Cameron Duodu:LETTER FROM THE NORTH
The Kosovo crisis continues to cause great human suffering. But apart from the human casualties caused by Nato’s saturation bombing of Yugoslavia, there is another seriously injured party. Its name is the United Nations.
The countries which are bombing Yugoslavia were almost all involved in drawing up the UN Charter after World War II. Their objective was to try to secure peace in the world by making it necessary for all the powerful states to agree before military force could be used against any country.
So they created the Security Council, and invested it with power as the only body in the world that could authorise the use of force. And they protected the Security Council’s power with an instrument called the veto.
The veto hasn’t been the most wonderful gift humankind ever had, but it has helped the UN to fashion an imperfect peace for an imperfect world.
One could label this sort of peace as a pax incognita. This wouldn’t have been unkind, for there has been so much fighting in a world supposed to be at peace that in many areas the so-called peace is completely unrecognisable.
The end of the Cold War, followed by the financial impoverishment of Russia, has now emboldened the victors in the Cold War – the Nato powers – to seek to replace the UN’s pax incognita with their own version: pax Natoriana.
Nato took military action against Yugoslavia/ Serbia without the consent of the Security Council. And by ignoring the Security Council, Nato has rendered the staff of the UN – the world’s appointed peacekeepers – almost irrelevant. UN staff are caught in a web of irritated feebleness. They realise they are in danger of condoning the illegality committed by Nato.
And yet because they know the UN cannot exist without the financial support of the Nato powers, they cannot expose Nato for the bully it is becoming.
I was at UN headquarters this week trying to see how the organisation’s top brass are coping with their new situation. It doesn’t make a pretty picture.
For the stark reality is that at the same time as Nato has sidelined the UN, the organisation has also tossed on to the lap of the UN’s humanitarian agencies the consequences of Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia.
The bombing has resulted in such a mass displacement of people – the very Kosovars Nato was supposed to be saving from Slobodan Milosevic – as brings to mind some of the most grim humanitarian disasters the world has seen in recent years – the Indo- Pakistan refugee crisis following partition, the Palestinian crisis, and most recently, the Rwanda/ Congo calamity.
And the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has, as usual, had to jump in and try to save the hundreds of thousands of people – about half of whom are children – rendered homeless overnight.
Nato’s inability to anticipate the expulsions that were bound to follow the bombing, and to plan ahead for the care of the victims, has exposed the organisation as a clueless military machine that shoots from the hip.
Indeed, Nato must thank the UNHCR and the NGOs that work with it for saving Nato from a public relations disaster of gigantic proportions. This was caused by Nato’s inability to use its much-vaunted intelligence-gathering capability to forecast and plan against the expulsion of the Kosovars.
Nato’s incompetence has put the UNHCR in the ironical position of having to go cap in hand to Nato to appeal for the tents, medicine and food with which Nato should have planned to receive the refugees as soon as the organisation contemplated bombing Yugoslavia.
You see, the UNHCR does not apportion blame. It does not score points. It just sees a disaster and seeks immediately to make life a little easier for the people suffering from the consequences of political idiocy or inhuman wickedness. And it is doing just this in Macedonia and Albania.
At UN headquarters there is bemusement, not only at the slowness of Nato to react to assist the victims of Milosevic, but also at the difference among Nato countries themselves in reacting. One hears of the speed and efficiency with which Italy was able to help establish a camp for 20 000 people in less than a week; of how Germany has taken in 20 000 refugees; while Britain had, at the same time, taken all of 167.
On May 3 I took part in a panel discussion at the UN to mark World Press Freedom Day. Also on the panel was Anthony Lewis, the The New York Times’s columnist whose writing exudes so much humane concern for the weak peoples of this world that one sometimes wonders whether he lives in the same United States as the millions of Americans to whom the outside world hardly exists.
Lewis remarked that the one weapon the media can use to try and help the victims of injustice and oppression is to “shame the governments” that perpetrate such evil deeds.
It would be salutary if the UN personnel who are bearing the brunt of Nato’s incompetence and callousness could shame the governments of the Nato countries into doubling or even quadrupling the assistance they are giving to the Kosovo refugees, and embracing a negotiated solution to the Kosovo crisis immediately, on the back of the Jesse Jackson triumph.
But UN personnel are the world’s civil servants, and all they can do if one asks them questions is to return an embarrassed silence in the form of, “I can’t comment on that.”