With a new secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, at the helm of the UN hopes are again being raised. The UN has never been so active- new peacekeeping ventures appear to go into the works every few months. Indeed, the peacekeeping department, mainly funded by its old critic, the U.S. of the administration of George W. Bush, has just thrown back to the Security Council its most recent order, complaining of overload and the fact there is no peace to keep- to go into Chad and sort out a brewing war.

The UN, albeit fitfully, is coming into its own, more recognizably a creature of its Charter than it has been for some time. Even on highly sensitive issues, such as Iran, Security Council resolutions get passed with the concurrence of China and Russia. The resolutions may be watered down compared with what the U.S. and the UK want but the big differences are being finessed by diplomacy rather than by confrontation.

It reminds some of the expectations that existed at the end of the Cold War. One only has to recall the article written in Pravda in 1987 by the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, followed by his speech to the UN a year later.

Anthony Parsons, then Britain’s UN ambassador, said these proposals “altered previous policy through 180 degrees”, challenging in effect the U.S. to follow the Soviet lead. President George Bush, nervous though he was as to whether Gorbachev was as true as he looked, rose to the challenge.

The harmony that then developed between the superpowers at the UN, by the standard of what had preceded it, was astonishing. The years between 1990 and 1993 were the longest period without the use of veto in the history of the UN. In quick succession the Security Council in July 1987 demanded a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war (the first time ever that the five permanent members of the Security Council had jointly drafted a mandatory resolution) and a cease-fire was secured in 1988. In November 1990, the Council authorized the use of force to reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In the following year it unanimously set the terms of the Gulf war cease-fire. In December 1992 it authorized the use of force in Somalia to end what was fast becoming a humanitarian disaster. At the same time the two superpowers began to withdraw their support from the opposing antagonists in long-running disputes, as varied as Afghanistan, El Salvador, Namibia and Cambodia.

Parsons has argued that it was the complex problems of Angola and Bosnia that brought this unprecedented state of harmony to a crashing halt. I would put Somalia first on the list, argue that Angola, although a failure, was never that central to anyone’s concern and that Bosnia could not but be difficult given that ex-Yugoslavia was by common consent the most intractable of all the ethnic conflicts then erupting. Unfortunately the wars of ex-Yugoslavia simply came to early for the new “consensus” at the Security Council to have put down roots deep enough where the UN could have been in a position with its own standing intervention force to immediately swing into action. The Somalia debacle of 1993 and 94 when the U.S. deployed what should have become, it hadn’t been so trigger happy, a prototype of armed intervention mandated by the Security Council, further queered the pitch.

Moreover, one should add, to fill out the picture, that the degree of harmony at the UN could not but be affected the counterproductive way the Western group of seven nations had failed to respond to the gathering Russian economic crisis in the crucial period 1991-92 when the economic reformers were in power in Moscow, thus allowing the anti-western forces in the Duma the opportunity to build up too much a head of steam.

President Bill Clinton, who excused his debacle in Somalia by blaming the UN, even though most of the troops were under his direct command, compounded his poor lack of judgement in foreign affairs by his peculiar election-driven vision of a Nato expanding right up to Russia’s frontiers. The astonishing level of good will between the erstwhile Cold War enemies all but evaporated on Clinton’s watch and for America the UN became a handy kicking ball.

Now the ball is in a new court, at the feet of Ban Ki-Moon. Despite the erratic tenure of John Bolton as America’s UN ambassador, the UN is working better than it has for a long time. Thanks to Kofi Annan’s quiet dignity and charisma Ban inherits one of the world’s truly high profile posts. As long as no one moves the goal posts he should be able to get quite a few balls right in the net.

Note for editor: 1) Copyright Jonathan Power 2) dateline London 3) I can be reached by email: JonatPower@aol.com or by phone: +44 7785 351172

Source: BBC