Silence on Gaza Demonstrates UN Lack of Power: Celestine Bohlen

By Celestine Bohlen

Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Twice in the past five months, the United Nations Security Council has failed to call for a stop to small wars that have put the international community on edge.

It isn’t for want of trying. Last year, ambassadors representing the 15 members of the Security Council met in the middle of the night to discuss the brewing conflict between Georgia and Russia. They adjourned at 2 a.m. on Aug. 8 without producing any kind of declaration, let alone a resolution.

Now, as Israel’s offensive in Gaza approaches its third week, a similar stalemate has set in. Since Dec. 27, the Security Council has met four times, including on two successive Saturdays and on New Year’s Eve. Closed-door negotiations are continuing, but so far no resolution has emerged.

As the casualties mount, the failure by the world’s biggest international organization to send a clear message to the combatants raises concerns -- once again -- about its effectiveness. The question is: What else could take its place?

The paralysis at the heart of the 192-nation UN can be traced to the veto power held by the Security Council’s permanent members: the U.S., Russia (formerly the Soviet Union), China, the U.K. and France. This can hold the international community hostage to the five nations’ own interpretation of events, their own national interests and those of their allies.

“It is the eternal conundrum at the UN,” says Stephen Schlesinger, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a public- policy research institute in New York. “As long as you have an international institution made up of states, you will always have state interests controlling the outcome.”

Russia’s Plea

Yet the UN remains the principal door on which governments knock during a crisis. On Aug. 7 last year, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, called for a late-night emergency session as Georgian rockets were raining on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, and Russian troops were poised to cross an internationally recognized border.

“The Security Council must now play its role,” Churkin said as the meeting convened at 1:15 a.m. on Aug. 8. “The council and the international community as a whole cannot remain on the sidelines at this difficult moment, when the fate of hundreds of thousands of people in the region is being decided. Together, we must put an end to the violence.”

On Jan. 7, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas went to New York to plead for UN action in Gaza.

‘Save My People’

“The entire world opinion will accept no less than an urgent intervention by the Security Council to stop the fighting and deter the aggressor,” he said. “I call upon this council to take the first necessary steps to save my people in Gaza, a resolution calling for an immediate cessation of Israeli aggression.”

In both cases, these calls ran up against the threat of a unilateral veto that can block any action by the council.

In the UN’s early years, the Soviets were profligate veto abusers, blocking 17 initiatives in 1955 alone. Since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. has taken the lead, using its veto 13 times, compared with five for the Russian Federation.

“What usually happens is that either the U.S. or Russia tend to protect their client states against UN intervention, or stymie action for other political reasons,” says Schlesinger, author of “Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations” (Westview Press, 2003).

The U.S. has used its veto mostly in defense of Israel -- 42 times since 1972, more than the total vetoes cast by the other four permanent members in that period, according to John J. Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

Israeli Power

“The key point is that Israel is in the driver’s seat,” says Mearsheimer. “Because Israel effectively controls American veto power, it makes it almost impossible to do anything meaningful, such as pushing the two sides toward an agreement.”

Last week, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad rejected a Libyan resolution, which demanded an immediate cease- fire and called for an end to Israel’s blockade of Gaza. He described the language as “not balanced and therefore, as currently drafted, not acceptable to the U.S.”

It was clear during the Georgia crisis last summer that the Security Council could do nothing since Russia was sure to block any language criticizing its military incursion onto Georgian territory. At a second meeting on Aug. 8, the council could do no more than lament a rapidly deteriorating situation.

Sarkozy Mediation

Ultimately, the role of mediator fell to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, then head of the European Union, who helped negotiate a cease-fire between Russia and Georgia on Aug. 12.

The veto available to the five “Great Powers” is an irritant to the other 187 members of the UN, who see it as “an anti-democratic self-violation of the whole rest of the UN Charter,” wrote Erskine Childers, a UN official, in 1994.

Yet it is also the rock on which the UN was founded, according to Schlesinger. Both the Soviet Union and the U.S. threatened to walk out of the founding conference in San Francisco in 1945 if they didn’t get the veto.

“Great powers are never going to allow international institutions to pursue policies that are not in their national interests,” says Mearsheimer. “As a result, no international institution is ever going to be powerful. They are useful tools, but there are limits.”

Since the end of the Cold War, the international community, led by the Security Council, has at times been able to swing into collective action -- launching the first Gulf War and the 2003 war in Afghanistan, ending the 2006 conflict in Lebanon, as well as supporting 19 different peacekeeping missions.

Then there are times when the UN has fallen down on the job -- in 1994 in Rwanda, and in 1999 in Kosovo. Last year, Russia and China together vetoed a resolution dealing with the deteriorating political situation in Zimbabwe. Then came Georgia, now Gaza -- and again silence.

(Celestine Bohlen is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the reporter on this column: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net