MDC Statement on Veto of UN Resolution
July 12th, 2008
Via an MDC Press Release:
The Movement for Democratic Change appreciates the focus of the United Nation Security Council on the Zimbabwean crisis.
We acknowledge that the Security Council has recognized the magnitude of the problems facing Zimbabwe and their impact on the southern African region.
The international community has recognised that the violence in Zimbabwe is state-sanctioned. Over a hundred people have been killed, many thousands beaten, tortured and displaced and millions now facing economic hardship and starvation.
The suffering of the Zimbabwean people is worsening every day and a peaceful negotiated transition is urgently required.
In light of this, the MDC calls upon the African Union to work with SADC in establishing the framework in which a negotiated solution can be formulated.
The MDC would like to express its gratitude to countries and organisations that continue to support the Zimbabwean people in their struggle for freedom and stability.
July 13th, 2008 15:27
The United Nation’s Charter states that its aims are to facilitate cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, and human rights. But this alliance of nations is today a very different organization which came together soon after WW2 in 1945 to replace the ineffective former pre-war League of Nations. The world in the following century is totally different than it was when the five permanent mebers of the Security Council came together to ratify the Charter and resolved to have veto power to reflect that they were the main victors in the global conflict against the Axis powers.
There should now be formed a new world organization. A common league of nations with a proven democratic background and outlook, and only those nations should be allowed as members, with aspiring nations able to join when they too have such a proven record of democratic observance. It could be called the United League of Democratic Countries (ULDC) and no nation would have a veto, as voting would be by simple majority, as befits any democratic institution.
Perhaps then, the dictators, tyrants, and oppressive regimes of this world would be dispatched more quickly and effectively than now when such countries as China, which is communist, and Russia which is a managed economy, still have a veto on the world’s attempt at global democratization, only because it suits them, and them alone.
July 13th, 2008 23:01
The problem is that the United Nations was apparently set up to prevent a repeat of what happen in Germany in the 1930s, but as Russia and China have helpfully pointed out, it is not constituted to do that.
The root of the problem I think lies in a popular misconception, that we went to war with Germany because of the way they treated the Jews. We did not. They could have continued to treat Jews, Gypsies and gays the way they did for as long as they liked, and we all would have wrung our hands and wished there was something we could have done.
That’s why to date, for a dictator to be removed from power, he first has to make the mistake of invading another country. Hitler and Amin made that mistake (and by the way no-one lifted a finger to help the Tanzanians who sacrificed a lot to remove that bullying dictator from power). Saddam Hussain made that mistake but the international community let him get away with it. Mugabe’s Junta, like that in Burma, is unlikely to make such a mistake.
The UN is the successor organisation to the League of Nations, which was set up with a similar aim of preventing wars. One way of looking at it which might be helpful, is to think of political and military power as something akin to banking. Prior to World War 1, various nations had agreements with each other that if someone invaded or attacked this oen, then these ones would attack back. It was a balance of power which should never have needed to be cashed in, in the same way that money in banks (with apologies to readers in Zimbabwe) should never all be called in at once. The First World War can be seen as a sort of run on banks, like the one that happened in the USA in the 1920s. It was when there was a run on banks that they set up a Central Bank that would prevent this happening by promising to pay on behalf of the bank.
Following this analogy, the answer to the problem that was set by World War 1 was to have a “Central Bank” of political and, critically, military power. An organisation that was mandated to carry out armed action so that other nations should not need to. The lesson of World War 2 should have been that this needed to be extended to countries which were starting to exhibit a very clear and repeatable set of symptoms, such that there would soon be either an unprovoked attack on another nation or a sustained and systematic attack on selected groups of people in that country itself. So the lesson for the successor to the League of Nations, namely our UN, would be to extend the “banking” of military power to countries which consistently and violently abuse their own people.
Unfortunately the UN lost its appetite for armed action in the Congo, many years ago. The modern trend to try and use sanctions (or indeed “sanctions” as we hear about now which are not even santions), is no substitute for literal gunboat diplomacy, that is the threatening of force which should thereby never need to be delivered.
It is part of the failure of the UN and the international community to consider armed action that led to the disastrous (in my humble opinion) unilateral actions in Iraq. The very fact that certain nations could feel they could act unilaterally shows that something the UN should have been capable of doing was not being done. That doesn’t excuse the cowboys, but it makes it somewhat inevitable.
If the UN can’t get back into seeing its role as robust physical intervenion in rogue nations, then let us hope that the AU will succeed where the UN has failed. Darfur is a good start for both of them, let’s hope that doesn’t become to the AU what Congo was to the UN.
Failing that, your idea (@ True Grit) is the only one that would work. In the meantime the vetoing nations have seemingly vetoed the very things the UN is supposed to be there for.
July 14th, 2008 15:51
@ Mike
A lot is true in what you say, especially the truism that the UN is not designed to be a beacon of morality. Take the decades long iron rule of the USSR over Eastern Europe. Remember the impotence of the world when Russia invaded Hungary in 1956, for example. It has also not prevented the superpowers from fighting each other. It was the threat of nuclear Armageddon that did that. And there were still indirect conflicts such as Korea and Vietnam.
My point was that, as the UN is incapable of acting with moral authority, due to the powers of veto by immoral regimes, it is time that a democratic alliance, seen to be as moral as the sum of its membership parts, should quietly take its place and thereby confine the UN, which is still tied to the coat tails of WW2, to the dustbin of history.
July 14th, 2008 22:54
Just to say that an hour ago I watched the BBC Panorama program about Sudan. It claimed that China supplies 70% of the governments small arms. It supplies Fantan fighter jets, as well as crew training and maintenance. Thier is a UN embargo on selling alrms to Sudan, but China is clearly ignoring it. China is also the main buyer of Sudans oil at knock down prices.
The program argued that while countries like China and Russia actively support Sudan and other countries by using their veto at the UN and continuing to trade, there is little hope of peace and justice for those on the recieving end of bullets which say “Made in China” on them.
Hard to disagree with that.