FREEDOM FROM VIOLENCE: UN is the only hope

FREEDOM FROM VIOLENCE: UN is the only hope

By Deepak Parvatiyar*

(This article was published in October 2014 issue of People And UN journal)

W Averell Harriman, a prominent American diplomat and politician, wrote in his introduction of The Twentieth Century –An Almanac:

“Ours is the most hopeful and most fearful of centuries. Individual determination took explorers to the North and South Poles in the first decade; collective ingenuity took Americans to the moon before the seventh ended.But in between those great moments of daring and faith, political savagery brought the deaths of millions upon millions of soldiers in two world wars and millions upon millions more civilians in Hitler’s camps and Stalin’s, in Guernica and Coventry, in Dresden and Hiroshima, in Ottomon Turkey, Indonesia, Burundi, Biafra, Cambodia. Medicine conquered the worst diseases – measles, smallpox, malaria, polio,tuberculosis – that had ravaged earlier generations, but man remained seemingly unable to control the most ferocious killer of all, man himself.”

Isn’t it true that the first decade and a half of the 21^st Century has been a more raucous extension of the previous century?

New killer diseases have taken over, the latest to follow AIDS, SARS, Diabetes and Cancer is the dreaded Ebola; Scientists have discovered the ‘God Particle’ -- One of the most mysterious and important properties is mass and decoded human genome – about which only recently eminent British physicist Stephen Hawking warned of having the potential to destroy the universe; and the world has been networked like never before through the digital technology that by itself created a virtual world within the real planet! 

On the business front, the World Trade Organisation has divided the world between the Haves and Have-nots , who quarrel among themselves at times when depletion of natural resources, environmental degradation and ecological imbalance have made the world sit on an edge as we helplessly watch climate change and a growing number of natural disasters.

What is even more disconcerting is that, as Harriman stated in his description of the twentieth century, man still remains the most ferocious killer of man even now as the 21^st Century is in the middle of its second decade – the only disparaging point could be the numbers of people killed in acts of violence in the last century vis a vis the number of people being killed now.

The fact remains that we, in the 21^st Century, live in a terrorized world, and the impact of terror is amplified manifold because of the inter-linkages of societies in a virtual world through World Wide Web, and satellite televisions and radios in the real world. Images of two hijacked civilian aircrafts hitting the twin World Trade Centre towers remain etched in one’s memory and so do the images of a defiant dictator Saddam Hussain embracing the noose after he was dethroned after a US attack in Iraq as the US led Western powers thought Iraq under him to be embarked on a secret nuclear programme –a same charge that is now levelled against Iran!

The invasions of Iraq by the US – which is involved in almost all the conflict zones of the world as the world’s lone superpower, in an obvious bid to control the oil-rich Middle East, too has caused enormous bloodshed in that country and the destabilization of the entire region. 

Today the entire region is a war zone where al-Qaeda's Syrian wing al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants are on a rampage since the middle of 2014. They are involved in war crimes, have attacked several Syrian and Iraqi towns and villages, and claimed thousands of innocent lives. The group has declared an Islamist caliphate in the areas it now controls in Iraq and Syria, and has forced tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities run for their lives. 

The situation is explosive and the UN Security Council has warned it to be a threat not only to Iraq and Syria but to "regional peace, security and stability". In face of ISIS resorting to cruel and barbaric method, the UNSC has even stated that those responsible for the violence could face trial for crimes against humanity.

Major military powers today resent any idea of the world community dabbling with their affairs of what they consider to be of “national interest”, howsoever contentious they may be in impacting the world. Russia annexing  Crimea and arming pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine to contest NATO’s eastward expansion is a case in point.

Another such example is of Israel which moved 500,000 settlers to the Palestinian territory it conquered 47 years ago into greater Israel, and resorted to bloody military invasions of Gaza to crush resistance. The Israel- Hamas conflict in the Gaza strip -- the third major escalation in six years has claimed over two thousand lives thus far this year. Among those killed are hundreds of children and women and some 10,000 Palestinians are left injured and thousands rendered homeless. A United Nations representative has described the conflict as “appalling”.

The popular Arab Spring has fast turned violent. The present anarchy that prevails in the Muslim world does not augur well for the world. And numerous other governments with powerful military forces too,  ontribute towards a chaotic and violent world.

Afghanistan and Pakistan today are safe haven for dreaded terrorists.(It was in Pakistan where the mastermind of WTC attack, Osama Bin Laden was finally located and killed by the US forces). 

Pakistan faces internal strife and there a democratically elected government is accused of rigging in elections and faces threats to its continuation from right wing political groups backed by its powerful army. Another South Asian nation, Sri Lanka – that wiped out the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) from its soil too faces charges of war crimes.

