I have spent years promoting the United Nations through NGOs. I was even a chief organizer of a top UN-supported youth conference with official representation from the UN Secretary General. And like many of my staff and those throughout my native country, Canada, we considered for the world the UN as being essential to peace and fairness. Was this due to naivete?
After all, the concept of multilateralism is what the UN is supposed to represent and what attracted me to it. And what much of the world wants today with some notable hegemon exceptions? That is the idea of a global democracy of nations but with Security Council guardrails. That was in theory.
However, over the last three or more decades, the UN has been steadily hijacked by Washington and its friends using a combination of fear and money.
India, unfortunately, at times has been a victim of such and the UN Secretariat leaning, if not lurching evermore to the US-led NATO and away from the South. The evidence is large. First, there is the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres. He was a Prime Minister of a NATO country, Portugal, as well an EU member country. Given the geopolitical divisions in the world today, appointments to the head of the number one international organization should be from more neutral countries like India, Brazil, South Africa or even better Barbados whose prime minister seems to be in the lead to replace the current UN head. India also has a possible candidate in Shashi Tharoor who spent decades working at the UN, including senior levels. Both candidates should be considered to offset the growing creep of the US and the NATO military alliance.
While Guterres has the legitimate right to criticize Moscow’s interventions into Ukraine, he seems nearly silent on another principle. This relates to a charter signed in Istanbul in 1999 by members of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which includes the United States. It says: «…countries should be free to choose their own security arrangements and alliances”, but goes on to say that they «will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other states.» «Could he be too worried about offending Washington and the associated, powerful western global media empire that could mobilize US public opinion seriously against the UN? It has been done before by the previous US Reagan administration pulling the US out of UNESCO that was promoting the idea that the South, including countries like India getting more voice in worldwide media. Withholding payments to the UN has not been uncommon, including cutting allocations due to pressures by the US Congress and UK parliament. Or threatening to leave various UN organs.
According to data from the UN organization, more than 60% of the UN›s budget comes from the US and its allies (US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Canada, South Korea totalled only). Russia contributes but 3% and India less so. That means in political matters in particular, countries that do not contribute so much are not so listened to within the political levels of the UN?
A further good example is that though India has almost one and a half billion people, it still only has a remote chance to be added anytime soon to the UN Security Council with a permanent seat. And according to the Secretary General, he has no say in the negotiations on UN reform of that top security grouping. Really? In fact, despite stellar efforts by India›s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar to move the discussion forward on India getting a permanent seat on the Security Council, the UN head does not seem inclined that much to push this snail-like process forward.
Regarding the Security Council›s independence, is the case of Russia asking the Council to investigate the blowing up of the Nordstream I and II pipelines. The Assistant Secretary General of UN political and security affairs has expressed to Moscow›s UN representative that the UN would prefer to wait for the findings from Denmark, and Germany (NATO members), as well as Sweden (future NATO member?) than for the UN to conduct its own independent investigation. For India that gets Russian energy, it has no small stake in knowing officially and honestly who has really done this damage and how to prevent it and other victims suffering the same. Interestingly, that UN official is a former US State department official. This means that one of the very top officials dealing with matters on security is from the US—a country that has been until more recent times a constant critic of the UN as being anti-American. Hence, Washington for decades given this perception, pushed harder to use its funding leverage to assert its political positions. Where does such an approach leave developing countries, like India on getting its agenda on state-sponsored terrorism to UN reform and beyond?
India, along with other BRICS countries, have been pressing for a true multilateral order than a unilateral one. That is not the unilateral one be it nuanced through the UN or even the OSCE, or more blatantly and bluntly by US State Department and NATO officials. Then, there were even posters allowed to be put up in front of the UN in Geneva making India to look like some social medieval society—a total distortion. (covered in a 28 March commentary in The Guardian Daily) Would the UN have permitted exaggerated propaganda on US inner cities put there, say for example?
All evidence indicates that the UN on political and security affairs is not the guarantor of the need for enough balance and reform of the current broken world order. And far from providing sufficient justice to meet the needs of countries like India and likely neither Ukraine nor Russia for that matter. India needs to express this forcefully, but to play possibly the same game as Washington and London have? That is the “political nuclear option”. That means to threaten to pull out of the UN, though say within 10 years if the UN cannot reform itself to be more inclusive of India in particular and the developing world generally, including marginalized Africa. In return for its UNSC permanent seat, it should raise funds from it private sector to provide more funding heft to the institution to put more “skin in the game” by New Delhi as our American friends might say. It might also provide more soldiers to UN peacekeeping operations where needed. And as an alternative in the meantime, it should help to expand BRICS as an alternative to the US overly distorted rules based order.
India is a super power in the making. Its greater respect by the western community needs to be demonstrated tangibly. Making the UN much more relevant to it and the rising South by NATO countries would be a positive signal than talking to death reform for another generation to keep the likes of India down.
Peter Dash was a volunteer for years promoting the UN.
