No meaningful multilateral or global force – even the ones with considerable geopolitical clout – is prioritising the world’s greater good and peace over self-serving, gruesome and ghastly gains of the formidable few. As if one year of incessant pounding of Gaza, where every conceivable war crime is being committed with insolent impunity since last 7 October, was not enough, the conflict is seeping deeper into the region with Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran, already a part of the conflagration.
The OIC and the Arab League, the so-called torch-bearers of Islamic fraternity and Arab solidarity, have been overtly unsuccessful in deterring Israel’s genocidal siege on Gaza that has now mutated into vicious assaults on Lebanon and Iran, not to mention that these emblems of Muslim harmony never tried hard enough to curtail the conflict in the first place.
With the powerful and the wealthy nations’ hegemony dominating the affairs of the world, one may ask why the Arab sheikhdoms, also loaded with oil opulence and considerable geopolitical clout, couldn’t command or, at least, attempt to employ influence to stop Israel from perpetrating its atrocious war on Gaza. A battered and rattled Gaza looks on as the OIC and the Arab League have done little beyond issuing meek and meaningless appeals to curtail the ongoing military offensive in Gaza.
Also repeatedly missing its mandate, is the United Nations, which was primarily created post-World War 2 with the aim of preventing future wars, conflicts and forced occupations. The global body seems to have been reduced to a manipulative mechanism in the hands of the world’s wealthiest; a platform that is only used to relay empty talk and hollow words, while paying lip service to global conflicts that, in fact, require quick and concrete solutions and advances.
Between 2014 and 2024, one or more of the five permanent UNSC member states vetoed 30 UNSC resolutions on protracted crises, including resolutions on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel
As the world’s worst fears envisage possibilities of what might develop into another mega conflict or even a third world war, a September 2024 OXFAM report, “Vetoing Humanity: How a few powerful nations hijacked global peace and why reform is needed at the UN Security Council,” has sent out strongly-worded, succinct warnings to the world’s richest nations.
Ahead of the recently held ‘Summit of the Future’ in New York, Oxfam urged the UN member states to use this ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to take decisive and bold action to rebuild a more equal, inclusive and responsive system, which truly captures the UN Charter’s ambitions and “puts global peace above politics.
Oxfam, an international confederation of 21 organisations that attempts to tackle inequalities, poverty and injustice around the world, reveals in the report how a handful of powerful nations that represent only “25 percent of the world population” have manipulated global peace and security to meet their geopolitical and economic interests.
Between 2014 and 2024, one or more of the five permanent UNSC member states vetoed 30 UNSC resolutions on protracted crises, including resolutions on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, Ukraine, Syria and Yemen, the report says.
The pact of the UNSC to maintain international peace and security is broken time and again, as the P5 deliberately “cherry-pick which conflicts to address in the Council. Dozens of conflicts have raged, some for decades, with no sign of abating, leaving an unprecedented trail of human suffering,” laments the report.
“Over the last decade alone, conflict has killed 1.1 million people in 23 crises. Millions have been forced out of their homes, and conflict has been the primary driver of hunger, pushing 135 million conflict-affected people into severe hunger. During the same period, the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance has risen nearly four times, driving funding needs to nearly triple, from US$20.3bn to a staggering US$56.1bn, to address this escalation in human suffering.”
In an alarming revelation, the report adds that over the last decade, more than 95% of the resolutions that the UNSC passed relate to just half of the protracted crises, leaving the other half mostly neglected. “The P5 (US, UK, France, China, Russia) are not homogenous: some of these influential countries have expressed openness to reform where others have and continue to use the veto in violation of the Charter’s own provisions. […] The gridlock within the UNSC has left unattended the 23 global crises, namely those in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, OPT, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and Yemen.”
Oxfam’s Vetoing Humanity report also illustrates how the current UNSC system is no longer fit for the purpose that it was initially constituted to serve. A handful of powerful nations have manipulated UNSC to their own gains, resulting in a global humanitarian catastrophe that is now “outpacing its ability to respond.”
Through three case studies, in Gaza, Syria and Ukraine, the report shows how P5 have not only failed to resolve these crises by abusing their veto and pen holding powers, but have undermined and sidelined the very goal of global peace, security and prosperity.
The imbalance between military aid and humanitarian aid is also glaring, as pointed out in the report. The startling facts say that in the year 2021 alone, P5 arms exports totalled more than US$ 90bn, enough to cover that year’s entire humanitarian funding gap of US$ 17.63bn more than five times over. “The P5 provide far more military aid than humanitarian assistance to countries in need. In 2019, USA provided US$ 18.8bn in security assistance but just US$ 6bn in humanitarian aid, despite being the largest aid donor.” Military aid fits into the P5 mandate of security but it is argued that this is more about profits than security, as the P5 overwhelmingly dominates the world’s legal arms trade, together accounting for 73.5% of global arms sales.
The urgent need of the hour is de-escalation in the Middle East but with the US and the West cheering Israel on, it is difficult to expect deterrence or much-needed sanity to prevail. Israeli leaders’ recent impetuous statements have threatened to hit Iran’s nuclear and petrochemical facilities, rhetoric that is only further fuelling the fire.
In a recent impudent move Israel’s foreign minister unabashedly stated that he was barring UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres from entering Israel because he had not “unequivocally” condemned Iran’s missile attack on Israel, adding that Guterres’ failure to call out Iran made him persona non grata in Israel.
This is brazen hypocrisy par excellence. First, Israel commits the most horrendous war crimes in the name of self-defence and then bans the person heading a global peace organisation because he did not condemn a country’s retaliatory, deterrent missile attack that caused no casualties, as a high proportion of Iran’s missile barrage was intercepted and neutralised mid-air by Israel. In comparison, when Israel attacks Gaza or Lebanon hundreds of unarmed citizens are killed or maimed in a single strike.
In another blitz on Friday, Israel targeted the intelligence headquarters of Hezbollah in Beirut, as part of a wider assault that has driven more than 1.2 million Lebanese from their homes. Israel claimed to have targeted Hashem Safieddine, the potential successor to the slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Safieddine’s fate was unclear till the writing of this piece.
While the West unifies in strong condemnation of Iran’s attacks on Israel, whipping up a digital hullabaloo, is there any point pinning hope that it will ever let righteousness prevail, enough to condemn Israel’s actions and offensives too?