The General Assembly of the United Nations was held in New York with world leaders participating in a Summit for Refugees and Migrants. Leaders traveled to the United States to represent their countries at the Summit. While addressing the assembly, leaders had a number of key messages to the international community, particularly related to the rights of refugees, the war in the Middle East, climate change, Syria, and the war on terrorism with the North Korean nuclear testing being at the top of the agenda.The problem is that there is no single global institution in place to help solve these problems. The United Nations is absolutely a useless organization. It formed to prevent wars and to protect human rights, global peace, and security. The fight against terrorism, however, must be based on principles, not on double standards. There should not be good terrorists and bad terrorists. Also, terror should not be a means of countries intervening in the domestic affairs of other countries. Because terrorism is a fire that burns everyone who plays with it, terrorism must be contained sincerely. The system of the U.N is corrupt, making the functioning of the U.N biased. Consequently, the entire U.N system should be changed for the common good of all human beings. The Untied Nations was founded during one of the most heinous conflicts in human history, so it was forged as an idealistic dream to maintain global peace and security.
After World War II, the international community organized the major powers of the world, so that they would constantly be in touch, in order to prevent another mass scale of deaths seen during World War II. American President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed that maintaining peace in the world was only possible through five “sheriffs.” The fate of more than seven billion would depend on these sheriffs. These sheriffs would be China, Russia, France, the United States, and Great Britain. The Untied States would police the American continent, China and Russia would police the Far East and Asia, and Great Britain and France would oversee Europe and the Middle East, and, as a result, we would live in a peaceful and just global community. So they set up a new world order and decided how the international order should function. But they failed to understand that the main reason countries or people go to war with one another is because of national interests.
A great example would be the Cold War. The permanent members of the United Nations’ Security Council each have the right to veto decisions, but for a long time the UN excluded China from decision-making in the United Nations, recognizing only Taiwan as the representative of the Chinese people after the Nationalist Party of China fled to Taiwan in 1949 during the Communist takeover of the mainland. Similarly, stalemates occurred between Russia and the US as each strategized against the other. Since then, the United Nations has remained a platform for debate, disputes, and dysfunction among the member states causing them not to trust each other. Most of the time Secretary Generals have taken stand or oppose the sheriffs’ opinions.
Our world is becoming more interconnected and more complicated. It is unfeasible that only five sheriffs cant mintain peace and order in the global world made up of nation states and regional interests, for instance, the wars in Syria and Yemen. In these cases Russia and China have joined forces and the U.S., France, and Britain are allied, creating a tension that belies any answer to the current global problems. The war in Syria has been going on for five years, thousands of lives have been lost, Syria has been almost leveled, and millions of Syrians have became refugees--still there is no peace in Syria.
At the beginning of the war the President of Turkey proposed to power players that they establish humanitarian corridors and no fly zones in Northern Syria, but none of them accepted the idea, and especially Russia did not want to put the agenda before the Security Council. As a result many individuals have become refugees and thousands have lost their lives. Finally President Erdogan decided to unilaterally invoke international law to create a defacto safe zone, although still using the zone for Turkey’s own war against the Kurds.
The international community failed to display any real solidarity with those who fight against terrorism. Terrorism is the biggest threat to human rights. The world can no longer ignore the fact of terrorism. Either the international community will prosper together or perish together. It is better to learn how to live in peace and harmony. Before doing that the international community should have strong global institutions that can help solve these kinds of issues, but at present the only global institution we have is the UN.
The international community must reform the UN, because the main goal and purpose of UN is allegedly to prevent war. Significantly, if we did not have war, we would not have so many refugees in the first place. In a conflict zone people will be either be killed or will flee somewhere to save their lives. We have to understand that five sheriffs cannot maintain peace in our interconnected but fragile world. Five sheriffs cannot accomplish the UN’s purposes stated in its Charter: to maintain international peace and security, to prevent and remove threats to the peace, to suppress acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to adjust or settle international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace by justice and international law. We must add more sheriffs and realign the system to secure and maintain peace, security, and justice in our global world.
Dr. Aland Mizell is President of the MCI and a regular contributor to Mindanao Times. You may email the author at:aland_mizell2@hotmail.com
