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Running
back to the UN
By
Jonathan
Power
February 27, 2004
LONDON - As recently as mid November the U.S. was
ignoring the UN despite it being obvious to the outside
world that it was increasingly bogged down in Iraq. On
November 15th , when the Coalition Provisional Authority
and the Iraqi Governing Council signed an agreement that
set up a transition plan, the UN was not even mentioned.
But a short two months later Washington is on its knees
before the UN, its transition plan in tatters. It's
revealing how in a real crisis- and Iraq is but the
latest example- the big powers can run to it to chew the
cud and find a solution short of war or revolution. When
the antagonists have either talked or fought themselves
into a corner they tend often to crawl back to the body
that they were not long ago denouncing to find an exit
from the horrors that confront them. But then a few years
later they seem to have forgotten that it
happened.
The present desperate return of the U.S. to the UN
brings to mind the events of the 1954 crisis over the
capture of 17 American airmen by China. American public
opinion became extremely agitated. There was even some
talk about the use of nuclear weapons. Belatedly, the UN
was asked to intervene and Secretary General Dag
Hammarskjöld went to Beijing to talk to Premier Chou
Enlai. It took six months of negotiating but the men were
released. President Dwight Eisenhower has a whole chapter
in his book on the incident but the central role of the
Secretary General is almost totally ignored.
It is the same in Robert Kennedy's book on the Cuban
Missile Crisis. There is only a passing reference to U
Thant's letter to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Yet
it was U Thant's letter that elicited a crucial response
from the Soviet leader indicating there was room for
compromise. In Suez in 1956, the Lebanon in 1958, in the
Congo in 1969 and the 1973 Middle East war it was the UN
that provided an escape hatch for the big powers who had
put themselves at the height of the Cold War on a
collision course. In the wake of the Yom Kippur war,
although both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had agreed in
principle to a cease-fire, there was no way of
implementing it. The situation looked exceedingly
dangerous. Egypt was calling for Soviet help. President
Richard Nixon put the U.S. on a nuclear alert. It was
fast footwork at the UN, principally by a group of Third
World countries, that helped break the impasse. They
pushed for a UN force to go in- and by the standards of
the slow-moving bureaucracy of today it did the
impossible by starting to arrive on the ground the next
day.
Critics can deride the Third World majority at the UN
but even if it does combine to vote through the Assembly
all number of meaningless or impossible resolutions it
often seems to rise to the occasion on the most serious
matters. It was during the charged Security Council
debate that preceded the American decision to invade Iraq
that the African members, who by the luck of the rotation
held 20% of the vote, pondered dispassionately both sides
of the argument before coming down against a war,
seemingly at great cost to their immediate short term
economic interests. And today it is a Ghanaian, Secretary
General Kofi Annan and his right hand man, the Algerian,
Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special envoy to Iraq, whom the
Americans can't seem to have enough of.
We are also able to watch right now the Secretary
General, hopefully at last, bringing to conclusion the
painful 30 year separation of the Turkish and Greek parts
of the island of Cyprus, following the British colonial
failure and the first post-World War 2 attempt at the
ethnic cleansing of part of a European country- by
Orthodox Christians of Turkish Muslims. The UN first
stopped a would-be pogrom, then halted the advance of a
Turkish invasion and subsequently guarded the peace line
separating the two halves, unnoticed by much of the
world, but not unnoticed by the still nervous inhabitants
of Cyprus. Who says the UN does not have staying
power?
If the UN has been a force, a peacemaker and an
interlocutor, today it must also seriously contemplate
the need to become a colonizer. Perhaps in Iraq, given
the antiquity of the civilization and the number of
highly educated people, it need only be a helpmate, once
the planned elections are concluded. But in Haiti,
Somalia, the Congo and Sierra Leone where the system of
government has all but disappeared the UN should consider
taking the reins of power. In all these countries torrid
personal ambition and gross administrative incompetence
combined with the ruthless application of the most sordid
and undisciplined forms of violence have destroyed any
semblance of normal life or ordinary discourse. They all
stand in danger of becoming shelterers of tomorrow's
terrorist networks.
We probably have to wait for a change at the helm of
command in the U.S. for this to happen. But, as Iraq
shows, American opinion, along with that of its main
allies in Iraq, is coming to appreciate the UN. The hope
must be that this time Washington learns from the
experience.
Also published in the International Herald
Tribune as The
UN: Much maligned, but much needed
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
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