India seems to be perennially under terror attacks from terrorists who use Pakistani soil for the purpose. The country too has Pakistan-backed home-bred terror outfits operating there. The Naxal challenge in the red-corridor stretching from Andhra Pradesh to West Bengal, is an imposing menace.

The Asia-Pacific region faces another polarisation of powers in the wake of the alleged expansionist policy of China that stakes its claim on the South China Sea. As a result the Japan-China rivalry has grown.

Africa too is not aloof from the terror network as Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan have been the new hotbeds of terrorism and internal strife. In Sudan, President Omar al-Bashr faces the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for committing war crimes and genocide against black African communities in Darfur. An upsurge in violence there has resulted in displacement of over 50,000 people since February this year as violent rivalry among the Arab groups there has already caused displacement of over two million people since 2003! Another African state,Libya, too burns since the ouster and killing of long time dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The militias, many of which originate from rebel forces that fought Gaddafi, have attempted to fill the subsequent power vacuum. But rivalries over control have led to fierce fighting among them.

Like the previous centuries, the conflict zones of the 21^st Century are not just identified on the basis of race, religion, internal power clashes and expansionist designs of nations but are on the basis of ethnicity too. Remember last year in November Canada said no to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s call for review of violence on its aboriginal women? This was a move that invited sharp criticism from the pro-Russian bloc comprising Belarus, Russia, Cuba and Iran.

Yet if we thought that this was enough then we are totally off the mark. A recent 2013 UN study shows that it has been Latin America that is the most violent region of the planet. It is here that some battered governments face epidemic levels of hostility largely unleashed by organised crime-driven violence. Such violence now accounts for 30 per cent of all killings in the region. The study shows that almost 37 per cent of world’s 4,37,000 homicides in 2012 took place in the Americas – Honduras being the most violent country in the world with 91.4 homicides per 100,000 people. High rates of homicides in other Latin American countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize, thus make Central America's "Northern Triangle" the world's second most violent sub-region behind Southern Africa.

Yet, the scope of conflict and violence is multi-pronged considering that it also involves domestic violence and violence against women and children as well. From 2010 to 2013, over 10,000 men in six countries across Asia and the Pacific were interviewed using the UN Multi-country Study on Men and Violence household survey. The countries included were Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. It showed that overall nearly half of those men interviewed reported using physical and/or sexual violence against a female partner and nearly a quarter of men interviewed reported perpetrating rape against a woman or girl!

This leads to the final questions – where is the world heading today? Hasn’t it turned to be a giant tinderbox? Consider the conflict zones of the 21^st Century and they all present a gloomy picture of a ravaged world.

It is in this light that the role of the United Nations assumes an even larger significance.

Conflicts have unravelled decades of social and economic progress in a brief span of time. In face of this, an urgent need has been felt to strengthen the UN with further reforms. Only then UN could be better equipped to ensure its capabilities and responsiveness to conflicts. Already its Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) with a 2015 deadline could not be achieved fully because of contemporary conflicts.

None can deny the importance of UN in the contemporary 21^st Century world. Given the complexities of unresolved issues that threaten the world, the need of a powerful United Nations is being felt more than ever before. Of course, the UN over the years has done a commendable job as a deterrent. At places it has been working relentlessly to restore some sorts of sanity in the troubled zones in whatever small ways that it can do. It will be required to link security with development to counter hostility. This is where the UN needs to carve a niche for itself because over half of the world’s population in extreme poverty is now estimated to reside in places affected by conflict and chronic violence. There is much of an expectation from the UN to uplift their living conditions and only the UN can perform in these regions. Consider this – For the first time in seven years, a humanitarian convoy of the United Nations World Food Programme successfully crossed from Egypt into the Gaza Strip in August this year, carrying enough food to feed around 150,000 people for five days!

Yet, there have been more disappointments to the UN under the prevailing situation and this does not bode well for world peace. Just refer to a UN statement of 8^th August 2014, where Secretary General Ban Ki Moon expressed his “deep disappointment” over the failure of Israel and Palestine to reach an agreement on an extension of the ceasefire in their talks in Cairo.

Isn’t it time that such disappointments are taken care of with aplomb? It is time to rework a strategy for the UN to deliver particularly when it has embarked on deliberations on the Post-2015 Development Agenda to achieve peace, progress against violence and instability. Because, a hi-tech and networked 21^st Century, deserves much better than the medieval era barbarism, and violent conflicts.

*The writer is a senior journalist and Media Advisor, Indian Federation of UN Associations. The views expressed are personal