West Plots To Supplant United Nations With Global NATO
Rick Rozoff
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| Ten years ago it first became evident to the world that moves were afoot in major Western capitals to circumvent, subvert and ultimately supplant the United Nations, as the UN could not always be counted on to act in strict accordance with the dictates of the United States and its NATO allies. At that time in 1999 the NATO alliance was waging what would become a 78-day bombing war against Yugoslavia in flagrant contravention of the United Nations and of international law in general. As two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the five permanent members being the main victorious World War II allies, with the People’s Republic of China having replaced the Republic of China (Taiwan) in 1971 and with Russia as the successor state to the Soviet Union – exactly China and Russia, not being NATO members states, opposed that war and in several other instances the use of sanctions and military force against nations targeted for both by the West. The first indication that the United Nations was marked for marginalization, selective application (and exploitation) or even de facto dissolution, however, occurred three years earlier in 1996 when the United States single-handedly browbeat the other fourteen then members of the Security Council to depose Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and replace him with Kofi Annan, who the preceding year had been appointed UN special envoy to NATO and authorized the NATO bombing in Bosnia behind the back of Boutros-Ghali. Boutros-Ghali was deprived of the traditional second term for not authorizing NATO’s bombing of Bosnian Serb targets in 1995 and for speaking the truth about the deadly Israeli bombing of a refugee camp in Qana, Lebanon in the following year when 106 civilians were killed and 116 injured. As former Clinton and Bush administrations’ National Security Council counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke acknowledged: “[Madeleine] Albright and I and a handful of others (Michael Sheehan, Jamie Rubin) had entered into a pact together in 1996 to oust Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General of the United Nations, a secret plan we had called Operation Orient Express, reflecting our hope that many nations would join us in doing in the UN head. “In the end, the US had to do it alone (with its UN veto) and Sheehan and I had to prevent the President from giving in to pressure from world leaders and extending Boutros-Ghali’s tenure, often by our racing to the Oval Office when we were alerted that a head of state was telephoning the President. In the end Clinton was impressed that we had managed not only to oust Boutros-Ghali but to have Kofi Annan selected to replace him.” [1] By 1999, however, even having a UN secretary general handpicked and forced upon the world by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright wasn’t sufficient to meet NATO’s requirements as it finalized plans for its first war, the Operation Allied Force aerial assault against Yugoslavia. The US and its Alliance allies could not be assured of gaining a majority of votes in the 15-member Security Council to authorize the war and even if successful in that regard could not be certain that Russia, China or both would not veto the resolution. So the United Nations, whose procedures and requirements for 54 years had been observed even in the breach, was now disregarded, downgraded and severely if not mortally wounded, not yet having recuperated from the blow of ten years ago. American and NATO subordinate Annan officiated over the debasement and humiliation of the organization he headed and never once criticized NATO’s waging war without a United Nations mandate and in open defiance of the institution. Guarantor Of Peace Versus World’s Only Military Alliance The Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations identifies the purpose of the UN’s founding in 1945 as being “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind” and “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest.” [2] To accentuate and complete the message that NATO had launched its post-Cold War transformation from Euro-Atlantic military bloc to self-designated and sole international arbiter of conflicts within and between nations and of the authorization of extraterritorial military force, with the concomitant usurpation of the role of the United Nations, on April 23-24 NATO held its 50th anniversary jubilee summit in Washington D.C. Unveiling what it called its new Strategic Concept, the summit also issued a Washington Declaration which inter alia stated “We are charting NATO’s course as we enter the 21st century” and “We pledge to improve our defence capabilities to fulfill the full range of the Alliance’s 2lst century missions.” [3] Video clips and photographs of the summit at the time revealed what 21st Century NATO was intended to become: With the US’s Bill Clinton and Britain’s Tony Blair at the center of other world leaders, the flags of nearly fifty nations – nineteen full NATO member states, 25 Partnership for Peace affiliates and others – decked the auditorium. As did the NATO flag, a facsimile of a compass with its four arms pointed to north, south, east and west. The message could not have been more clear, more irrefutable: A new world organization, an expanded version of a Western military bloc, was replacing that which had emerged from the smoldering ruins of a war that had cost over fifty million human lives. NATO lost no time and spared no effort in implementing its plans for the new millennium. In addition to its military deployment in Bosnia the bloc continued its occupation of the Serbian province of Kosovo. In 2001 it inaugurated a military deployment in Macedonia, Operation Allied Harmony, after armed invasions of the nation by an extremist offshoot