Part Twenty-Five
(This is a translation from the original Arabic, offered so that my grandchildren, and others of their generation, may understand something of their history— a history they were denied when they were uprooted without choice.)
Where To? What Have We to Do with the United Nations? — I
For thirty years I have been asking a single question: Why are Arabs members of the United Nations and its affiliated institutions? I have written about this repeatedly and raised it in countless conversations with friends and acquaintances. I cannot conceal my astonishment at the responses I have received; at best, they have been expressions of puzzled surprise.
The present international climate may be particularly suited to raising this question in this instalment of We Arabs: Who Are We, and Where Are We Going? The Ukraine crisis has driven the Russians— for the first time since the Korean War— to question the credibility and usefulness of the United Nations itself. If a great power such as Russia, endowed with veto power in the Security Council, is now questioning the legitimacy of the UN, is it surprising that an Arab such as myself—who has known nothing from the organization but humiliation and aggression—should ask the same?
Let us pause, then, to examine the United Nations: how it came into being, what it has done, what it truly represents—and why we are part of it.
When Europeans grew weary of slaughtering one another in the devastating Second World War, they found it necessary to establish rules for a new international order. It is hardly surprising that any contracting party seeks to draft an agreement in its own favour. Thus, when the time came to formulate a charter governing international relations, the Europeans inevitably pursued a document that would preserve their dominance over the world through the new organization.
It must be recalled that the Charter of the United Nations is a contract between contracting parties. It is not a document issued by a superior authority. Consequently, the Charter derives its legitimacy solely from its provisions; no party to the United Nations possesses rights beyond those expressly conferred by the Charter itself.
Although fifty-one states participated in the discussions and ultimately signed the Charter—most of the world, including much of Africa, still being under colonial rule—the reality is that the states that played the decisive role in drafting and advancing the Charter were the European powers victorious over Nazism. Yet Europe and the Soviet Union emerged from the war exhausted and devastated, whereas the United States was comparatively unscathed. This imbalance gave the United States considerable freedom to shape the Charter, marking the beginning of American capitalist hegemony not only over Europe but over the world at large.
Despite the Cold War, which created a semblance of balance, the United States behaved toward the rest of the world as though it were its own backyard. The evidence is so abundant that it scarcely requires enumeration; anyone born after the Second World War lived through it and needs no reminder.
Thus, the Charter was drafted and signed on 26 June 1945 by fifty-one states. All states that gained independence thereafter joined the United Nations, as did those that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union, bringing UN membership today close to two hundred. Since none of these later states participated in drafting or negotiating the Charter, the document stands as a quintessential example of what may rightly be called a contract of adhesion. Since its adoption, only two minor amendments—leaving its essence untouched—have been made. The Charter in force today is, in substance, exactly what Europeans wrote in 1945.
I will not catalogue all the Charter’s authoritarian provisions, but a few salient examples suffice to reveal its fundamental uselessness for smaller states.
The Security Council
Many assume that the General Assembly, which includes all member states, wields genuine authority in enforcing the Charter, resolving disputes, or safeguarding peace and security. In reality, the General Assembly is little more than a forum for speeches. Real power was deliberately vested by the Europeans in the Security Council.
The Security Council consists of five permanent members and ten non-permanent members elected for two-year terms to provide nominal continental representation. At first glance, this arrangement may appear innocuous. A closer examination, however, reveals much. Four of the five permanent members who control the Council are European. While this may have reflected the balance of power in 1945, it bears no resemblance to today’s world. Africa has no permanent representative; South America has none. Nor is there any meaningful religious or civilizational representation—no Buddhist, Hindu, or Islamic voice, for example.
Even this is not the gravest flaw. Article 24 of the Charter transfers the entirety of the United Nations’ authority to the Security Council. Since the Council is dominated by the five permanent members—each wielding veto power that nullifies all other votes—UN members have effectively consented to submit to the will of the great powers without any right of objection or amendment. This explains why not a single Security Council resolution has ever been issued against any of the five permanent members, despite their numerous transgressions, while resolutions have routinely targeted other states—particularly those disfavoured by the United States.
Nor does the abuse end there. The Security Council has repeatedly manipulated the Charter itself without consequence. Consider the following examples:
- Although Article 27 stipulates that decisions require nine affirmative votes, including those of all five permanent members, the Council has habitually treated abstention—particularly by a permanent member—as consent. No legal system in the world recognizes abstention as approval. This manipulation was exploited when China abstained from the vote imposing a genocidal blockade on Iraq; the abstention was counted as approval, enabling the sanctions, while China later claimed non-complicity by citing its abstention.
- Article 27 also prohibits any party to a dispute under consideration from voting on that matter. Yet permanent members routinely vote even when they are themselves parties to the conflict.
- Article 32 permits any UN member that is party to a dispute before the Security Council to participate in discussions. Nevertheless, Iraq was barred from participating in deliberations concerning its own fate during the sanctions period from 1990 to 2003, without any means of appeal—while Ukraine was invited to participate in discussions regarding its war with Russia.
- Article 47 mandates the creation of a Military Staff Committee composed of the five permanent members to advise the Security Council and oversee actions related to peace and security. This committee has never been formed.
- The failure to establish the Military Staff Committee rendered Articles 43 and 45—governing Security Council–authorized military action—effectively meaningless. As a result, what was intended to be collective security under UN supervision degenerated into unilateral or coalition warfare by major powers, masked as peacekeeping, as witnessed in Iraq, Serbia, and Libya.
These examples illustrate the Charter’s structural corruption and the systematic abuse of its provisions. Arabs, for reasons beyond the scope of this essay—though I have written about some and will address others in future—have suffered disproportionately from this system.
This raises the unavoidable question: What benefit do we derive from membership in an organization that delivers only punishment, harm, and injury? When a friend once asked me how we could exist outside the United Nations, I replied that the proper question is not how, but rather: What would have happened had we never been members of the United Nations at all?
That is what I shall attempt to explore next.
To be continued…