Strengthening the world body

NEW Year began with a new secretary-general for the United Nations. Antonio Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, is the ninth UN chief in the world body’s 71-year history. There is a new occupant in the White House. Guterres has an impressive record and is full of personal energy but that alone is not going to put the UN back on to the global diplomatic map. If everything the US media and political leaders write and say about Donald Trump is correct, the new president is not going to be much of help in revitalizing the world body. The fact is that UN’s problems run much deeper than can be solved by the personal dynamism of a secretary-general or the cooperation of a US president. This also means that if the organization’s reputation is now as low as it has ever been, the reason goes beyond the lackluster performance of Guterres› predecessor Ban-Ki moon. UN failure to solve or deal effectively with the crises in Congo, Palestine, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Syria and to prevent mass killings in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Sri Lanka all result from serial weaknesses, both political and institutional. In Rwanda, UN peacekeepers failed to stop the majority Hutus going on a murderous rampage and killing almost a million members of the Tutsi minority. The UN had an “Assistance Mission” for Rwanda in 1994. It did not know about the impending genocide or knew about it, but could not do anything to prevent it. The same thing happened in Srebrenica where more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men were massacred by Serb forces in 1995 though UN has declared Srebrenica a “safe zone” and placed it under its own Dutch protection force. Investigations by UN agencies and others have identified what these weaknesses are. What is lacking is a will to address them. UN is the best example of what happens when a failure of leadership is combined with poor management, discipline, and widespread inefficiency, as well as corruption. Some of the problems can be solved without rewriting the UN Charter. But others are deep rooted and have something to do with the circumstances in which the organization came into being. The chief among them is the concerns about the Security Council as it is constituted. The composition of the council no longer reflects the global geopolitical realities. Three of the five permanent members come from West, including the US. Of these, two (France and United Kingdom) are middle powers. Eastern Europe and Asia-Pacific region gets one permanent position each — Russia and China. Compounding the problem is the power conferred by the veto. Very often, the UN finds itself unable to take action on major problems affecting the peace of the world (Palestine and Syria to give just two examples) because one of the permanent five members can threaten to employ its veto. The fact is the five can, and would, bring a proposal to alter the status of the “high-table” powers, or to increase or decrease their number, to a grinding halt. Successive US administrations including Barack Obama’s have used veto power to unconditionally support Israel and shield it from accountability for the war crimes of building settlements and targeting civilians in Gaza. The abstention last month was the first time a US administration stepped aside and allowed the Security Council to censure Israel. The fact is that the UN which considers democracy promotion among its objectives is anything but democratic in its composition or decision-making. Is the new secretary-general aware of this and other problems? Would he suggest some measures to rectify this situation? Writing in the latest issue of Newsweek, Guterres says: “It is time for us to recognize shortcomings and reform the way we work.” Let us hope that the new chief would transform the UN fundamentally so that it becomes well-equipped for the demands of the 21st century.