- 73 years of Failed Diplomacy
As a student I have been part of many model United Nations conferences where all the delegates discuss, debate over and provide solutions to global issues that affect us all in some way or the other. The reason for my deep interest in these conferences is not only to hone my diplomacy, negotiation and leadership skills, but also an ardent interest in finding real answers to the quagmire of problems we find ourselves in. To this end, an understanding of UN’s contribution to world peace, or lack thereof, is imperative so that the youth of the world can be part of a pressure group that gets behind changing UN’s role for the better.
On October 24 each year, the world celebrates United Nation’s day. The UN was formed to replace the League of Nations, which had proved incapable of restraining aggressive dictators like Hitler and Mussolini. However, it seems that this new organisation has ended up doing not much more than its predecessor. The possibility of world peace still appears to be a utopian ideology.
The UN has been involved in trying to resolve numerous disputes since its founding. Some of them have been successes, for instance, helping West New Guinea gain independence, efforts in resolving the Suez Crisis and peacekeeping efforts in the Cambodian civil war and its rehabilitation, but the list ends there.
The list of the organisation’s failures, in comparison to its successes, is extremely long, and can be perfectly assessed through its intervention in the Israel-Palestine conflict — a deep-rooted war against occupation of great scale and catastrophe. The role of the UN in the Israel-Palestine conflict has been very controversial. The UN was unable to prevent a series of wars between Israel and various Arab states, though it did useful work arranging ceasefires and providing supervisory forces. Nonetheless, Israel has been taking unilateral action through decades in its geographical vicinity, thus showing the UN’s incompetency to even curb violence, much less to stop the conflict as a whole. Both parties claim to be responding to the provocations of the other, but much of the conflict reflects a consistent failure on the part of the UN to understand the legitimacy of the Palestinian narrative.
Very concrete, valid arguments can be made in favour of a clear-cut bias shown by the UN in this case among many others, taking into account the number of resolutions passed and the number of accusations and cases for crimes against humanity against both sides, showing a visible contrast and differentiation.
It has even failed at the very fundamental principle and pillar upon which it was established; diplomacy — as it has not even been able to hold peace talks or bring the two countries to the negotiating table, let alone a world of “united nations”. Recently when the General Assembly gathered to vote on a draft resolution which was aimed at reversing Trump’s decision on Jerusalem, all the members except US, that vetoed the resolution, voted against Trump’s illegal decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. However, this voting was inconsequential. The UN was once again seen as a passive player, not playing its due role in the Middle East peace process.
It has even failed at the very fundamental principle and pillar upon which it was established
Many times conflicts have been rife with horror stories where the UN either acted as a silent spectator or a puppet at the hands of one of the five permanent members of the UN security council, or worse, the UN peacekeeping forces have directly been accused of financial mismanagement, rape and child abuse. On most occasions, the little humanitarian work which the UN does is only in front of the camera, to obviously maintain a reputation of morality, often acting with utter indifference as soon as they are off air or away from the flashes of the news camera.
Also, the UN military interventions only occur when a super power has vested interests. The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States), who are all nuclear powers, have created an exclusive nuclear club whose powers are unchecked. The US has been so disproportionately powerful that it can ignore the UN altogether and act as it pleases unless UN deliveres the outcome it wants.
The interviews or viral videos all over social media of Palestinians and even Israelis at times, also sets these arguments in stone by proving that the very people the UN is trying to ‘help’ are either better off without it or have lost trust in it. This really begs the question, is this world better off without the UN meddling in all these problems perhaps?
In lieu of the truth, it seems that the UN has not fulfilled its responsibilities as a peacekeeping organisation and as far as this aim is concerned it seems to be a redundant organisation.
