Selective security

So shattered by the Bush years, the UN and its Security Council seem lost and bereft of purpose, writes Ayman El-Amir*

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These days, a week hardly passes without the UN Security Council engaging in consultations or meeting on an issue of international concern. And it is not only obsession with Iran's development of nuclear technology that is in play. Washington and its allies are trying now to push for Security Council sanctions against Robert Mugabe who returned to the presidency of Zimbabwe via blood stained election fraud. Nonetheless, China, Russia, India and Indonesia are opposed. In the past 30 years, the US has cast almost 130 vetoes to foil any decision that could censure Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians or the seizure of their occupied territories. These and other actions have distorted the definition and functions of the Security Council in a world in need of a credible collective security framework now more than ever before.

The Security Council remains the UN's agency responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security and authorised to use military force to ensure that. The functions of the Security Council have sometimes been put to good use, sometimes abused, and sometimes hamstrung. It has been generally recognised that when it comes to Security Council action involving the use of military force, the participation of the United States is essential. That made the US a more equal partner among theoretical equals, mainly those other members who wield veto power privileges. But excessive power usually leads to excessive abuse. The United States, particularly during the long span of the Bush administration, by waging war on Afghanistan and Iraq, and threatening Iran, has proven it.

US Republicans in general do not like the UN or the edicts of international law. It is their conviction that unless the UN serves the interests of US foreign policy and works to reshape the world in the US image, it is redundant. President George W Bush has often threatened the UN and its Security Council when the majority appeared close to stepping out of line with the US. Indeed, no other US administration has undermined the UN as the Bush administration did. It refused to sign the Kyoto Protocols on limiting greenhouse gas emissions, withdrew the Clinton administration's signature of the Rome Statute on the establishment of the International Criminal Court and refused to join an agreement banning landmines and cluster bombs. By comparison, it was during the Clinton administration years that US Congress was persuaded to pay US arrears of nearly $1 billion to the UN.

For more than 12 years, the UN has been negotiating overall reform, particularly the complex Security Council system. However, the initiative, which was introduced by Malaysia's charismatic permanent representative Razali Ismail in 1996 as president of the General Assembly, seems to have come to a standstill since the appointment of Secretary-General Ban Ki- Moon 18 months ago. This is not to suggest that he was necessarily under any pressure to let the process die slowly; it had nearly come to a dead-end when negotiations got stuck on the issue of expanding the Security Council's membership and curbing veto powers. Passing time, failing reform and the abuse of the Bush administration are casting a dark shadow over the credibility of the Security Council.

Two international crises illustrate the status of the institution. In 1991, the Security Council authorised the use of force to evict the Iraqi army from Kuwait -- a sovereign member of the United Nations that had been blatantly invaded by Iraq in the previous year. It was a clear- cut case to revoke an illegal action undertaken by a more powerful state against one weaker. Despite the objections of Yemen and Cuba, non-permanent members of the Security Council at the time, the US-led international force was viewed by international standards as legitimate. Kuwait was liberated, in the proper sense of the word, by a legitimate and just action. Sanctions were imposed upon Iraq by a Machiavellian Security Council resolution that required Iraq, among many other things, to disclose and destroy its weapons of mass destruction.

In March 2003, President Bush, having failed to obtain a Security Council resolution to wage war on Iraq to rid it of alleged weapons of mass destruction missed by 13 years of inspections, invaded the country unilaterally. He had the temerity of stating he was "fulfilling the will of the international community" which denied him that authority in the first place. In contrast to 1991, the 2003 US invasion was a clear-cut case of subverting the rule of law by using the law of force. The Security Council's standing was dealt an irreparable blow. Since the invasion was illegal, it was internationally illegitimate. Thus the US stands guilty of committing an international crime in Iraq, punishable by international law, and leaving available to the people of Iraq and their supporters the use of all means -- including armed struggle -- to reverse that crime, just like la Resistance in France during World War II.

The UN Security Council maintains only the weakest semblance of its original purpose, and at the worst possible time. It is still empowered to uphold international peace and security and to enforce sanctions, though the oil-for- food scandal during the time of Kofi Annan is a lasting blight. The Security Council was originally designed to step into inter-state conflicts and, in many cases, ventured successfully into peacekeeping missions -- an improvised concept that was successful in many situations. However, it has had little success intervening in civil war situations and has yet to prove itself in confronting the most serious challenge of the 21st century -- terrorism.

If the Security Council is late in facing this challenge it is because the US is preoccupied with its war-for-oil in Iraq. This, added to its immoral veto wielding while the mass murder of the Palestinian people and expropriation of their territory continues, leaves the Security Council crippled and exposed. In most cases the US has voted not in the interests of world peace and security but to advance its narrow foreign policy agenda, thus chipping away at the foundation of the UN and its principles. National agendas, not universal international interests or the principles of multilateralism have become the guiding culture of that body and its Security Council.

Reforming the UN Security Council is not a matter of expanding membership to 21 or 25, although limiting the veto matters. The real challenge is the development of a moral and legitimate consensual foundation for its decisions and actions. Fissures in the structure and actions of the Security Council are widening. The institution that convened a summit meeting in January 2000 to debate the question of HIV/AIDS as a threat to international peace and security -- a public relations gimmick by then US Ambassador Richard Holbrook -- is now unable to agree on what to do about Mugabe's rigged elections. It has not even come to consider the global food crisis that threatens millions of people around the world and risks regional if not international security. The council and its permanent members face as serious a challenge now as states did when they first drafted the Charter of the United Nations 63 years ago. To save what is left of the UN's tattered reputation they will have to abandon backroom diplomacy and engage themselves with the realities of the world of the 21st century.

* The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.