----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Mensah" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 11:53 AM
Subject: [unioNews] UN: Much maligned, but much needed


Thursday, February 26, 2004
<H3>The UN: Much maligned, but much needed</H3>
Jonathan Power IHT


LONDON
<B><i>The United Nations is everybody's whipping boy, but it is
revealing how in a crisis - and Iraq is but the latest example - the
big powers can run to it and find a solution short of war or
revolution.</i></B>

When the antagonists have talked or fought themselves into a corner
they often tend to crawl back to the body that they were not long ago
denouncing, to find an exit from the horrors that confront them. But
then a few years later they seem to have forgotten the experience.

The present desperate return of the United States to the United
Nations brings to mind the events of the 1954 crisis over the capture
of 17 U.S. airmen by China. American public opinion became extremely
agitated. There was even some talk about the use of nuclear weapons.

Belatedly, the United Nations was asked to intervene and the UN
secretary general, Dag Hammarskjold, went to Beijing to talk to Prime
Minister Chou Enlai. It took six months of negotiating, but the men
were released. President Dwight Eisenhower had a whole chapter in his
book on the incident but the central role of the UN secretary general
was almost totally ignored.

Similarly, in Robert Kennedy's book on the Cuban missile crisis there
is only a passing reference to the letter that the then UN secretary
general, U Thant, sent to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in
October 1962. Yet it was U Thant's letter that elicited a crucial
response from the Soviet leader, indicating there was room for
compromise.

In Suez in 1956, Lebanon in 1958, the Congo in 1969 and in the 1973
Middle East war, it was the United Nations that provided an escape
hatch for the big powers when they put themselves on a cold war
collision course.

In the wake of the Yom Kippur war of 1973, although both the United
States and the Soviet Union had agreed in principle to a cease-fire,
there was no way of implementing it. The situation looked exceedingly
dangerous. Egypt was calling for Soviet help. President Richard Nixon
put the United States on a nuclear alert. It was fast footwork at the
United Nations, principally by a group of Third World countries, that
helped break the impasse. They pushed for a UN force to go in. It
started to arrive on the following day, which would seem hardly
possible by the standards of the slow-moving bureaucracy of today.

Critics deride the Third World majority in the UN General Assembly,
but even if it does combine to vote through any number of meaningless
or impossible resolutions, it often seems to rise to the occasion on
the most serious matters.

It was during the charged Security Council debate that preceded the
American decision to invade Iraq that the African members, who by the
luck of the rotation held 20 percent of the vote, pondered both sides
of the argument dispassionately before coming down against a war,
seemingly at great cost to their immediate economic interests. And
yet today the Americans can't seem to have enough of two Africans at
the United Nations - Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, a
Ghanaian, and his special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian.

We are also able to witness right now the secretary general bringing
to a conclusion the painful 30-year separation of the Turkish and
Greek parts of Cyprus. UN troops have guarded the peace line
separating the two halves since 1974, unnoticed by much of the world,
but not by the inhabitants of Cyprus. Who says the United Nations
does not have staying power?

If the United Nations has been a force, a peacemaker and an
interlocutor, today it must also seriously contemplate the need to
become a colonizer.

Perhaps in Iraq, given the number of highly educated people, it need
only be a helpmate, once the planned elections are concluded. But in
Haiti, Somalia, the Congo and Sierra Leone, where the system of
government has all but disappeared, the United Nations should
consider taking the reins of power.

In all these countries, torrid personal ambition and gross
administrative incompetence, combined with the ruthless application
of the most sordid and undisciplined forms of violence, have
destroyed any semblance of normal life or ordinary discourse. They
all stand in danger of becoming shelterers of tomorrow's terrorist
networks.

We will probably have to wait for a change at the helm in the United
States for this to happen. But as Iraq shows, American opinion, along
with that of its main allies in Iraq, is coming to appreciate the
United Nations. Let us hope that this time Washington learns from the
experience.

***
Jonathan Power writes on foreign affairs.

 Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune




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Marcus Mosiah Garvey <i>(1887 - 1940)</i></A></html>

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