Promises to Keep

The United Nations started its annual ritual of the General Assembly session in New York 26 September. And so this time is wrapped in ceremonial atmosphere, with fluttering flags, neatly-dressed saluting guards, white-gloved waiters serving high-profile dignitaries at gala dinners, traffic gridlocks, an irate crowd of New Yorkers, small demonstrations for all sorts of causes squeezed behind police barricades, and a lot of side-meetings and speeches. It is party time where every representative of the 192 members of the behemoth organisation gets to wax lyrical. Whether the noble principles articulated in the carefully drafted speeches go beyond the General Assembly hall is a different story. After nearly three months of hair-splitting scrutinising and categorisation of issues and proposals contained in each statement by the six committees of the General Assembly, scores of draft resolutions will be prepared and finally adopted in December before the Christmas holidays. Regrettably, the meeting of the assembly of nations, the bilateral talks, diplomatic niceties, the speech making and the urgent resolutions normally do not leave the world a much better place to live in. Something is seriously wrong with the $3.79 billion-budget institution.

Born out of the ashes of World War II, the UN may be seen to have kept the word of its founding fathers to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war ..." True, there has been no World War III. Rather, however, it has been split into more than 145 mini-interstate wars, civil strife and genocide that have produced just as many victims. The five-year civil war in Congo alone, where up to eight African nations were involved, left an estimated four million victims in what has been described as Africa's world war. For all its malevolence, the Cold War spared the globe another world war mainly because of uncertainty over the consequences of nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers. They never came to blows over the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and superpower agreement on the withdrawal of Soviet-backed Cuban forces from Angola helped put pressure on apartheid South Africa to withdraw from Namibia, which gained independence in 1990. In 1972, Soviet and US leaders agreed that they should not be dragged into confrontation in support of their allies in the Middle East conflict. Paradoxically, this freezing of the situation convinced former Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat that war, which he launched in October 1973, was the only option he had to unlock the no-war no-peace stalemate.

The UN went through several stages but the most significant watershed was the 1960 historic General Assembly Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. Not only did this development help confirm the unity of purpose and interests of newly independent as well as colonised Third World countries, and strengthen the coalition of the inchoate Non-Aligned Movement, but it also changed the structure, direction and identity of the enlarged world organisation. It created a post- colonial new world order. Before that structural change, the UN was a more malleable and homogenous organisation, consisting mostly of like- minded European states that had suffered the horrors of global war and a few associated nations that had great faith in the new organisation but little independent sway of their own. The offshore island of Formosa represented China while the main land giant itself was kept out by the US because it was "communist". There was little worry about population issues, negligible mention of climate change, no nuclear test ban treaty, let alone one on non-proliferation, apartheid in South Africa was a minor issue espoused by India, no one ever heard of free trade rounds and the millions of war refugees and separated families were repatriated and re-united by non-governmental organisations before the UN High Commission for Refugees was established in 1951. The Korean War of 1950-53 was the first test of wills of the Cold War warriors (it ended in a stalemate), and the 1956 Suez Crisis was the final showdown between the old forces of colonialism and the emerging spirit of nationalism.

The great UN era came to an end in the late 1960s, after having created a great number of specialised agencies, programmes and funds for various purposes. Instead of fostering a partnership for peace and development, as the Pearson Commission Report had envisioned, the UN was divided between the old and the new world orders, between the rich and the poor, democracy and dictatorship. The newly independent nations were mostly controlled by military-cum-civilian dictatorships and the dream of post-colonial national development became a nightmare of poverty, epidemics, poor quality education and the demolition of the ideals of human rights. The polarisation of the world body between the two superpowers left it more ceremonial than trustworthy. And the weakness of leadership, which began with the tenure of the late Kurt Waldheim, made it a tool of the powerful against the weak.

Republican administrations in the US usually have little respect for the UN. To the Republicans, the only function of the organisation is to be an instrument of US foreign policy. That is why the Bush administration had no qualms about invading Iraq in 2003, despite the opposition of the UN Security Council – the UN powerhouse that is usually used to protect allies and punish opponents. This was not only a test of the worthiness of the UN but equally a ruthless violation of its very foundation. The British who, under Tony Blair, were staunch allies in this conquest are now opting out of the debacle. But the French who, under president Jacques Chirac, distanced themselves and their European Union allies from it, now have a new administration that is wanting, willing and anxiously asking, "Can we be of help"? The current UN secretary- general, Ban Ki-Moon, is gently resisting pressure to deploy a mission in Iraq following the disastrous bombing of the UN mission headquarters in Baghdad during the time of his predecessor. It was on 19 August 2003 that a truckload of explosives blasted the scantily guarded building, killing 22 of the best and the brightest of the UN's staff, including head of mission Sergio Vieira de Mello. It was a sinister attempt by the world organisation to paint a coat of legitimacy over an ugly and illegal act of aggression – the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

After 62 years of existence, the UN has not lived up to the principles and ideals of its founding fathers. It is largely a forum for each country, big and small, to defend its national interest against possible transgression by others, not for collective will to improve and defend the interests of mankind. With one-fourth of humanity living in poverty and a similar number under brutal dictatorship, with the figure rising to 61 per cent in the Middle East, the UN has failed to honour the principle enshrined in the preamble to the UN Charter of "better standard of life in larger freedom". Apologists will point to some modest achievements. But the fact is that almost all major world problems have either been resolved between major powers outside the UN or are still lingering. Look at the 60-year old Palestinian problem, the 40-year long Israeli occupation of Arab territories, the reunification of Korea, the discrepancies of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and marathon negotiations on disarmament. That is not to speak of the long trail of afflictions that now bedevil the globe, from the HIV/AIDS pandemic to environmental degradation.

The emblematic malaise of the world's state of human rights stretches, uninterrupted, from 1956 when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the US-inspired pro-democracy uprising against communist dictatorship to 2007 when the military dictatorship in Myanmar moved thousands of troops countrywide in September to kill and quell pro-democracy demonstrators. It was almost 60 years ago, in 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the world community to set in stone standards for the promotion and respect of human rights.

To say that the UN needs reform sounds almost banal. It has been tried and re-tried time and again. The last reform episode started 10 years ago as an initiative by the then president of the General Assembly, Malaysia's permanent representative, Razali Ismail. It continued to gather momentum until it came to the dead-end of changing the composition and voting structure of the Security Council – the exclusive reserve of the big five permanent members. The reform initiative will most likely be dragged to death in committees until it becomes an item on the annual agenda of the General Assembly, just like the mandatory review of the UN Charter of yesteryears.

All is not lost, though. The new secretary- general, a polished diplomat who enjoys high ratings so far, has to take the leadership initiative that most of his self-serving predecessors cringed at. He could turn the decades-old mundane annual report of the secretary-general on the work of the organisation into an incisive, uncompromising and blunt annual report on the state of the world. He would ruffle almost all UN feathers, but this is what the UN needs. In retrospect, future generations, if this direction were taken, may end up echoing what Neil Armstrong said when he first set foot on the moon in July 1969: "It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."