September 16, 2005
Born out of necessity and in the shadow of death and destruction on a scale never before witnessed by humanity, the United Nations officially came into existence on October 24, 1945, on the basis of a Charter adopted by the representatives of 50 countries who met in San Francisco, USA, at the United Nations Conference on International Organization, for the specific purpose of drawing up the United Nations Charter. The death and destruction that preceded its establishment was the result of the Second World War (1939-45) in which fifty million people were killed. The War had engulfed several continents; it had devastated millions of homes in thousands of cities in Europe, the Soviet Union, North Africa, China, South East Asia, and the Pacific. It began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, but it was the direct result of the conflict of interest between Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union, all of whom were vying for a greater share of world resources and markets.
The War ended in Europe with the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945 (V-E and Victory Days), and in Asia on 15 August 1945 (V-J Day) with the surrender of Japan, after two of its cities had been nuked by the United States. During these years of War preceding the establishment of the United Nations, humanity saw, for the first time, the use of atomic weapons, jet aircrafts bombarding cities and killing civilians in the hundreds, rockets and radars, the massive use of tanks, submarines, torpedo bombers, and destroyer/tanker formations. For the first time in human history, twenty million civilians, not participating in the fighting, were bombed out of existence. The War also left millions of disabled and paralyzed men, women, and children in many countries and, most importantly, it merely ended an older unjust order to establish another unjust world order. Soon after the Japanese surrender, the victors embarked upon splitting the booty. They divided old countries, created new dominions, established their respective spheres of interests, and re-organized the entire international framework of state relations and the nature of economic transactions.
The new world order that emerged in the post–World War II era was thus marked by a rapid change of hands as the victors drew new boundaries on old earth and divided among themselves the “poor” and “underdeveloped” nations of the world and their resources. They needed an instrument of legalization for this new world order, so they established the United Nations. Its very conception was based on inequality and injustice: certain countries had more rights and powers than others, and the Charter which the delegates signed was drafted to incorporate this inequality into the founding documents through the establishment of a docile, ceremonious, and powerless General Assembly, and a powerful but unrepresentative Security Council which had five and only five “permanent members” with veto powers.
The nature of this inequality was soon to become apparent when the First General Assembly met in Central Hall, Westminster, London, on January 10, 1946, and adopted its first resolution. The main focus of this resolution was neither the liberation of countries like India, where hundreds of people were being killed through communal riots in the wake of a struggle to drive out the overweening English occupiers, nor the situation in Palestine where thousands of people were losing their homes and land to the newly arriving Jews who were planning to establish a new Jewish state by evicting the local Arabs; the resolution was about “peaceful uses of atomic energy and the elimination of atomic and other weapons of mass destruction”.
It was obvious to all who signed the Charter of the United Nations in San Francisco on October 24, 1945, that the world had changed after the second World War. It was not recognized by many at that time that soon a new world order was to be enforced through raw military power, and very few people realized that this new world order would be legalized by the United Nations over the next six decades. This was so because each new aggression, each new partition of old land, each new “sphere of interest” brought its own mechanism of legalization with it. The first of these was through the nefarious deeds of Ralph Bunche, the UN envoy who forced Arabs to accept a ceasefire on January 7, 1949, thus “legalizing” the Israeli occupation of their land. This was followed by numerous other “legalizations” of results achieved through raw and brute power.
Ultimately, the United States was to emerge as the most important “controller” of the UN. Looking back, it does not seem surprising that this happened, because the very first blueprint of the UN was prepared by Americans who foresaw the role of their country as world colonizer. Thus those who met at a mansion known as Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., between September 21 and October 7, 1944, merely formalized this vision. Of course, nothing was written in black and white to this effect, as those who saw the emergence of the United States as a substitute colonizer (that is, substitute for the British and French) knew that only broad mechanisms needed to be established and not the specifics which could then be dealt with as they emerged.
The demise of the Soviet Union has further enhanced US control over the United Nations and together with its junior partner, the UK, the United States is now well poised to impose its own brute and unjust world order on disempowered people who are “represented” in the UN by self-appointed kings, charlatans who grabbed power through midnight coups, and plain, old fashioned Rajas of the colonial vintage who are made prime ministers and presidents by occupying armies. This mixed congregation of men and women who control the natural resources of the people of the world, is, once again, meeting in New York. What will they do this time around different from what the UN has always been doing? What is the real agenda for the UN at sixty? What kind of future exists for a “world” body that has never represented anyone but sheer brute power? Is there any future for the UN other than the continuation of being an instrument of legalization of results achieved by military power?
(To be continued)
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