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Today's
Millennium UN Meeting Misses the Point
By JONATHAN
POWER
Sept 6, 2000
LONDON - It seems a strange time to organize a
millennium meeting of the world's heads of government at
the UN this week. What are they supposed to do? What are
they supposed to say? Is anything new afoot? (Indeed one
could ask, in all seriousness, are there enough toilets
for them all with their mammoth entourages?) Isn't it the
same old dreary UN that everyone loves to use as a
punch-bag and which they occasionally run to when they
are in trouble? The millennium changes nothing- eight
months on that is very clear. The thing that could give
the UN a jolt, a charge, that would give it a chance of
re-capturing its old idealism is not a poorly prepared
meeting of bosses, nor is it a new Secretary General. It
would be for the world's only superpower to take it
seriously. Not only does the U.S. need to pay off its
enormous debt of back dues, it needs to put a stop to its
unerring ability to paint the organization black.
The latest phase began with President Bill Clinton's
malevolent campaign to shift the killing of American
soldiers in Somalia onto the UN, even though it emerged
that the U.S. troops were operating independently from
the UN, directly under the U.S. command in distant
Florida. It interfered counterproductively with the UN
operation in Bosnia, criticizing from the sidelines, but
slow to act where it might have been useful, with
logistics and transport. And it continued with the use of
its veto to block pre-emptive peace-keeping in Rwanda, an
action that could have headed off the genocide that
followed. Perhaps, for the long run, its gravest fault
has been to play around with UN treaty-making on crucial
issues, acting the "big boy" that could have his cake and
eat it.
The U.S. works hard to get other countries involved in
these path-breaking treaties- and later expects them to
toe the agreed lines- but then has a nasty habit of
stepping back at the last minute and playing the rest of
the match by its own rules. We have seen this lately with
the establishment of the International Criminal Court for
trying war criminals and with the Comprehensive Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty. With the first, after pushing it hard,
Mr Clinton, subject to remorseless pressure from the
Pentagon, suddenly got cold feet at the last minute. In
the second, after years of hard American effort
(beginning with President Dwight Eisenhower) to get the
world on board, Mr Clinton seemed to lose interest in
pulling out the stops to get it ratified in the Senate
and last October lost the vote.
The story of the Law of the Sea - the UN effort to
bring law and order to the anarchic world of the seas and
oceans that occupy the greater part of our planet- is
nothing less than a parable for our times. It is the UN
at its best and the U.S. at its worst and the blame
stretches over a number of U.S. administrations. The most
that can be said for Mr Clinton is that he appears to
have forgotten about it.
The Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force
in 1994. Before then the seas were ruled by a mixture of
customary practices and the dictates of whoever was the
predominant power of the time- the Romans, the British
and, more recently, the Americans. Control over
territorial waters was for long enough accepted as lying
only within cannon-shot, later firmed up as 3 nautical
miles from the shore. World war submarines made nonsense
of that and since 1945 these traditional limits lost
their force. Particularly badly hurt was the fishing
industry. With no agreed limits on territorial waters
there was massive over-fishing.
Iceland started the ball rolling in 1979 when it
unilaterally announced an exclusive fishing zone off its
coast. Other fish-dependent countries quickly followed,
sparking clashes between coast guards and foreign fisher
boats. Britain and Iceland ended up in the 1970s fighting
the so-called "Cod Wars".
At around the same time mining companies became
intrigued with the lure of mineral riches on the seabed.
Undersea oil started to become a big business. Countries
created exclusive economic zones extending up to 200
miles from their shore. Uninhabited islets and barren
reefs- the Spratlys, a source of dispute between China
and South East Asian nations is a good example- have
become strategic places to be fought over.
The Law of the Sea has seven main provisions. It gives
coastal states sovereignty over their territorial seas,
twelve nautical miles out from their shoreline miles, and
economic rights up to 200 miles out. But all foreign
vessels are allowed innocent passage through these seas.
Coastal states have sovereign rights over the continental
shelf but beyond 200 nautical miles out they must share
the revenue they derive. Fifthly, the high seas are to be
enjoyed by all. Finally, there is an International
Tribunal to judge disputes. In July 1999 New Zealand and
Australia made use of it to bring a successful case
against Japan over its "experimental" fishing for
bluefish tuna in violation of conservation
agreements.
Interestingly, on this convention the Pentagon favours
U.S. ratification. American naval officers have pointed
out that difficulties could arise for U.S. forces moving
between the Far East and the Persian Gulf if either
Malaysia or Indonesia were to close the Strait of
Malacca. In fact, the Senate's reservations about the
provision on sharing the profits from deep sea mining
have fallen away with time. Under the Reagan
administration these were much watered down from the
original concept of a "global commons". These days,
moreover, mining companies have lost interest in deep sea
mining on economic grounds. Instead the interest has
switched to the harvesting of genetic resources from the
sea bottom, which the Law of the Sea has no provision
for. Nevertheless, the Senate is still ruled by the
sentiment that as the world's only maritime superpower,
the US can make or break rules unilaterally and does not
need to be bound by international law.
The trouble with this approach is that when you bend
the UN so far out of shape, it does not spring back to
where the U.S. wants it to be the next time there is a
crisis in which it needs the majority of the UN
membership's support- the crisis that arose when Iraq
invaded Kuwait is a good example. Even more seriously, it
is a slow, insidious whittling away of both the authority
and the useful practice of the UN. However, even the
U.S.'s closest allies like Britain and Canada, do not
want the world run by American unilateralism. If the U.S.
doesn't soon come to terms with that fact, it is going to
rue the day, as the rest of the world increasingly digs
in its heels. America's next president will inherit a
difficult legacy from Mr Clinton. No millennium meeting
and no amount of the hearty back-slapping that will go
with it can change that fact.
I can be reached by phone +44
385 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By
JONATHAN POWER
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