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The Inadequacy of the United Nations

“The gap between the hopes reflected in the UN conventions, reports and structures, and the reality on the ground, where power prevails over humanity, remains as wide as ever.”

– Jose Ramos-Horta, President, East Timor

While a beleaguered Ukraine struggles against a powerful antagonist, a larger disquiet at the ever-increasing threat of a wider war hangs over Europe and the rest of the world.

After a humiliating series of reverses at the hands of the Ukrainians, Vladimir Putin and his close advisers have now set off a wider and deeper conflict. Russia appears to have deliberately targeted civilian and critical infrastructures in its recent blitzkrieg. Looking back on the death and destruction inflicted on Ukraine, a stanza by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai comes to mind:

God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children.
And on grown-ups he has no pity at all,

he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first-aid station
covered with blood.

War alone seldom resolves the underlying issues. “Our mutual investment in one another’s survival is our greatest resource, and our greatest hope,” says journalist Kelly Hayes.

Sadly, there seems to be no viable international agency that can stop the course of war or discipline the perpetrators unless nations collectively begin to respect the ideals of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN can effectively function only if its members rise above their rivalries and mutually collaborate to resolve conflicts. Which they show no sign of doing.

In 1946, the UN bestowed upon the Security Council the power to authorise the use of force in certain circumstances. It specified in Chapter VI of the Charter that parties to any dispute “shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their choice” .Only on failure to reach a solution will they “refer it to the Security Council”. Such a condition implies an honourable motive of permitting war only as self-defence or to save lives.

This seems to be more in theory as obvious in the little attention paid by powerful nations to this Charter stipulation. Though there was talk about “accelerating collective action” at the G20 summit, the other 19 members of the group could not even speak in one voice about Russia’s act of aggression.

Admittedly, international bodies like the UN General Assembly and Security Council or the global conferences held from time to time, have a long history of political bias and failure in marshalling a peaceful solution to any escalating international conflict. Impediments and procrastination invariably arise. For instance, far from winding up hostilities in the Korean peninsula in 1950, the permanent members of the UNSC were fully involved in the Korean War, leading to the death of over two million people. The US at the time even went to the extent of considering the use of nuclear weapons.

The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was as unlawful as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But, as C.J. Polychroniou notes, no sanctions were imposed on the US as they were on Russia and no “freezing of the assets of American oligarchs” took place.

Today, hopes for a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine crisis appear bleak, particularly, with the Security Council being reduced to an arena of super-power disputation, in keeping with their respective foreign policies. The SC resolution condemning the referenda organised by Russia in the four annexed regions of Ukraine was vetoed by Russia. And the US and its allies have blocked resolutions moved by Russia, such as the one on alleged Ukrainian bio-weapons.

In this scenario, being a fence-sitter or passive participant in draft resolutions of global importance is morally untenable.

If the Security Council is moribund, is there a role for the International Criminal Court, which in recent years has gained some credibility? With a legal system in place and nations ready to promulgate harsh sanctions on offender states, a brutal and hard-nosed leadership can be brought to its knees. Though the ICC has jurisdiction over the crime of aggression, none of the five permanent members of SC have accepted the Rome Statute’s amendment activating that jurisdiction. However, war crimes committed on Ukraine’s territory do fall under the ICC’s mandate. Russian commanders and leaders may yet find themselves arraigned in The Hague one day.

Ukraine will be eventually rebuilt and resettled – however desolate the task – but before we envisage an end to Putin’s criminal invasion, we need to ask some fundamental questions that were uppermost during the devastation of Grozny: Are we not, as a global human community, answerable to the millions of civilians displaced, the thousands slaughtered just for the political ambitions of Russian imperialism that imagines a united Russia with Belarus and Ukraine under its wing? And when will powerful nations stop flouting international law? Unless these questions are deliberated upon, this dark chapter in human civilisation will recur and, this time, it might be in our own backyard.

Those who are willing to follow the rule of law go a long way towards setting an example that may eventually lead us to a more peaceful and agreeable cross-border co-existence. This view, though grossly optimistic, draws us towards a more realistic picture of the roadmap that members of the UN must unanimously adopt. Everything will be all right, said Dag Hammarskjold if “people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction, and see it as a drawing they made themselves.” The UN as a body will remain a paper tiger if members do not collectively become accountable in their quest for global peace.

Maybe the leaders of the world should heed the words of Gary Snyder in his poem ‘For the Children’.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

Shelley Walia, Professor Emeritus, has taught cultural theory at the Panjab University.

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