Can’t solve security risks.

A quick look at the contemporary international order reveals that the collective security system established by the United Nations Charter and put into place following the end of World War II has failed to protect international peace and security. The tragedy last year in Aleppo and throughout Syria at present is the biggest proof of this failure. For many years, the system’s inability to achieve peace has been attributed to the Cold War. So when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a wave of optimism that mirrored the preamble to the UN Charter which states: “We the peoples of the world are determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” This was essentially the purpose of founding the United Nations, whose main objective was “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.” Hopes were high that these lofty goals would see the light of day after the end of the Cold War, and that the world would renounce the law of the jungle so that peace and justice would finally prevail. Indeed the first ever Security Council summit meeting following the end of the cold war on January 31, 1992 saw world leaders ask the new UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, to report on the nature of post-Cold War international relations. Boutros-Ghali presented his famous report “An Agenda for Peace”. In May 1992 the general assembly appointed a committee of the whole, which I presided, to put the proposed contained in the “Agenda for Peace” into effect. However, it soon became clear that the maintenance of world peace would not come about with the end of the Cold War, because the interests of the great powers still conflicted with one another. Thus the Security Council’s inability to take effective and urgent measures to impose peace will, regrettably, continue. *** To understand the reason for this we must look back at what I call the “grand design” that was concluded in 1945 at the San Francisco Conference when the UN Charter was adopted. It was agreed then to establish a Security Council that would oversee the protection of international peace and security. The Council was given unprecedented wide powers to eliminate all threats to peace. It was also agreed that the five permanent members would have the power to veto substantive resolutions but not procedural resolutions. Unfortunately, the Charter did not clearly delineate the nature and delimitation of the procedural resolutions that could not be impeded. More importantly, the Charter granted the five permanent members veto power, which means that they could block resolutions even with the majority vote needed to pass. The argument behind this open-ended unprecedented license was that it was the responsibility of these five great powers to protect world peace, not their own narrow interests. The five great powers at the San Francisco Conference tried moreover to gain the right to veto non-procedural resolutions regardless of their content, and to incorporate this right explicitly into the charter, but they failed because of the opposition of most countries. At present, it is clear that the interlocking political and economic interests of the five great powers make it inconceivable that any action taken by the Council would directly or indirectly affect those interests. Simply put the Security Council, with its present structure, has been made to be in a state of permanent paralysis the recent deliberations in the council on Ghouta-Syria reflect this paralysis. As a result, the international protection system enshrined in the UN Charter no longer exists. This is what the Arab countries have struggled with over the past seven decades when it came to Palestine, and what the region is struggling with now when it comes to Syria. *** It is noteworthy that the Security Council’s paralysis [failure] does not hinge solely on the actual use of the veto power. I was the representative of Egypt in the Security Council in 1996 and 1997. I chaired the Council in June 1996 and witnessed first-hand the five great powers threatening in the negotiation phase to veto many crucial resolutions. Ultimately, when the G-5 accept to pass a resolution, it usually ends up formulated as follows: Refraining from taking the action required to end the conflict, and merely appointing an envoy to manage the conflict. The best example of this are the resolutions on Palestine. Imposing sanctions that do not change the situation much but often harm many innocent people. Using distorted ineffective verbal formulations such as the repeated condemnations and denunciations we see now in the Council’s resolutions that do not call for any action that would change the tragic situation in question. The net result is that the Council is being confined to managing conflicts, not ending them.