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February 19, 2006
Behind closed doors
This book takes a close look at the workings of the United Nations Security Council and its failure to exercise control over the international community
Chinmaya Gharekhan writes about the development of the Security Council and the part it plays in the functioning of the UN
The 38-storey glass tower on East River in New York City, global headquarters of the United Nations Organisation, is a symbol of humankind’s aspiration for peace. The principal purpose behind the creation of the world body, as a successor to the discredited League of Nations, was to ensure that future generations never again suffered from the scourge of war. The international community, thus, has a right and duty to inform itself about how the UN goes about discharging this mandate.
The 90’s saw an unprecedented expansion in the peacekeeping operations (PKO) of the United Nations. This growth in the PKOs coincided with the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union. It was as if the Security Council had felt stymied and frustrated during all the years of the Cold War and wanted to make up for the lost time by getting involved in all kinds of situations without worrying about whether it would be able to handle them competently or about the impact in case its assumption of unmanageable mandates led to undesirable and unexpected consequences.
The fact that new threats to peace and stability occurred for the most part within the territorial confines of states, and did not arise as a result of disputes between states, coupled with the lack of experience in the UN bureaucracy, did not augur well for the success of the operations. For their part, member states of the United Nations, feeling compelled to “do something” in response to the carnage going on in some “failed states”, entrusted the Secretary General of the UN with difficult mandates, without providing him the resources, financial and human, which were indispensable for the proper discharge of those mandates.
Article 24 of the Charter of the United Nations has entrusted the “primary” responsibility for maintaining international peace and security to the Security Council. The use of the word “primary” would suggest that the General Assembly has at least a “secondary” or “residual” responsibility in this field. The General Assembly sought to legislate this “residual” authority in the form of a resolution commonly known as “Uniting for Peace” in which it proclaimed for itself ,the right to set up even a peacekeeping operation in the event that the Security Council was stalemated into inaction because of the use of veto by one or more permanent members.
The Uniting for Peace resolution did come in useful on one occasion, in a conflict between Israel and the Arab states. For the past four decades, it has been invoked at times by the Palestinians to give vent to their frustration with the Americans who routinely veto resolutions critical of Israel. Thus, it has its uses. However, for the citizens of the world, it is only the Security Council which comes to their mind when issues of war and peace are discussed.
In recent years, the Council has acquired the propensity to deal with all kinds of issues by the simple stratagem of defining peace in holistic terms. Since there is consensus in the international community that peace cannot, and should not, be defined solely in military or security terms but must include other dimensions such as poverty, environment, health, aid, education, and so on, it has become legitimate for some powerful members of the Council to raise all these issues as well in the Council chamber. The developing countries are, in a manner of speaking, victims of their own cleverness since it was they who took the initiative in defining peace in such broad terms to squeeze funds from affluent countries for their development plans. Now, with the global war on terror being the highest priority for all nations, there is practically no restriction on the authority of the Security Council to legislate on any subject. There is, thus, a need to critically examine the functioning of the Security Council.
The 38-storey glass tower on East River in New York City, global headquarters of the United Nations Organisation, is a symbol of humankind’s aspiration for peace
Closely linked to the propensity of the Security Council to expand its jurisdiction in new areas is the question of its representative character. The international community has reached broad consensus on the need to enlarge membership of the Council in both categories — permanent and non-permanent. For the Council to acquire legitimacy, for its decisions, it must more realistically reflect the power equations in the contemporary world which have changed significantly during the past 60 years.
Kofi Annan, the Secretary General, has repeatedly called for such expansion. He set up a high level panel of 16 eminent men and women in November 2003 to make recommendations on how the UN could be reformed or restructured to deal with the challenges of the modern era. The report of the panel was released in December 2004. The most important and certainly the most eagerly awaited recommendation of the panel deals with the question of how to make the Security Council more representative of contemporary realities. The Secretary General presented his own report titled “In larger freedom” in March 2005. Both these reports were discussed at the General Assembly in the autumn of 2005.
The Security Council is unique in the sense that it combines in itself both legislative and executive functions. It decides whether or not a particular situation warrants its attention; whether it amounts to a threat to peace; what, if anything, it should do about it and then proceeds to do it. Since there are no definitions of terms such as threats or breaches of peace, it is left to the members of the Council to decide how they ought to react in a given situation. What this means in practice is that the permanent members decide everything.