of the NATO-allied Kosovo Liberation Army based in Kosovo, and later in the year it participated in the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan where NATO continues its first ground war almost eight years later. It insinuated itself into the Darfur region of western Sudan in 2005 and thus was simultaneously engaged in operations in three continents in that year. Or as then State Department Deputy Assistant for European Affairs and later US ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker said of 2005, NATO was “engaged in eight simultaneous operations on four continents.” [4] In the last five years of the 20th Century and the first five of the 21st NATO had evolved from a regional alliance based in Western Europe to a global force contending with the United Nations for the number and geographical range of the missions it was conducting. That expansion in both extent and essence was not limited to frequently overshadowing and nullifying the role of the UN, but has also been a component in undoing the entire post-World War II order of which the UN was the cornerstone. Results Of World War II Undone: Inauguration Of Post-Post-Yalta World The choices were deliberately selected to antagonize Russia, which has borders with both, as Latvia has disenfranchised millions of the minority residents of the country who are 40% of the total, especially ethnic Russians and other Slavs (Europe’s only “non-citizens”), and has permitted the rehabilitation of Nazi Waffen SS veterans as “defenders of the nation,” and Georgia has been a thorn in Russia’s side since its formerly US-based head of state Mikheil Saakashvili came to power on the back of the “rose revolution” of late 2003 with the assistance of US governmental and non-governmental funds and direction. That antagonism reached a breaking point last August with the five-day war between Georgia and Russia. Bush overtly baited Russia in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi with comments like “Before there was a purple revolution in Iraq or an orange revolution in Ukraine or a cedar revolution in Lebanon, there was a rose revolution,” [5] “In recent months, the world has marvelled at the hopeful changes taking place from Baghdad to Beirut to Bishkek [Kyrgyzstan],” [6] and that thanks to Georgia, “freedom is advancing to the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and around the world,” [7] as an image of his face was projected onto a giant screen in the background. Earlier in the Latvian capital of Riga Bush delivered a blunt and unprecedented attack on the Yalta Conference of 1945 and its aftermath. The historical meeting of Britain’s Winston Churchill, the US’s Franklin Roosevelt and the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin in February of that year was denounced by Bush with such characterizations of the summit as constituting one of “the injustices of our history,” which “followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,” and that “the legacy of Yalta was finally buried, once and for all” in 1991. [8] This animus against the post-World War II system that evolved out of the Yalta and later Potsdam conferences remained a recurring motif for Bush, who in his last appearance as US president at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008 denounced “the bitter legacy of Yalta” and to demonstrate what the post-post-Yalta era was intended to be added, “I spoke those words on the soil of a nation on the Baltic. Today, on the soil of a Black Sea nation, I have come to see those words fulfilled. The NATO alliance that meets here this week now stretches from the shores of Klaipeda [Lithuania] to the beaches of Neptun [Romania]. “[O]ur Alliance must also decide how to respond to requests by Georgia and Ukraine to participate in NATO’s Membership Action Plan. These two nations “As NATO allies fight…in Iraq and Afghanistan, our Alliance is taking on other important missions across the world. In the Mediterranean, NATO forces are patrolling the high seas…as part of Operation Active Endeavor. In Kosovo, NATO forces are providing security and helping a new democracy take root in the Balkans….NATO is no longer a static alliance….It is now an expeditionary alliance that is sending its forces across the world….” [9] To understand the nature of this abiding, visceral, monomaniacal hostility toward what with a comparable degree of venom Zbigniew Brzezinski for years has contemptuously derided as the post-Yalta world, excerpts from a column by Indian journalist Siddharth Varadarajan immediately after Bush’s Riga speech of 2005 are quoted below. “[Bush's] attack on Yalta shows the U.S. is not interested in cooperative security. “Historians of the Cold War will not have missed the significance of President George W. Bush choosing Riga as the venue for his speech on Saturday repudiating the 1945 Yalta Agreement. “[W]hen Mr. Bush said in Riga that Yalta was ‘one of the greatest wrongs of history’ because it traded the freedom of small nations for the goal of stability in Europe, he was not merely echoing Cold War dogma. He was also sending out a message to the world — and particularly to Great Powers like Russia and China — that the era of collective security established at Varadarajan included in his piece this quote from President Franklin Roosevelt on March 1, 1945 on the meaning of Yalta as it was understood at the time: “The Crimea Conference was a successful effort by the three leading Nations to find a common ground for peace. It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries — and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organisation in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a choice to join.” [11] The universal organization Roosevelt referred to only 42 days before his death was the United Nations, which would come into existence formally on October 24, 1945. On the very day that Bush traduced Yalta and its