Towards a stronger, not weaker UN

Javed Jabbar, The Dawn, Asia News Network, Karachi

As an unjust war unleashes destruction on Iraq, a United Nations battered and bypassed by its physical host and its largest financial contributor may begin to look like the Red Cross -- or the Red Crescent -- of global diplomacy.

When the UN Security Council met on March 19 to discuss the potential humanitarian role that the world body could play in war and post-war conditions, it appeared as if the global forum expressly created for conflict avoidance and conflict resolution has now become an ambulance service of stretcher-bearers. Though it is tempting to apprehend that the corpse being carried away may well soon be that of the UN itself, reality fortunately suggests otherwise.

While individuals are certainly dispensable, the UN as an institution is surely not so. However bad a body blow it has suffered in March 2003 by the savage attacks on it, both above and below the belt by Bush and Blair, the political dimension of the UN can only get better from now onwards, not worse, because there is no further depth left to sink to.

Already, for several decades, the UN's political credibility had been damaged in a sustained and substantive way by the amnesia applied to the Security Council resolutions on Kashmir and Palestine. Yet, before writing its epitaph, we need to remember that the forum remains the only place where the whole community of nations can meet as ostensible equals in the General Assembly, and as realistic unequals in the veto-based Security Council.

As democracy increasingly comes to be accepted as a world-wide norm, its concomitant of dialog requires that there be available a mechanism to facilitate verbal exchanges, however innocuous or ceremonial the talk-shop becomes through the inability to enforce political justice. This minimal function of dialog facilitation alone ensures the future existence of the UN. But building its political power and creating credibility for its pronouncements and actions will derive strength from at least four factors.

First: Notwithstanding failures as old as Kashmir and Palestine, the UN has demonstrated the capacity for consensus on political approaches to conflict resolution in cases as varied as Namibia, Cambodia and East Timor. These success stories provide an adequate basis to go forward in search of the elusive capacity to act decisively and fairly even when the vital interests, or strongly held views of the veto powers, are involved.

Second: Nations have become more interdependent than at any previous stage in history. With a singular and integrated financial system, however informal in some respects this may be, the fundamental economic interests of every nation are now deeply enmeshed with other nations in the same region and on the same planet.

The multilateralism spawned by the UN concept after World War II will obligate all to work closer with each other in the years ahead, not further away from each other. In the future, the inequities of the World Trade Organization, the Bretton Woods institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and of stagnant or increased disparities of wealth will compel collective reaction.

Third: In the non-political realm of development, and cooperation for progress, the UN has refined the heritage of international practices and principles from the past. It has initiated comprehensive and unprecedented new frameworks for world-wide participation through instruments as varied as the Law of the Sea Treaty to the Convention on the Rights of Children, through institutions as useful as the World Health Organization to the International Telecommunications Union.

The growth of these multilateral networks over the past five decades has created an infrastructure of internationalism that will support the continuity of the organization and compensate for the stark failures in the political duties of the UN.

Fourth: And perhaps most important from a political perspective, the Iraq crisis produced the first powerful challenge to U.S. unilateralism on the diplomatic battlefield of the Security Council.

The three dissenting veto powers -- Russia, China and France -- and the people of the world, as they did through their "million marches" will strive their utmost to sustain the UN General Assembly and the Security Council, even just as tactical talking shops, if only to use the forum to expose the isolation, the hypocrisies and the arrogance of those who threaten new and unjust wars in the future.

With regard to the 35 nations allegedly comprising the "coalition of the willing" which the U.S. and UK claim are supporting the war on Iraq, the contrived list resembles more "a coalition of the coerced" than of the willing, with troops committed by barely a handful.

When the UN becomes a forum as it did in March 2003 where two intimidatory veto powers were unable to force far smaller and weaker countries on the Security Council to support a second resolution, the place became a historic landmark in the struggle against hegemony. Thus, the challenge for the reconstruction of the UN becomes an imperative, even more significant than the challenge of the reconstruction of Iraq after Saddam.

For all these reasons and more, there are positive prospects for the evolution of the UN in the 21st century into the sole global political forum with enhanced ability to deal consensually and function effectively in conflicts, despite the ominous asymmetry of American military power, a phenomenon that requires separate analysis.

The writer is senior vice-president of the Millat Party and a former Senator and federal minister.