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The UN is not the Holy See

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

The Spectator on intervening in Zimbabwe

In an ideal world, the United Nations would raise a multinational force to go into Zimbabwe and ensure that free and fair elections were held. However, we do not live in an ideal world and the UN is — to put it mildly — far from an ideal institution. Its declaration on Monday that legitimate elections cannot be held in Zimbabwe at present was a feeble batsqueak of indignation, but also about the most we can expect from the UN at this point.

There is a huge misconception in this country and elsewhere that the UN is a Holy See for the modern era: the moral conscience of mankind, designed to guarantee basic freedoms for the peoples of the world. This is historically illiterate. The founding aim of the UN was to avoid great power conflict — which is why five nations have a veto over its actions, and the organisation has, to repeat the old joke, the engine of a lawnmower and the brakes of a Rolls-Royce.

Two of the Security Council’s permanent members — Russia and China — have no interest in setting a precedent whereby repression and the failure to hold free and fair elections are a trigger for other nations to intervene in the internal affairs of a country. In essence, they have no intention of drafting an international jurisprudence that could one day be used against them. It is no accident that the great humanitarian interventions of the post-Cold War era — Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999 and Sierra Leone in 2000 — had to be carried out outside the UN framework.

If the UN will not act, and Britain and America cannot, some other mechanism for intervention is clearly needed. There have been frequent calls for the Southern African Development Community or the African Union to step in. But just as a British- or American-led initiative could be misrepresented as a colonial intervention, so an exclusively African-led military intervention is hard to envisage unless Africa is forced into doing something. The feelings of freedom-fighting solidarity that still exist between Mugabe and some African leaders are an obstruction to meaningful action. (It is worth noting that the South African populace seems to take a clearer-eyed view of the Zimbabwe situation than their leaders. For all Thabo Mbeki’s moral cowardice, it was South African dockers who refused to unload Chinese arms shipments to Mugabe.)

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Dwight Vandryver

June 27th, 2008 12:30am

The situation in Zimbabwe is reprehensible, as all would agree. It's a hateful thing to have to say, but Zimbabwe has no strategic importance, either to the West or the East. Apart from gems and platinum, Zimbabwe does not possess the mineral wealth that most desire: oil. If it were a significant producer of oil, then long before now, it would have been declared part of the "axis of evil" and the troops would have rolled in to achieve "regime change". The Spectator may express high ideals about what should be done by other African states: however, the bottom line is that there is no "dollar value" in it.

leonard

June 29th, 2008 4:31am

white man domination is coming to an end.

Roy

August 6th, 2008 10:37am

Words, words, and more words, summing up and more summing up. We can almost recite, off by heart all that is said here. Once a country is handed over (like a daughter in past centuries) you take pot luck in how she is handled. A good essay could be written on how different could have been Britain's handing over of its responsibilities with this country, but no help would it be. Without the USA or a determined Britain, restoring order by intervention is out of the question. So we just wait and watch, decrying the uselessness of the UN, and the truculence of China and Russia. Mugabe will eventually pass away and new hope will arise. It will mainly be up to South Africa as the strong (hopefully friendly) neighbour in how that situation will correct itself.

Diary

Rani Singh

I’ve just emerged from the gym, winding down after a day’s writing, when my son Sukhraj calls, alerting me to sudden news of explosions and fatalities in Mumbai.