They came. They spoke
As you are reading this, the 193 world leaders who addressed the 74th UN General Assembly are back home with each of them relishing the impression he made on the world stage. The cavernous hall has witnessed thousands of speeches since the founding of the world body in 1945. It is now empty. But the […]
As you are reading this, the 193 world leaders who addressed the 74th UN General Assembly are back home with each of them relishing the impression he made on the world stage. The cavernous hall has witnessed thousands of speeches since the founding of the world body in 1945. It is now empty. But the speeches by presidents, prime ministers and other world leaders by whatever titles they are known, would take on a life of their own in the immediate future. They are the stuff of the general assembly history. Some of the speeches would be remembered for their soaring rhetoric; some for their impassioned delivery, some for their sheer blandness and some for being provocative. But each of them represented the voice of a sovereign nation, no matter how poor or small it might be.
The UN General Assembly is the world’s biggest and most important respecter of the equality of states. Small and impoverished countries have as much right as the big, rich and developed countries in the assembly. In the hall, no country is considered more important than others. Every voice is heard because the voice of every sovereign nation counts as this glittering assemblage struggles to make some sense of the challenges that confront each nation and their impact on or implications for the rest of the world.
In the past, the assembly witnessed high octane drama staged in and outside the hall by some controversial and colourful figures. Under the rules, each nation is allotted only 15 minutes to address the assembly. But on September 26, 1960, this rule did not prevent the late President Fidel Castro from holding the stage for four hours and twenty-nine minutes. I wonder how many of the world leaders were awake while he spoke. It remains the longest speech ever delivered in the assembly. Perhaps, the late Libyan strong man, Col Muammar el-Ghaddafi, came a close second. In 2009, he delivered a speech that lasted for 90 minutes. He wisely did it outside the General Assembly hall.
In 1961, the late Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, took the podium to condemn Western capitalism in, as you would expect, purple prose. In the course of his speech, he took off his shoe and loudly pounded the podium. A rather sleepy world suddenly woke up to the pounding fury of the Soviet leader and probably did not find it funny. Such controversial figures are now absent in the UN.
Pardon my resort to a cliché but the UN has come a long way. The UN rose from the hot ashes of World War II. It was the worst tragedy the world has known. Its horrors and devastation and the human suffering visited on millions of people in and outside the theatres of war, motivated Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union and the United States to say, not again. They founded the new body in San Francisco, known then as the United Nations Organisation. They wanted to create a body of sovereign nations with shared interests and commitment to preventing wars within and among nations.
At the time, the possibility of a third world war loomed large like a dark and obvious danger. The possibility was aggravated later by the sharp division of the world between the Western and Eastern ideological blocs, led by the US and the USSR respectively. They hoped such a supra-national body would help to make the world a better and more peaceful place. That hope and sentiment were well-placed. Its charter signed on October 24 that year by 50 nations committed the rest of the world to that hope and the aspiration of its founders with the words: “We, the peoples of the United Nations…”
Seventy-four years later, an assessment of the role of the UN in fulfilling the objectives of its founders in, among others, preventing wars between and within nations and making the world a more peaceful place is rather mixed; as indeed it should be with each person making the assessment from his own perspective. Its critics argue that it has not achieved the objectives of its founders and that it has abandoned their ideals and allowed itself to degenerate into a mere talk shop both at the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council. But that seems to me to be an unfair cut. It should be possible to see that without the UN providing a forum for intervention at which nations ventilate their pent-up feelings towards other countries, the world would be a more dangerous place than it is today.
The real power in the UN does not lie with the General Assembly but with the 15 member-Security Council. Five of them are the permanent members whose right to so hold that position was conferred on them by their being the victors in World War II who promoted the UN concept. The other ten members are elected for a two-year term each.
The UN has not prevented wars within and between nations because despite its sentiments and hopes, the world body was not equipped to stop nations from warring within and among themselves. Its inherent weaknesses are obvious. Because it is a body of sovereign nations, the UN has no powers to tell nations what to do. It expresses its views through its resolutions in the General Assembly but lacks the mechanism for enforcing them. Nations affected by its resolutions arrogantly ignore them or treat them with contempt.
This has been the case with the numerous resolutions passed in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Israel, backed by its powerful big brother, the US, has ignored all of them, just as North Korea backed by China has ignored UN prohibitions against both a nuclear programme and missile-testing. UN resolutions could also be vetoed by one or more of the five permanent members of the Security Council. The US has exercised such options 16 times, but it trails behind the Soviet Union with 22 vetoes.
Its powerful permanent members are part of the problems of the UN. One or more of them are involved in all current inter and intra-state conflicts such as the Syrian war that pits the Russians supporting President Bashar al-Assad against the US, Britain and France that support the opposition groups. The UN’s peace-keeping role in several flash points in the world has also had the bad luck of being undermined, directly and indirectly, by the big powers.
However you look at it, the existence of the UN has been a blessing to the world in ways that we cannot quantify, whatever its critics might say. What if the UN did not exist? Think about the vacuum that could have created and its cynical exploitation in relations among nations.
The world is a much-changed place now. The Cold War has ended; the USSR has unravelled; communism has collapsed and along with it, the fiction of the classless society; colonialism has run its full course, yielding place to independent nations in Africa and elsewhere.
The world body faces new threats and critical global challenges, among which are resurgent institutional racism, poverty, hunger and disease, human and drug trafficking, and non-state actors engaged in mindless killings in many countries. It also faces the real threat of climate change that may, in a loose sense, restructure our way of life. It should be possible for the member-nations to make the UN stronger and more effective than it is now without encroaching on the sovereignty of nations because the challenges forced on it are critical.