The Security Council also considers itself to be above the law. In theory, the Council is bound by the provisions of the Charter. But the Charter does not contain any constraints on the functioning of the Council except laying down the majority required for adopting decisions. Nowhere does the Charter say that the Council cannot deal with a particular subject or issue. The only restraint on the authority of the Council is the practical one of a country intending to raise an issue mustering the necessary political support within the Council. Thus, USA, UK, and France were able to browbeat other members into going along with their plan to bring to the Council their complaint against Libya on the issue of the Pan Am crash over Lockerbie in Scotland and the crash of the UTA airliner over Chad, even though most members were not at all happy about it.When Libya approached the International Court of justice for its opinion on the legality of raising the issue in the Council, the three countries concerned made it clear that they would not accept any limitation, even from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), on the authority of the Council in the matter. India toyed with the idea of bringing to the Council the question of the hijackers of an Indian civilian plane who were given asylum in Pakistan, but gave up since it had no chance whatsoever of finding the necessary backing for it. If Pakistan wishes to raise Kashmir, which is already on the official agenda of the Council, it must first ascertain how much support it would be able to mobilise ...
Fortunately for the United Nations, the very first crisis it was called upon to deal with after the end of the Cold War was of the classic type. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, in an attempt to swallow it, was precisely the type of situation for which the UN was created. It was a clear-cut case of aggression by one state against another. There was no room for any doubt or debate as to who was the aggressor and who the victim.
Despite the existence of different and conflicting national interests of great powers, unanimity was achieved among the permanent members on facing up to Iraq’s aggression. Even if Iraq had undertaken the operation during the Cold War, the Soviet Union would have found it extremely difficult not to join in the condemnation of the aggression and the demand for withdrawal from Kuwait. It would, however, be safe to assume that the United States would not have been able to impose the kind of sanctions and inspection mechanism that it was able to, if the Cold War had continued. The system of collective security enshrined in the Charter delivered, as it was meant to.
Soon, however, the Security Council was confronted with unforeseen challenges for which the UN and the member states were ill prepared, politically as well as logistically. Some of the crises, such as the one in former Yugoslavia, presented features of civil war as well as of external involvement. Furthermore, by the time the Yugoslav crisis broke, the Russian Federation, which had replaced Soviet Union in the Council, had acquired enough confidence, and felt sufficient domestic pressure, not to give in to every proposal put forward to punish one party to the conflict, namely, the Serbs with whom the Russians had ethnic affinity.
The United Nations Secretariat, which was anxious to preserve its impartiality vis-a-vis the parties, often had to give in to pressures from the Americans, who, in turn, had begun to pay attention to the numerically, and hence politically, influential Islamic group. The crisis in former Yugoslavia and Bosnia also exposed the inability and unwillingness of the Europeans to deal on their own with problems in their “backyard”. (This experience of the early 90’s directly led to the proposal 10 years later for the creation of a European Defence Force, independent of Nato and the US.) The United States, most reluctantly, agreed to assume leadership and eventually hammered out the package solution in Dayton.
Most of the other situations of active UN involvement during the 90’s were primarily cases of internal strife or civil war, such as Somalia, Rwanda, Mozambique, Angola, and so on. But even in these crises, external aspects were present. Angola, and to an extent Mozambique, were holdovers from the Cold War era when the rival ideological alliances backed one or the other side in the civil war. Even Rwanda, which was overwhelmingly an ethnic conflict, had an external dimension in the form of active assistance to the Rwanda Patriotic Force, a Tutsi army, by the Uganda government of President Museveni, without which General Kagame could not have succeeded in defeating the largely Hutu Rwandan government armed forces.The common feature in all those situations was that the big powers did not have conflicting interests there. Rather, the problem was precisely the fact that big powers had no interest at all in Somalia, or the other situations, once the Cold War had ended. The Security Council and the Secretariat blundered their way into those crises, often with irreversible damage to their credibility.
Excerpted with permission from
The Horsehoe Table
By Chinmaya R. Gharekhan
Pearson Education. Available with Paramount Books,
Jamalistan Shopping Centre, Plot # DC-1, Block 8 Kehkashan, Clifton,
Karachi
Tel: 021-5833915.
Email: parabooks@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 81-7758-453-7
328pp. Rs550
Chinmaya Gharekhan is a retired officer of the Indian Foreign Service. He was India’s Permanent Representative at the United Nations
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