legacy in Latvia, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin said on the same topic, “I am deeply convinced that the essence of the 1945 Yalta accords was as follows: The anti-Hitler coalition’s leaders strove to build a new international system that would prevent the revival of nazism, and that would shield the world from destructive global conflicts,” explicitly mentioning the United Nations Organization and its Charter. [12] Bush’s statement in Riga, “the significance of the venue” having been pointed out above, was calculatingly delivered in the capital of a country that has witnessed a disturbing revival of Nazi revisionism, apologetics, nostalgia and rehabilitation in recent years. Animosity toward the Yalta principles, including their most enduring institutional embodiment, the United Nations, means preferring in some manner what preceded the Yalta conference to what came after it. That either means the state of affairs in Europe before World War II or – that during the war years of 1939-1945. Von Sponeck’s Warning: Subverting The United Nations From Within This past February Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, wrote a probing indictment called The United Nations and NATO for a Swiss Journal. It it he warned that “The world of the 192 UN member states has come to a fork in the road. One way leads to a world focused on the well being of society, conflict resolution and peace, i.e. to a life of dignity and human security with social and economic progress for all, wherever they may be as stated in the United Nations Charter. Down the other road is where the nineteenth century ‘Great Game’ for power will be further played out, a course which, in the twenty-first century, will become more extensive and dangerously more aggressive than ever. “This road supposedly leads to democracy, but in truth it is all about power, control and exploitation.” [13] Contrasting explicitly what the above excerpt had done tacitly, he remarked of his former employer and its would-be replacement: “A comparison of the mandates of the United Nations and of NATO shows clearly how opposed the purposes of these two institutions are. In the 63 years of its existence, the United Nations mandate has remained the same. “The United Nations was created to promote and maintain worldwide peace. NATO exists to assure the self-interest of a group of 26 UN member countries.” [14] In a section of his article titled “21st century NATO incompatible with UN Charter,” von Sponeck added, “In 1999, NATO acknowledged that it was seeking to orient itself according to a new fundamental strategic concept. From a narrow military defense alliance it was to become a broad based alliance for the protection of the vital resources” needs of its members. Besides the defense of member states’ borders, it set itself new purposes such as assured access to energy sources and the right to intervene in ‘movements of large numbers of persons’ and in conflicts far from the boarders of NATO countries. The readiness of the new alliance to include other countries, particularly those that had previously been part of the Soviet Union, shows how the character of this military alliance has altered.” “[T]he United Nations monopoly of the use of force, especially as specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine. “NATO’s territorial scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by its member to encompass the whole world in keeping with a strategic context that was global in its sweep.” [15] In a following section named “UN-NATO-accord: incompatible with UN Charter,” he exposed a clandestine accord signed between the secretaries general of NATO and the United Nations, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Ban Ki-moon, respectively, on September 23, 2008, which “took place without any reference to the United Nations Security Council. “In the generally accepted agreement of stated purposes, one reads of a “The UN/NATO accord is anything but neutral and will thus not remain without serious consequences.” [16] Shortly after the unauthorized pact signed behind the backs of the UN Security Council, in addition to the General Assembly, by NATO chief Scheffer and Ban, who has proven to be as obsequious toward and obedient to the interests of the West as his predecessor had been, the Russian press reported: “Russia’s representative to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said that in the document there is not a single word on the UN’s leading role in ensuring stability in the world. “NATO and the United Nations have signed a new cooperation accord on prerogatives for UN member states – but have angered Russia by not telling them about it in advance.” [17] Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was similarly caught off guard and indignant alike, stating “”We knew that the UN and NATO secretariats were “The Russian minister said that he discussed the problem with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. ‘I did not hear any reasonable explanations. It surprised me,’ said Lavrov….’We asked the leadership of the two secretariats what it might mean. We’re awaiting answers.’” [18] Another Russian report added, “Russia has recently vented its displeasure over what it called the ‘furtive signature’ of a cooperation agreement between the secretariats of the United Nations and NATO, which took place late last month. