at a memorial event in 2019.
Two decades after the genocide, declassified cables revealed that US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright sent a cable to the State Department encouraging Washington to withdraw most of the UN’s peacekeeping forces, with Hutu extremists seeing the move as a “green light for genocide,” according to George Washington University National Security Archive director Tom Blanton.
Libya Chicanery
In March 2011, a NATO-led coalition of warplanes began a 222-day bombing campaign in Libya. Formally tasked with enforcing a United Nations resolution which imposed a no-fly zone over the country amid an increasingly brutal civil conflict, the strikes factually amounted to a foreign-backed military intervention in support of rebel forces seeking to topple the government of long-time Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi. The campaign succeeded, Gaddafi was overthrown, captured, tortured, sodomized and executed by NATO-backed rebels in October 2011.
How did the US and NATO manage to rope Russia and China into acceding to NATO’s aggression in Libya? In part, it came down to the resolution’s wording, which included talk of an “immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians.” Russia, China, Brazil, Germany and India all abstained from the vote, with Moscow and Beijing refusing to use their veto power, which would have blocked the air assault, or at least force NATO to search for another pretext for its aggression.
Vladimir Putin, who was serving as Russian's prime minister at the time, and whose position did not allow him to call the shots on foreign policy matters, called the resolution “flawed,” and compared it to a “medieval call for a crusade…allowing for the invasion of a sovereign country.” Putin’s concerns proved correct, and Libya, once the most prosperous and developed country in Africa, was turned into a failed state rife with open-air slave markets and terrorist activities overnight. Today, control of Libya remains divided between the Tobruk-led government and Libyan National Army, and the Tripoli-headquartered Government of National Accord and its allies. The UN has been invited to assist in national political reconciliation.
No comments:
Post a Comment