“We are not terrorists, our innocent people have been the targets of cowardly attacks and aggression imposed upon our country,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian asserted on September 23 at the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, referring to the war unleashed on the Persian Gulf country by the US and Israel together on February 28 this year. During his historic address at UNGA, he tried to falsify before the world community US President Donald Trump’s declarations a day earlier when the latter threatened to ‘annihilate’ Iran if there was no diplomatic deal to end the war.
Declaring that Iran did not ‘bend the knee’ when it was attacked unjustifiably, and will defend itself ‘until our last breath’ if the aggression against it continued, Pezeshkian stated that even then his country remained open to dialogue and diplomacy if there was no use of the ‘language of force’.
All this, however, is not as significant as the fact that the Iranian President made his assertion without fear in the US mainland while being at war with America. This happened for the first time in the 81-year UN history, which could be possible only because the world has an organisation of nations which provides not only diplomatic immunity to its member-countries’ representatives but also the freedom to express their thoughts without fear or favour. The diplomatic protection is available under Section 12 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. There is a clear declaration that representatives of the UN members have been granted ‘immunity from legal process in respect of words spoken or written and all acts done by them in discharging their duties’.
In the past, there have been cases of leaders like Cuba’s Fidel Castro in 1960 strongly criticising what he called Western (read the US) imperialism, Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi in 2009 calling UN Security Council permanent members ‘bullies’ and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in 2006 describing George W. Bush as ‘a devil’. But the case of the Iranian President attacking the US at the UN headquarters in New York City falls in a different category in the sense that the Head of State of no country officially at war with the US has ever been to America in the midst of ongoing hostilities. This underlines the necessity to ensure that the UN system remains alive and effective as far as possible in the interest of security, peace and stability in the world.
One cannot deny that the UN has played an admirable peacekeeping role on many occasions in the past and has been providing humanitarian aid to people in distress. Of course, by and large, it has also been functioning as the world’s discussion club, but this too has its significance. It is true that in the recent past, it has miserably failed to prevent wars or human rights violations in different parts of the world – Gaza, Iran and Ukraine being the latest examples. The past record of the UN, particularly Security Council, has not been satisfying at all. The Security Council could do little beyond stating that the use of military might should be avoided owing to various reasons when the US and its NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) allies used their armed forces in March 2003 to eliminate what they described as a serious threat to world peace from the unverified existence of the nuclear bomb or the capacity to produce it in a matter of days by Iraq at that time. US-led NATO troops resorted to carpet bombing, etc. in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Towers and Washington DC’s Pentagon complex despite meaningful suggestions by experts that Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, believed to be the chief architect of those dreaded incidents and hiding in Afghanistan, could be caught alive and brought to book through other means.
The UN Security Council has been a silent spectator to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war that began over four years ago, on February 24, 2022. Palestinian civilians in Gaza were massacred when the Hamas resistance fighters penetrated the Israeli defence shield called the Iron Dome on October 7, 2023. The Security Council did nothing to prevent the Israeli attacks on civilians in Gaza, leading to the death of as many as 75,225 Palestinians for no fault of these innocent souls. According to one estimate, at least 10 per cent of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip was done to death by Israel’s defence forces in retaliation for what Hamas did in October 2023. Of course, the UN’s system of providing aid to the Gazans continued to the extent possible, but the primary task of saving innocent Palestinians’ lives was virtually abandoned by the Security Council.
Yet the UN system that came into being with the signing of the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, after World War-II must remain intact with a view to maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights and fostering cooperation among nation-states – its primary objectives. The Council’s failures cannot nullify its significance.
In fact, there is a pressing need for reformation of the UN system in view of the current global realities. This was underlined by the outgoing UN chief, Antonio Guterres, himself during his media interactions and on other occasions on the sidelines of the just concluded BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, its founding members) summit in New Delhi. Speaking about the Security Council, he admitted that the Council ‘does not correspond any more to the world of today’. It is faced with the problems of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘effectiveness’ which must be handled in the interest of global order.
Experts have been of the view that the Security Council must launch an exercise for its expansion to reflect the prevailing global reality. There is no meaningful justification for the Council having only five permanent members with veto power – the US, the UK, France, Russia and China. The countries that have been frequently getting mentioned in any such discussion for their inclusion in the Council as equal permanent members are India, Japan, Germany, Brazil and two representatives of Africa. There is strong opposition, too, from countries like Pakistan (against India), Italy (against Germany), and Argentina and Mexico (against Brazil). Türkiye and South Korea too have been mentioned as opponents of the Security Council expansion idea.
The opponents have been arguing that if, at all, the Council gets more members, the new ones should not have the veto power to ensure that the system does not get diluted.
There is another aspect which requires to be focused in the course of any debate on the UN system. The world body has been faced with a major financial crunch for a long time. Among the countries which need to clear their dues are the US, China, Russia and Venezuela. The UN cannot function properly and effectively if it continues to suffer from the financial liquidity problem.
[The writer, former Deputy Editor of The Tribune, is a New Delhi-based political commentator. Email: syed.nooruzzaman@gmail.com]