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complained that this country, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, was not even consulted on the matter. “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said recently that Moscow and other UN members had not been consulted on the essence of the UN-NATO cooperation agreement, although, he said, the document contained clauses that concern the prerogatives of UN member states.” [19] A third source referred to Russian Foreign Minister spokesman Andrei Nesterenko who, in stressing that the surreptitious pact was “riding roughshod over Moscow’s interests,” affirmed that “a big question mark currently hangs over the professional skills of some UN officials, who try to involve the UN Secretary-General in covert activities.” [20] An Azerbaijani news source added, “If the agreement, signed in September, is only confirming the status quo, it can be surprising why the information about it was not published on the NATO website, which even has a special section called ‘NATO’s relations with the United Nations.’ This fact perpetuates Russia’s perception of NATO as a hostile bloc.” [21] In a news dispatch titled “UN and NATO team up behind Russia’s back,” Russian envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin – who was himself not informed of the backroom deal – said “NATO should fully acknowledge the UN’s universal role and not try to substitute UN functions.” [22] In the article discussed earlier, Hans von Sponeck asked “Is the United Nations accord with NATO – a military alliance with nuclear weapons – in contradiction with Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, which requires that conflicts be resolved by peaceful means? Can UN and NATO actions be distinguished when three of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are also NATO members? How can future violations of international law by NATO be legally prosecuted? Is an institution like NATO, which in 1999, without a UN mandate, unlawfully bombed Serbia and Kosovo, a suitable partner for the United Nations?” [23] And in a section entitled “UN mandate makes NATO obsolete,” he finished with “Any evaluation of the UN/NATO pact must take into account that NATO is a relic of the Cold War; that NATO, as a Western alliance, is regarded with considerable mistrust by the other 166 United Nations member states; that a primary NATO aim is to assert, by military means, its energy and power interests in opposition to other United Nations member states and that the United States, a founding member of the NATO community, in the most unscrupulous ways, has disparaged the United Nations and broken international law. “It is urgent that one or several member states petition the International Court of Justice to rule on the interpretation of the UN/NATO pact of 23 September 2008, in conformity with the Courts statutes. “The people of the world have a right to request such a ruling and a right to expect an answer.” [24] Think Tank Origins: NATO Undermining The UN From Inside And Out The current US permanent representative (ambassador) to NATO is Netherlands-born Ivo Daalder, who like so many others of his type cut his foreign policy teeth in the Balkans in the 1990s. In fact he was the director for European Affairs on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, where he was in charge of Bosnia policy. Although a Clinton appointee Daalder criticized his chief during the 1999 war against Yugoslavia, calling for a ground invasion of the country in addition to the devastating air war. The day after President Barack Obama announced the selection of Daalder for the NATO post, a news account from his homeland described him as a “liberal hawk” who was “a signatory to the January 2005 Project for a New American Century letter to Congress urging an increase in the number of troops in Iraq. The Project for a New American Century is a neoconservative think-tank linked to the American Enterprise Institute, where much of the foreign policy of the Bush administration originated. “He often wrote about the right (or duty) of the international community to use military and humanitarian action to intervene in countries that fail to meet their responsibilities.” [25] At the time of his nomination Daalder was a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The day after the Dutch feature appeared, the print edition of Russia Today “Barack Obama’s administration sees NATO as the nucleus for a global “Washington wants NATO to expand by inviting counties like Australia, Japan, Brazil and South Africa and become a global organization tackling not only security issues but also epidemics and human rights….The next US Ambassador to NATO Ivo H. Daalder is a great supporter of this idea. “Daalder, an expert at the Brookings Institution and a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama during the election campaign, is a strong proponent of the so-called Concert of Democracies. “The idea, coined by the think-tank Princeton Project on National Security, is that the United Nations is outdated….” [26] The source added that “Daalder believes that NATO is a prototype of the proposed concert, being an alliance of democracies with a long success record, and can be extended to the new global organization” and that “a source in the White House [says] that Vice President Joe Biden is among the supporters of the Concert of Democracies.” [27] As the American magazine Newsweek reported late last year under the headline Fighting Wars of Peace, “Vice President-elect Joe Biden called during the campaign for imposing a no-fly zone in Darfur and, a year earlier, advocated committing ‘U.S. troops on the ground’ if necessary. And Hillary Clinton, the incoming secretary of state, was a forceful advocate of the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during her husband’s administration. “[A]s Ivo Daalder, [a] prominent Obama adviser, and Robert Kagan have pointed out, between 1989 and 2001 America dispatched significant military force to foreign hot spots so often — once every 18 months — that intervention became something of a standard weapon of U.S. foreign policy, and one with bipartisan support.” [28] The genesis of the “war for peace” Concert of Democracies concept under NATO auspices and in opposition to the UN, at least as far as Daalder is concerned, may have been in a “guest” column in the Washington Post over five years ago called An Alliance