United Nations and its failures – Part Two

United Nations and its failures – Part Two

The wanton use of the veto has undermined the UN system and reduced its Secretary General to a mere puppet, though under the charter the Secretary General must uphold the values and moral authority of the UN, and speak and act
for peace, even at the risk of challenging or disagreeing with some member states.

However, no Secretary General — the current incumbent is the 8th — has gone so far as to challenge a superpower. If they speak aloud, they lose their job. Boutros-Boutros Ghali of Egypt was a victim while Kofi Annan who described
George W. Bush’s war as illegal at a forum outside the UN had to face an internal inquiry over UN contracts.

Many won’t disagree that the UN is a pawn in the hands of the big powers. In the post-Cold War era, particularly, in the post-9/11 era, the world body has become a foreign policy tool of the United States to enable it to prosecute
politically-motivated wars against some countries on the ostensible grounds that they posed a threat to world security.

In fact, the process of misusing the UN to achieve political objectives dates back to the early days of the UN. Besides the division of Palestine, the UN played into the hands of the US in Korea too. It gave a stamp of legitimacy
to an election that was highly rigged by pro-US elements in the South to deny North Korea’s popular leader Kim Il Sung a sure victory countrywide. This contributed immensely to a build-up of tension in the peninsula and eventually to a North Korean invasion
of the South in 1950.

In response to the North Korean invasion aimed at the reunification of Korea, the US and its allies moved the Security Council for a resolution to authorize use of force against North Korea.

The shrewd US manoeuvring and manipulation of the UN process was so successful that it gave hardly any time or space for the Soviet Union, which was boycotting the Security Council over Nationalist China’s (Taiwan’s) presence in
it, to respond or come back to the council and use its veto. The force that went under the US command with the UN blessing consisted largely of pro-US and anti-communist countries. It was not a collective international action but a case of selective action.

Some ten million people died in this UN-approved war which is more than the number killed in World War I. Yet the spilling of Palestinian and Korean blood failed to shake the UN foundation.

In the next issue we will talk about the remaining horrors that took place in the 1990’s by the hands of the United Nations.

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Posted by Momina Khan on Nov 25 2011. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry