The issue with the UN

The issue with the UN

 The Sunday Times Editorial (26-09-2021)

In his recently published book on reporting 40 years from the United Nations, our special correspondent Thalif Deen, often called Sri Lanka’s ‘permanent ambassador’ to the world body, writes; “Come September, Sri Lankan Presidents or Prime Ministers routinely visited New York to address the annual sessions of the UN”.

The Bandaranaike family had three members address the UN General Assembly (UNGA), a record parallaled only by the Nehru family of India. Now Sri Lanka has two brothers who have addressed it. There were a few exceptions though. Presidents D.B. Wijetunga and R. Premadasa never bothered. President J.R. Jayewardene — “Yankee Dicky” to his political opponents — never even stepped in to meet the UN Secretary General when he was in New York during a state visit to the US.

Mr. Deen relates a story of President Jayewardene’s brother, H.W., when he was in Geneva at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights during the northern separatist insurgency at home trying to upstage a resolution against Sri Lanka instigated by the West. The telephone rang at “Braemar’, the Ward Place residence of the President seeking instructions. Towards the tail-end of the conversation those in the hotel room in Geneva heard the Queen’s Counsel saying to his elder brother, the President; “Yes, Dicky, Yes, Dicky, No, Dicky, we can’t do that, Dicky”. Asked what President Jayewardene’s instructions were, they were told; “the President wants us to leave the UN”.

''President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in his UNGA address this week pointedly said all states big and small should be treated “equitably”. When he had his meeting with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the UNSG’s office statement said the SG “reiterated the UN’s view on the importance of ensuring protection of minority rights and civic engagement” in Sri Lanka but one wonders if he would have ventured to tell the US President that ‘Black Lives Matter’ or that desperate refugee seekers from Haiti should be treated more humanely!''

Such exasperation with the UN was not confined to President Jayewardene. One-time Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed would go to the UN and slam the West for “manipulating” the organisation. Former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who would get under the skin of his former colonial masters bluntly referred to the domination of the UN by the “white skinned”.  Sri Lanka’s former Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, an erstwhile UN bureaucrat himself, once asked a nosy UN Resident Representative in Sri Lanka who had exceeded his brief, to limit his engagement in the country to fighting mosquitos.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in his UNGA address this week pointedly said all states big and small should be treated “equitably”. When he had his meeting with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the UNSG’s office statement said the SG “reiterated the UN’s view on the importance of ensuring protection of minority rights and civic engagement” in Sri Lanka but one wonders if he would have ventured to tell the US President that ‘Black Lives Matter’ or that desperate refugee seekers from Haiti should be treated more humanely!

Reforming the world body

The role of the UN in international relations has long been debated. The world peace that was hoped for after World War II has been elusive. The big powers that finance the UN dictate its agenda. With its core mandate of peace and security, the UN has often been a bystander as conflicts rage everywhere. But even the harshest critic has yet to say that negotiating a substitute is a feasible option now unless another intercontinental war or a similar disaster happens triggering such a process. Instead, there has been a lot of talk (for decades) on UN ‘reforms’ with little or no tangible action. Any meaningful action is unlikely unless there is consensus on what is known as the ‘mother-board’ issue of the UN reforms viz. rectifying the old anachronism of the UN Security Council structure in which key UN decisions are held hostage to a possible veto by the five nuclear armed Permanent Members (P5) of the UNSC.

Some have proposed the abolition of the veto while others have proposed expanding the anomaly — e.g. by adding more veto wielding members (Germany, Japan, India, at least one each from Africa and Latin America). But these proposals are likely to be vetoed by the current veto bearers! So it is a classic Catch 22 situation. Despite disagreements among themselves on national interest issues, the current P5 are quite cosy with the status quo, enjoying that power and unlikely to agree to any major changes any time soon.

No intercontinental war has broken out since WW II, but the UN can hardly claim credit. The nuclear powers controversially contend that the doctrine of ‘nuclear deterrence’ practised by them and not the UN prowess, has deterred war among the usual warmongers in Europe. Critics also claim that the UN failed to prevent over a hundred smaller wars that cost over 20 million deaths since WW II. The major powers bypass the UN to wage war (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen etc) and get the UN to do the debris sweeping after they declare victory (Iraq) or cut and run (Afghanistan).

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s strongly worded accusative statement at the opening of this year’s UNGA session is an implicit admission that the big powers do not listen to him on most of the issues ranging from Conflict to Covid. He has spoken of the sharp divide between the economic ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, of Vaccine Nationalism and Vaccine Diplomacy. The sad truth is the UN will most likely remain a glorified appendage of the ‘balance of power architecture manipulated and managed through the five nuclear ‘thugs’ (the P5) rather than a world body ‘overseeing an international law-governed code of conduct for ‘State behaviour’.

Countries like Sri Lanka are vulnerable pawns in the power games of the P5, forced to take sides and seek the protection of that veto.

Notwithstanding all this, the village wisdom might be to try and build on what you have simply because given the natural and man-made imponderables and volatility that lie ahead, it will be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to conclusively renegotiate a consensus on a ‘nouvelle Nations Unies’!

Despite these shortcomings in the political realm of the UN, many specialised UN agencies like the FAO, ILO, WHO, WMO, UNHC for Refugees, UNICEF, UNESCO, ITU, WIPO, UNCTAD, WTO and others have done some sterling work to promote international cooperation in technical, humanitarian, and socio-economic fields.

Sri Lanka has benefited immensely from these technical inputs and achieved relatively high HDI (Human Development Index) standards quite disproportionate to its GDP punching weight.  Whatever the UN tinkering is done, it must strengthen and not diminish these agencies’ capacity to do more of what they do for the citizens of the world.