of Democracies and co-authored by Daalder and James Lindsay, then vice president and director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. In the article Daalder and his colleague leave no doubt as to which institution global NATO stands in opposition to: “An immediate problem is that the United Nations lacks the capability to make a difference. Its blue-helmeted troops can help keep the peace when warring parties choose not to fight. But as we learned in the Balkans, they cannot make peace where none exists. And as we saw in the 12 years preceding the Iraq war, the United Nations cannot enforce its most important resolutions. The deeper problem is that these reform proposals do not go to the heart of what ails the organization: It treats its members as sovereign equals regardless of the character of their governments. “The idea of sovereign equality reflected a conscious decision governments made 60 years ago that they would be better off if they repudiated the right to meddle in the internal affairs of others. That choice no longer makes sense. “Today respect for state sovereignty should be conditional on how states behave at home, not just abroad. “We need an Alliance of Democratic States. This organization would unite nations with entrenched democratic traditions, such as the United States and Canada; the European Union countries; Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia; India and Israel; Botswana and Costa Rica.” [29] Analogous demands have been voiced over the past few years by former Spanish prime minister Jose Aznar, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and spokesman James Appathurai and US Republican Party candidates in last year’s presidential election Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain, alternately identified as an alliance, a concert or a league of democracies. In 2007 the now deceased US congressman Tom Lantos, at the time chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said that “NATO should seriously consider expanding into a global alliance including democratic countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Israel,” and posed the rhetorical query “Would it not make the (NATO) Supreme Allied Commander feel more comfortable about upcoming global crises if he would have a NATO of a global reach?” To which the commander identified, Gen. Bantz John Craddock, replied: “From a best military advice perspective, it would indeed The advocates of the ultimate “coalition of the willing” call for expanding NATO from its current 28 full members, 22 Partnership for Peace states in Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, seven Middle Eastern and North African nations in the Mediterranean Dialogue, six Persian Gulf countries covered under the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative and several individual Contact Countries – in total over a third of the nations in the world – into a comprehensive, worldwide political-economic-military bloc with members in six of the world’s seven continents and with its eye set on the remaining one, Antarctica. The nations targeted for the NATO-led Alliance of Democracies include Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and South Korea inter alia. From Design To Execution: Ivo Daalder Daalder would follow up on this initiative two and a half years later, this time in a forum generously provided him by the International Herald Tribune, sister publication of the New York Times, the other main pillar of the American “free press,” and co-written by the Council on Foreign Relations’ James Goldgeier. The piece in question, “For global security, expand the alliance,” states: “NATO must become larger and more global by admitting any democratic state that is willing and able to contribute to the fulfillment of the alliance’s new responsibilities. “Other democratic countries share NATO’s values and many common interests – including Australia, Brazil, Japan, India, New Zealand, South Africa and South Korea – and all of them can greatly contribute to NATO’s efforts by providing additional military forces or logistical support….” The contribution is urgent because “NATO militaries are stretched thin by the many new missions they are called on to perform in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the Sudan, Congo and other parts of Africa.” The column raised the stakes to a degree that is deeply unsettling, fraught as they are with the threat of nothing less than world war. “Collective defense, enshrined in Article 5’s dictum that an attack on one member is an attack on all, must remain at the core of an expanded alliance as it has in the past. For the United States, such commitments “[A]ll NATO members contributed to the grand coalition that reversed Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which is not even a democracy. If Australia or Japan were attacked, would the European democracies simply shrug their shoulders?” [31] Far more is involved than the deployment of troops, warships and warplanes to all parts of the globe on the arbitrary decision of the major NATO partners, as unparalleled a danger to the world as that is. In speaking of Washington’s ongoing global missile shield program – one that could neutralize the potential for nations, Russia and China come immediately to mind, to maintain a deterrent or retaliation capacity and thus serve as an invitation for a first strike – in March of 2007 US Assistant Secretary of State John Rood asserted that planned interceptor missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic “would be integrated with existing radar sites in the United Kingdom and Greenland as well as missile defense interceptors in California and Alaska,” adding that at the time some fourteen nations were already involved in the plans, including “Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Israel, India, Japan, the Netherlands and Ukraine. Taiwan is also