Hello; I am honored to have been invited to participate on this important webinar today.
As Professor Wronka said, criticism must be viewed as a tribute; my remarks today focus on some current failures of the United Nations, but I am pleased that Professor Wronka also listed some of its many successes. I am also pleased that he commented on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a vitally important document.
According to its website, the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) “…plays a central role in United Nations efforts to prevent and resolve deadly conflict around the world. DPPA focuses primarily on five areas in international peace and security; they are the following:
• Ensuring sound analysis and early warning
• Preventing conflict and engaging in peacemaking
• Managing political crises and violent conflicts
• Sustaining peace
• Enhancing partnerships.”
These are all just, even noble, purposes, and in a more ideal world, would be fulfilled. But in looking at current conditions in just a couple of areas of the world, we see that these goals are not being met and, in some cases, not even being addressed. And the cost of this neglect is major violations of human rights and international law, both of which the United Nations is charged with protecting.
We will first look at the current situation in Palestine. Israel, already in violation of dozens of UN Security Council resolutions, is now decimating the Gaza Strip, having killed more than 33,0000 men, women and children in the last six months, wounding hundreds of thousands more, causing nearly 2,000,000 people to be homeless, and destroying more than half of the enclave’s infrastructure. There was no ‘sound analysis and early warning’, as required by the DPPA’s own mandate; the right of Palestinians to resist their brutal occupation – a right guaranteed under international law – has long been ignored by the United Nations. The victims of Israel’s brutal, genocidal onslaught – completely financed by the United States – had no ‘early warning’. There was no ‘sound analysis’ of their suffering under cruel and illegal occupation.
Nothing has been done to satisfy the second requirement: Preventing conflict and engaging in peacemaking. Due to the outmoded and completely unfair veto power held by several Security Council member nations, Israel has been allowed to continue carpet-bombing Gaza, and to use food deprivation as a weapon of war. Political and economic considerations, is seems, trump international law and human rights every time.
The DPPA is mandated to ‘Manage political crises and violent conflicts.’ What’s happening in Gaza satisfies both categories, but this is not something that started with the October 7 resistance. Palestine has been occupied for seven decades, in violation of international law, and the Gaza Strip has been blockaded by air, land and sea for over twenty years. Israel periodically bombed the Strip, even prior to its current genocide. The United Nations has failed in managing a decades-long political crisis, or doing anything to prevent violence against the Palestinian people, issues that the UN caused with its 1947 partition plan.
Coupled with managing political crisis and violent conflicts is sustaining peace. There can be no peace under occupation; the occupied people will always, despite the horrific brutality under which they suffer, resist. Assuring that Israel abides by international law would have brought a sustainable peace to the Middle East, but the United Nations has not focused sufficiently on the suffering of the Palestinian people.
And what partnerships has the United Nations enhanced to bring peace to the Middle East? Efforts must be made with other countries to sanction Israel for its constant, shocking violations of international law, but there again, the UN has not fulfilled its duty.
While much of the world’s attention is focused on the Gaza Strip, it must be remembered that since October, Israel has killed over 400 people in the West Bank, and expanded illegal settlements there. A ‘strongly worded’ objection from the United Nations is meaningless.
Let us turn our attention now to Kashmir. Seven decades of brutal repression have not been addressed in any meaningful way by the United Nations. There is no excuse for seventy years of neglect, years which have deprived the people of Kashmir of the the plebiscite, guaranteed them, that would enable them to determine their own future; years which have seen people arrested and incarcerated for long periods of time without charge. There can be no reasonable explanation for the deprivation of the basic human rights of freedom of speech and expression; freedom of movement and assembly; freedom of residence, association and property, to name only a few. Yet these freedoms have been denied the people of Kashmir for decades, and conditions have only worsened since India’s abrogation of article 370 of its constitution on August 5, 2019. The medical deprivation, sexual violence and destruction of property that India has used against the Kashmiri people for decades has only increased since then.
Where are United Nations’ peacebuilding efforts in these situations? Why are the people of Palestine and Kashmir not being protected from such great harm? Why are their basic human rights being allowed to be violated in such extreme manners on an hourly basis?
And what of the Rohingya (row-hin-ja) people in Myanmar, the Uyghurs (weegr) in China, and other oppressed peoples around the globe? They are entitled to the same human rights that are mandated in Geneva, Islamabad, Toronto and New York, although not everyone in those locations experiences those rights. But in many places, entire populations are deprived of them.
The United Nations, through the Department of Politics and Peacebuilding Affairs, and other of its departments, is the world’s best hope to ensure the human rights of people everywhere. Yet as I’ve mentioned, it has not, and is not, living up to its potential. Genuine peacebuilding will end hunger, oppression, fear, poverty and a wide range of social ills. We must all work for these goals, and the United Nations, as an organization, must work to end the unfair and unjust veto power in the Security Council. Doing so will greatly assist in fulfilling its vitally important mandate.
Thank you.
Comments are closed.