UN Correspondent, Pacifica Radio Network
The United Nations, in its origins in the aftermath of World War II, gave rise to a tremendous international movement of people who supported the idea of multilateralism and who believed the Charter about the organization's role to end the scourge of war. But these ideals were not high on the agenda of the powers that created the organization. They were interested in maintaining their power. The post-World War II victors' club became the Security Council within the United Nations. That is not an accident.
We see a parallel now with the re-creation of the United Nations after the Cold War and particularly after the Gulf War. The United States, as the victor of those conflicts, is redefining the organization in a way that it hopes will maintain and protect its power and its strategic interests--not to carry out all of the various activities that are called for by the UN Charter, that focus on development, human rights, economic rights, and so on.
These days, the United Nations is increasingly defined in terms of peacekeeping. And peacekeeping has been defined very narrowly, in the military sense. What the Security Council does--in terms of sending troops--determines for many people and many governments whether the UN is responding or not, whether the UN is effective or not. The Gulf War has been heralded as an example of the high effectiveness of the United Nations in multilateralism. But it was a false consensus, an enforced consensus, that was bribed and threatened by the United States. I will not use the euphemisms we have heard often today--the "larger powers" or the Security Council's "permanent members". It is the United States that holds the strategic power in the organization. That is not to say that it can or will use that power on every issue, every time any time a decision has to be made. The UN is still a multilateral organization. But it is one in which, at times of international crisis, the US predominates. Sometimes the crisis is defined as a crisis of international proportions only by the United States.
Using the Gulf War example, the Arab League was sorely divided over how to respond to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Though pretty much uniformly agreeing it was a violation of international law, League members were quite divided about what to do about it. It was the United States that determined that it would be viewed as an international conflagration that ultimately would take the world to war. In that context, the question of military peacekeeping becomes an issue of power within the Security Council.
Ambassador Jaramillo, in his parting speech as Chair of the Group of 77 one or two months ago, spoke of how the emphasis on peacekeeping has been a tremendous detriment to the organization because it strips away resources so badly needed for development and economic efforts that would prevent the kind of wars we now see emerging around the world.
In Somalia--one of the most tragic examples--the UN started to do a good job, under the leadership of Ambassador Sahnoun. He had proposals respecting and building on the economic and political realities of Somalia. Suddenly, under the influence of the United States and others in the Security Council, Ambassador Sahnoun was forced to resign and the militarization of UN Somalia policy took effect. We now see the terrible results.
We can't pretend that the Security Council is not the repository of real power in the United Nations. As you all know, only Security Council resolutions are considered to have the force of law. General Assembly resolutions are only advisory. And we should not forget that along with democratization of the Security Council we have to look at the role of other United Nations agencies and bodies. For example, the rehabilitation and reassertion of the General Assembly is desperately needed--and that does not require amending the Charter.
In the years of Security Council paralysis, at the height of the Cold War, the General Assembly was not paralyzed. Far from it. The General Assembly was an important actor in the name of decolonization. As the agency which had absorbed the representatives of a hundred or so newly decolonized countries, it was not silent, was not paralyzed. It dealt with the environment, economic issues, information, a whole range of things. But when the great powers, led by the United States, determined once again that the United Nations should be an agent of US policy, the General Assembly was allowed to fade away. It was as if the United Nations had been transformed into an organization of 15. There was a revealing quote from the Secretary General a couple of months ago, at one of his rare press conferences. He said:
"The United States is not eager to play the role of the policeman of the world. So the United Nations is there to do the job. And there is a consensus that in spite of all the difficulties, in spite of all the contradictions existing, the only forum existing today that can play this role is the United Nations."
Excuse me, Mr. Secretary-General! That was not my under- standing of what the United Nations was supposed to be.
Multilateralism is being undermined by the militarization of the United Nations. It is true, there are military challenges where there is need for an international military response. The notion of a truly internationalized military force under the control of a democratized United Nations--if such an institution can be reborn with guarantees of representation by the South--is not a bad idea. But the notion of a US volunteer force that would operate internationally, is a terrifying thought, at least for me.
I think that we have to look at the question of UN democracy in the context of power. The contradiction between power and democracy is one that shapes much of the tensions around the United Nations.
The Security Council represents the most undemocratic component of the United Nations and at the same time, by far, the most powerful. The Libya sanctions vote, in which the UN was not allowed to use its own procedures, is an example of how the US continues to undermine UN democracy. The sanctions were already under discussion in the International Court of Justice, but the US insisted that the Security Council make the decision instead. It was a clear example of what the Bush administration was trying to do--to consolidate power in the Security Council, to the exclusion of the International Court of Justice, the General Assembly and other more democratic parts of the UN system.
That does not bode well for democracy, even if the Security Council could be democratized in some way. We have to keep in mind that real democratization of the United Nations means strengthening the democratic principals that the supporters of the United Nations had in mind at its founding. Not the power goals that motivated the state founders themselves. The new US guidelines for peacekeeping operations, released by the Clinton administration last week, reflect a way of maintaining US control, not of sharing UN responsibility--maintaining US control of decisions about peacekeeping operations.
Part of democratization means redefining what peacekeeping means, redefining what peace and security is all about. And until policies in the United Nations, in crises like Somalia, can go back to the type of those proposed by Ambassador Sahnoun, instead of being a reflection of the militarized goal of the US administration, we cannot really say that we have succeeded at democratizing the United Nations.
To end with an image that struck me recently: There was a television series on PBS about the civil rights movement in the US. It opened with a very powerful image of a group of early civil rights protesters, black sharecroppers in the South, in Alabama. They were very poor people, obviously very powerless in their economic and political lives, trying to win their right to vote. They carried a few hand-lettered signs and one flag. They did not carry the US flag. They carried the flag of the United Nations. I wonder whether any group of disempowered, impoverished citizens of any country--in Kigali, in Bujumbura, in Mogadishu, let alone in Mississippi or Alabama--would see the United Nations today as a symbol that represented their aspirations. I would submit until that is once again the case, we can not say that we have democratized the United Nations.
