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POLITICS: Will Iraq Crisis Signal U.N.’s Final Disappearing Act?

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 2003 (IPS) - At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, a former Peruvian diplomat characterised the United Nations as a politically wobbly institution that survives only at the will – and pleasure – of the world’s big powers.

"When two small powers have a dispute,” he complained, ”the dispute disappears". "When a great power and a small power are in conflict, the small power disappears. And when two great powers have a dispute, the United Nations disappears."

And so political observers watching the slanging match between two big powers – the United States and France – are wondering whether the days of the United Nations are numbered.

The political tug-of-war is over whether the 15-member Security Council – the only U.N. body with powers to make war and peace – should give its blessings for a U.S.-led military attack on Iraq.

Since the Council has threatened to frustrate his plans for an immediate war, U.S. President George W. Bush has already warned that "free nations should not allow the United Nations to fade into history as an ineffective and irrelevant debating society".

If the world body does not assert its authority, Bush said, it will go the way of the now-defunct League of Nations, which was dissolved in 1946 because it was ineffective in stopping the military aggression that led to World War II.

And if the Council decides this week to reject a U.S. resolution for a war on Iraq, Bush says he will still attack Baghdad supported by a ”coalition of the willing” – but without U.N. authorisation.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan begs to differ with Bush’s assessment of the future of the body that he runs. He argues that if any action were taken outside the Security Council, support for such moves – popular or otherwise – would also be diminished in the eyes of the rest of the world.

”To state that if the Security Council does not vote one way, it is going to go the way of the League of Nations, is overstating the case,” Annan told reporters last week. ”The United Nations is much, much larger than the Iraqi crisis.”

The secretary-general, who has already complained that the international community is far too obsessed with Iraq, to the point where it is ignoring some of the world’s more pressing humanitarian problems, says that Iraq is just one of the more important issues of the day.

”We’re dealing with economic, social, humanitarian and other issues. And we’re dealing with many other crises around the world,” he added.

”There are suggestions that if the Security Council does not vote for action, then its credibility would be mortally wounded. I tend to believe that if the Council were to manage to come together and resolve this crisis effectively and successfully, the credibility and influence of the Council will be enhanced,” said Annan.

Successfully solving the Iraq deadlock could herald positive results in dealing with the Middle East’s most pressing issue – Palestinian-Israeli relations, the U.N. chief said Monday.

Mark Lance, associate professor of justice and peace at Georgetown University in Washington DC, says that unilateral action by the United States would be ”a case of the overwhelmingly most powerful country in the world doing as it pleases”.

”If one powerful state can go to war without consequence from the United Nations – regardless of the views of U.N. members – and if one powerful state can bribe or coerce other states into supporting its wars, then the United Nations is already irrelevant as an arbiter of international law,” added Lance.

There is evidence that U.N.-style multilateralism is failing elsewhere.

The Conference on Disarmament, the world’s only multilateral forum dedicated to debate on weapons control, has been bogged down for years primarily because of U.S. insistence on bilateral negotiations. Washington has also been dubbed "unilateralist" for obstructing Conference negotiations on nuclear disarmament and on ending the arms race in outer space, among other measures.

Independent experts on disarmament had previously forecast a very gloomy future for the Conference, including the possibility that it might disappear altogether. An invasion of Iraq could put an end to the Geneva-based forum once and for all, said a Latin American diplomat who requested anonymity.

But there are other much more positive visions of the future of intergovernmental organisations.

Claude Martin, director-general of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund), says that despite disappointment at the results of last year’s U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa, he is confident that new alliances will be able to "mitigate the current flaws in the multilateral system".

Such alliances include "new constellations of enlightened governments, intergovernmental institutions, environmental and development NGOs, forward-looking companies, and creative thinkers”, added Martin.