Geopolitical Myths by Adnan Khan

It was the horror of the atrocities and genocide during World War 2 that led to a ready consensus that a new organisation must work to prevent any similar tragedies in the future. The United Nations was founded in 1945 primarily to achieve the lofty aim of having to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’ Since then there have been more than 250 conflicts worldwide. It is blatantly clear that the UN has been unsuccessful for the purpose it was created for.

The West as well as many policymakers from the third world consider the UN a non-biased, internationally represented institution boasting nearly 200 member states, who uphold the beacon for the values of internationalism, multilateral action, democracy, pluralism, secularism, compromise, human rights and freedom. This could not be further from the truth.

The UN in reality is a tool of exploitation where it is manifestly apparent from the inherent structure of the organisation that it legitimises wholesale abuse by the colonialist and permanent members of the Security Council.

In 1994 the UN failed to prevent genocide in Rwanda, which resulted in the killing of nearly a million people, due to the refusal of Security Council members to approve any military action. The French (a permanent member of the Security Council) supported the Hutu regime against the Tutsi rebels, in this ethnic civil war that dates back to the colonial era. In the midst of the crisis, UN peace keeping troops were instructed to focus on only evacuating foreign nationals from Rwanda, rather then protecting the Tutsis. This change led Belgian peacekeepers to abandon a technical school filled with 2,000 refugees, while Hutu militants waited outside. After the Belgians left, the militants entered the school and massacred those inside, including hundreds of children. Just four days later, the Security Council voted to reduce its force to only 260 men.

A similar scenario occurred just a year later in what has come to be known as the Srebrenica genocide. Although both Britain and the US wanted the break-up of the region, the US wanted NATO to be the de-facto security force. The UN designated Srebrenica a ‘safe haven’ for refugees assigning 600 Dutch peacekeepers to protect it, who handed over the camp to Serb forces, who then massacred them.

The United Nations again failed to intervene during the second Congo war in the Democratic republic of Congo. A UN peacekeeping force was established in February 2000, by Resolution 1291 of the United Nations Security Council in order to monitor the peace process. However, failure by the peace keeping force to intervene during the civil war claimed the lives of nearly five million people.

The United Nations created the problem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and has continued in its failure to implement provisions of United Nations Security Council Resolutions by selectively applying international law. The United Nations was exposed as being ineffective and run by imperialists when it was essentially thrown aside in the run up to the second Iraq war. The US didn’t hide this fact. John Bolton, acting US Ambassador to the UN, made several statements critical of the UN saying in 2004, ‘There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States.

In reality the UN is an international organisation that the five permanent Security Council members (US, Russia, Britain, France and China) have used as an extension of their own foreign policies.

The problem actually lies in the concept of international law, which in reality does not exist. There can only really be international norms and customs not international law. For international law to exist enforcement must be possible at a global, supranational level. As this does not exist we must expect nation-states to flout the regulations of the international agencies when it suits them – neorealism (cf. Waltz. K. 1979. ‘A Theory of International Politics’).