Twilight Of The UN

The millennium summit of the United Nations is going to be a gala affair. Virtually every head of state or government who can be there intends to come. But not all the glamour, nor all the pomp and pageantry, can hide the fact that the UN, indeed the very idea of a single interdependent, democratic world in which everyone’s voice and everyone’s vote counts, is in decline. And the decline is almost certainly terminal. It’s not the so-called rogue states, nor the atavistic ‘developing nations’, still trying to reconcile the often violent imperatives of nation-building with democracy and development, who’re responsible. These weak nations are in fact clinging to the UN, the wto, and even the World Bank in the increasingly desperate hope that these will somehow shelter them from the storm of global autocracy they see gathering around them. No, the UN, and all that it stands for, is being betrayed by the strong nations and their permanent hangers-on, who refuse to accept that the essence of peaceful coexistence is accommodation. And this means that they cannot have their way, whether in the UN or the wider world outside, all the time.

The chief culprit is the US. On January 20 this year, Senator Jesse Helms, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, decided to pay the UN a visit and address the Security Council. Warning the members that he was not a diplomat, he launched into a series of "home truths" that had the listeners seething with anger. He told them that the American people knew instinctively that "the UN lives and breathes on the hard-earned money of the American taxpayers". And he warned the members that "most Americans do not regard the United Nations as an end in and of itself - they see it as just one part of America’s diplomatic arsenal. To the extent that the UN is effective, the American people will support it. To the extent that it becomes ineffective - or worse, a burden - the American people will cast it aside." The UN was, in short, dispensable. America’s will had to prevail.

Helms, admittedly, makes the US liberal establishment squirm. When I commented on his speech to an academic friend she said, "no one takes him seriously". But in October 1993, in an address at Harvard University, President Clinton’s then national security advisor, Anthony Lake, listed no fewer than nine circumstances when the US would not hesitate to use force unilaterally. These ranged from defending itself from direct attack, to maintaining the credibility of its commitments to allies, that is, intervening in which no direct national interest was involved. As for the UN, Lake too made it clear that the US was not subordinate to it. On the contrary, it would work with the UN where possible and without it when that became necessary.

Since then, President Clinton has stressed America’s ‘partnership’ with the UN more than once. But the actions of his administration have spoken louder than his words. First in the resumed bombing of Iraq repeatedly from 1993 till December 1998, and then in the NATO assault on Serbia in 1999, the US and its faithful ally, the UK, and then the whole of NATO, simply ignored the UN and acted unilaterally. For bombing Iraq, the US and UK claimed a mandate the UN Security Council resolutions didn’t give them, and against the express objections of other permanent members of the Council, notably Russia and France. In the case of Serbia, even this was dispensed with. Far worse than the misuse and bypassing of the Security Council is the manner in which the US and UK have stood in the way of every attempt to frame an even remotely non-discretionary way of determining when to end sanctions against Iraq. One demographic statistic captures the horrific impact of the UN sanctions imposed on Iraq. In August 1999, UNICEF published the first international report on the effect of the sanctions. It pointed out that the child mortality rate in Iraq had jumped from 54 per thousand before the Gulf War to 131 per thousand in 1998. The increase meant that around 5,00,000 children had died who need not have perished, or approximately 150 children per day! That report was virtually buried by the international media.

Between August 1 and October 1, 1999, there were more than 800 references to Iraq in the Lexis Nexis classification of "Major Newspapers" and 53 references on all US television and radio networks. But there were only 17 references to the UNICEF’s damning report. And of the 53 television programmes, only three were devoted to the effect of sanctions on the people of Iraq. Another report was released by the UN a few days ago has met the same fate.

The second report, however, moved UN secretary-general Kofi Annan to make a plea in his address to the millennium General Assembly on its opening day, to lift the sanctions on Iraq. But so great was his fear of angering major powers, that instead of broaching the issue directly, he asked the UN to consider whether, since sanctions didn’t hurt the leaders of rogue states but only their people, some other way couldn’t be found to punish such states. He thus put Iraq, or a Libya, whose only crime has been an extreme form of nationalism, in the same basket as Rwanda or Afghanistan, where the issue was, and is, genocide.

The very idea of a rogue state makes nonsense of the notion of one world and an equality among nations. For it simultaneously creates two categories of states and gives one the right to judge and punish the other. Behind such a vision of the world lies not charity, compassion or understanding, but messianism. And messianism, which is ideology at its most dangerous, is the sworn enemy of democracy and compromise. It’s against this that we need to weigh the plea President Clinton made at the UN last week. It was for an end to conflict through accommodation!