participating…. “[There] is a cooperative understanding among the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Israel, Italy and Denmark to conduct government-to-government and industry-to-industry missile defense cooperation.” [32] The correlation between the non-NATO nations mentioned as members of a concert or alliance of democracies under NATO leadership and those being integrated into the global interceptor missile system is striking. While still US State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs and before being appointed Ivo Daalder’s predecessor as ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker said: “[A]s NATO is active in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or Darfur, we are working together with countries that share NATO’s values and that are capable of contributing to security, such as Australia or New Zealand or South Korea or Japan, and we would like to find ways to cooperate with these countries…. “Some countries which, from a geographic standpoint, see themselves as front line states, have a high interest in theater missile defense, and other countries say it’s something we ought to do….For the U.S. there is no such thing as theater missile defense because we look at missile defense in a global scale….” [33] The complement to the above, popularly referred to as Star Wars or Son of Star Wars, is an even more dangerous threat: Space war. Last November Russia, as it has routinely done for years at UN General Assembly meetings, urged “UN member-states to join the moratorium on the deployment of weapons in outer space.” The nation’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, pointed out that “it is on Russia’s initiative that the UN General Assembly has been adopting resolutions, for many years now, aimed at the prevention of an arms race in space. “The only one who objected to the adoption of this resolution was the United States – this was earlier this year.” [34] Another report revealed that “Washington does plan to deploy its ABM system “In the United Nations 166 countries have voted for the Russia-proposed resolution on measures to ensure transparency and build up confidence in space activities.” [35] As with questions of war and peace, the United Nations is used by the US and its allies solely to punish weaker nations and if the UN would ever begin to function as it was designed to – including attempting to prevent the militarization of space – it will be bypassed and rendered powerless by a NATO-led “Alliance of Democratic States.” As recently as a few days ago Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, on the sidelines of the foreign ministers meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Damascus, Syria, “express[ed] his country’s worries over giving NATO an international mission where it will be able to interfere anywhere in the world without permission from the Security Council, affirming that this is very negative and can undermine the basis of international law and the UN Charter.” [36] NATO No Alternative To United Nations Conceived during the waning days of the world’s most destructive and deadly war and born two months after the only use to date of nuclear weapons, the United Nation’s still bears its birth marks. 74 years later the five chief victors of World War II remain the only permanent members of the Security Council and alone have veto power. Three of them are founding members of NATO and all five are nuclear powers, hardly representative of the world community. Not a single nation in Africa, South (indeed all of Latin) America and Oceania have such status. Also, the 192-member General Assembly has largely been shunted aside in favor of the five permanent and ten rotating members of the Security Council, not to mention events of major world importance being conducted by the secretary general and other officials behind the backs of even permanent members of the Security Council as with last September’s agreement with NATO. The General Assembly represents humanity not only on a day-to-day basis but in a more substantive and legitimate manner than ten of its 192 members on the Security Council at any given time. It must play a larger role in all deliberations. A revived, robust, empowered and democratized UN must shift focus from a disproportionate emphasis on negotiating trade, treaty and other agreements in service to world commerce and in ceding vast tracts of the earth to interested parties under suspicious circumstances, as with the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon and 2.2 million square kilometers of the resource-rich Antarctic Ocean to Australia recently, to what needs to be its main objective: Exerting all efforts to eliminate forever the scourge of war. The record of the past thirteen years under the stewardship of Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon has been abysmal. Three major wars have been conducted by the United States and its NATO allies, the first against a founding member of the UN, Yugoslavia, while the organization made no meaningful efforts to prevent or halt them once started and has even legitimized them after the fact with assorted resolutions. Even UN resolutions following unauthorized wars are trampled on, as with the recognition by most NATO members of the illegal secession of Kosovo from Serbia last February, flagrantly contradicting UN Resolution 1244 which commits the UN to “Reaffirming the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act….” However, even with its manifold problems, the United Nations was intended to prevent the replication of the horrors of World War II which ended only two months before its creation. The world would hardly gain by having it further weakened, sidelined and in effect reduced to a hollow shell by an expanding military bloc that has already waged wars on two continents and set its sights on penetrating and dominating the entire world. |
