Editorial from London Free Press, Canada
January 3, 2000
Five political animals are more equal than the rest: the United States, Russia, France, Britain and China. Among the petulant superpower, the three faded glories and the Great Wall, two particulars stand out: the bomb and the veto.
The veto and closed-door antics of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are behind a lot of what's wrong in the dysfunctional UN these days. Narrow national objectives, not international good, are what drives decisions. An altruistic ideal of nations has been subverted. And a power structure based on the world 55 years ago has no place at the UN today.
Since 1945, the veto -- known as "great power unanimity" -- has been used 250 times, almost 200 by the U.S. and Russia. Few were for major issues; most were during petty wrangling to block admission of members or nominees to the Security Council. Threat alone prevents temporary members from proposing reform.
Three extraordinary apologies were issued by the UN during the past six weeks over Security Council failures to act in international crises. Screw-ups in Srebrenica, East Timor and Rwanda exploded into catastrophic but avoidable massacres of hundreds of thousands of civilians and dislocation of hundreds of thousands more. The UN could offer neither protection nor intervention.
Canadian Maj.-Gen. Lewis Mackenzie, a retired commander of United Nations forces, rightly pulls no punches in slamming this gang of five for failing those who needed UN protection. They should have been fired for incompetence long ago.
The UN apologies are pitifully inadequate, especially, as Mackenzie notes, because they don't come from the Big Five ambassadors. The tragedies will be repeated unless the Security Council power structure is reformed. In East Timor, Kuwait and Yugoslavia, it took other nations or bodies to act.
In East Timor, militias went on a rampage after a UN-run vote in August revealed the population wanted independence from Indonesia. An Australian-led force finally moved in -- the UN won't arrive until February. When the killing began, hundreds of Timorese sought protection in a UN compound. Yet the UN, which initiated the conflict with the vote and a refusal to prepare for well-advertised violence, ordered workers out. Only the workers' refusal to abandon civilians to the militias saved hundreds.
God help Canada that it should ever need the intervention of a heartless Security Council. It will arrive to pick over the bones, but no sooner.
