RAISING THE spectre of Srebrenica and Rwanda’s genocide Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned an international conference in Istanbul on Saturday that the UN, and specifically its ruling body, the security council, is losing all legitimacy through its failure to act on Syria’s humanitarian tragedy. “This negligence 20 years ago was explained by the international community being caught unprepared in dealing with the issues of the post-Cold War era,” Mr Erdogan argued. “How can the injustice and weakness displayed in the Syrian issue be explained today?”
It’s tragically an all-too-familiar refrain that echoes the frustration of many member states, Ireland included, whose vocation for the UN as the guardian of global collective security is constantly frustrated by an institutional structure that belongs to the cold war, more geared to freezing conflicts than unfreezing them, to inaction rather than action. Particularly so when crises involve client states of the Big Five.
Mr Erdogan called for radical reform of the council, describing it rightly as an unequal system that failed to reflect the will of most countries. “If we leave the issue to the vote of one or two members of the permanent five at the UN Security Council, then the aftermath of Syria will be very hazardous and humanity will write it down in history with unforgettable remarks.”
He has every reason to feel aggrieved. The vetoes exercised by permanent members Russia and China against action on Syria have again exposed the toothlessness of the UN and left Turkey unprotected, subject to violent attacks over its border and a growing refugee problem. Little wonder that the Syrian regime treats the UN’s representative with such contempt nearly one and a half decades after what appeared to be a consensus on the principle of a more robust UN able to put humanitarian protection above national sovereignty concerns.
Mr Erdogan said reform of the council should take into account the growing strength of countries like Turkey, Brazil, India and Indonesia, adding: “The West is no longer the only centre of the world.” But although the exclusion of such countries, and the whole of Africa, from the rights of permanent membership, is indefensible, it is doubtful that adding more vetoes will make the UN more responsive to the needs of the broader membership. The challenge, as it was in the EU as it sought to become a more effective decision-making forum, is to start a dialogue about replacing vetoes with some form of majority voting. An uphill road, but we should start on it.