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| War criminal Ariel Sharon |
Last month the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the United Nations and its secretary general, Kofi Annan. The Nobel committee declared that the UN was 'at the forefront of efforts to achieve peace and security in the world'. But can the UN and the principles of international law enshrined in the UN Charter really serve as a viable alternative to war and insecurity?
Four days before the Nobel committee made the award, as US and British air strikes against Afghanistan began, Kofi Annan issued a statement reaffirming UN support for the strikes. After the 11 September attacks on the United States, he said, the Security Council, the supreme body of the UN controlled by the US, Britain, France, Russia and China with their vetoes, had passed two resolutions. The first, on 12 September, reaffirmed the 'inherent right of individual or collective self defence' by a member state under Article 51 of the UN Charter--in other words, the right of the US to bomb Afghanistan without further sanction from the Security Council. The second, on 28 September, affirmed the need to combat terrorism 'by all means'. But Annan went further still. He stated that the UN was 'actively engaged in promoting the creation of a fully representative, multi-ethnic and broad-based Afghan government', a statement which, in the context of the air strikes, amounts to nothing less than tacit support for US plans to install a new regime in Afghanistan. In short, Annan and the UN have provided comprehensive legal backing for the US and British air strikes. It is no coincidence, then, that last month the US repaid $582 million of the $2 billion it owes in UN dues.
The political roots of the war against Afghanistan lie deep within the conflicts that ravage the Middle East. And there, the role of the UN has been marked either by servility to US power or impotence in the face of it.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorising member states 'to use all necessary means' to ensure Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait. By contrast, when Iraq had invaded Iran in 1980, the UN did nothing, paralysed by the common desire of the US and the Soviet Union to contain the Iranian Revolution. The bloody onslaught against Iraq, led by the US, left 100,000 Iraqis dead. In August 1990 the UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions which it reaffirmed in April 1991 after Iraq's defeat. By July 2000 Unicef estimated that 500,000 children had died as a direct result. When the UN commissioner for humanitarian aid, Dennis Halliday, resigned in disgust, he declared, 'I did not join the UN to wage war on children.' In short, the UN has provided continuing legal authority for the mass crimes committed by US and British imperialism against the people of Iraq.
The case of Israel is no less instructive. In 1967 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, which called upon Israel to relinquish control of the territories it gained in the Six Day War--the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Gaza. Although the US voted for it, its support for Israel has ensured the resolution remains a dead letter to this day. In 1976 the US vetoed a resolution calling for a settlement that would include a Palestinian state. And in 1982 the US vetoed a resolution condemning Israel for ignoring an earlier resolution (one the US had voted for) which demanded that Israel withdrew from Lebanon. A few days later the US vetoed another resolution calling for the withdrawal of both Israeli and Palestinian forces from Beirut, arguing that such a withdrawal 'was a transparent attempt to preserve the PLO as a viable political force'. A few months later the terrible Sabra and Shatilla massacres took place.
The duplicitous conduct of the US in rendering the UN impotent was exposed most starkly in 1975 when, with secret US consent, Indonesia invaded East Timor, massacring an estimated 200,000. The US voted for the UN Security Council resolution condemning the invasion but, as then US ambassador to the UN Daniel Moynihan later wrote in his memoirs, 'the [US) Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it took. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.' Such contempt for the UN Charter reached yet greater heights over the war against Yugoslavia in 1999. Unable to get a pro-war resolution through the UN Security Council because of Russian and Chinese vetoes, the US bombed a sovereign state in direct contravention of the charter, arguing instead that the war was justified by the law of humanitarian intervention, a law that the vast majority of international law experts deride as without credible precedent.
This sorry history suggests strongly that an international criminal court, advocated by some as the answer to conflict, will fare no better than the UN. Not only has the US so far opposed its establishment, for fear of becoming subject to prosecution itself, but one modification it has proposed in return for ratification is that some of the workings of the court be made subject to...the UN Security Council! How the US might react to such a court is best illustrated by its reaction to a 1984 decision of the World Court (under Article 92 of the UN Charter 'the principal judicial organ of the United Nations'). The court declared that the mining of Nicaraguan ports by the US during the Sandinista revolution was illegal and must cease. The US condemned the decision and refused to comply. In a fit of temper, then US Secretary of State George Shultz attacked those who advocated 'utopian, legalistic means like outside mediation, the United Nations and the World Court, while ignoring the power element of the equation'.
The facts speak for themselves. It is impossible to divorce the application of international law from the unequal distribution of power and wealth across the globe. The belief that the law can provide a realistic alternative to war in a world held hostage by US imperialism is illusory. The only realistic alternative we have is to build a mass anti-war movement. And the more such a movement grows, the more the servility and impotence of the UN in the face of US power will come under scrutiny.