|
Posted on 15-5-2003
Nations
Replaced By States?
By Corine Lesnes, Le Monde, Thursday 08 May 2003
United Nations -- Not displeased to have overcome the “taboo
of regime
change” in international law, the American “hawks” forge ahead.
Every day
the UN staff can follow in the press their debates on the reform
or the
death of the United Nations.
"They’re killing us", says one official.
The charge was lead from London by Donald Rumsfeld’s Counselor,
Richard
Perle, with a now-famous article of March 21st in the Guardian:
“Thank-you,
God, for the death of the UN”. The war had just begun. Mr. Perle
predicted
that Saddam Hussein would not fall alone, but take the UN with
him. "Oh,
not the whole UN,” he corrected. “ The ‘good works’ part will
survive, the
bureaucracy for low risk peace-keeping, the word windmill.”
But what will
die, he continued, “is the myth of the United Nations as the
foundation of
a new international order”, the “liberal concept of security
achieved
through international law applied by international institutions”.
Ever since, new daggers are planted every day. The bureaucracy
of “Food
for Oil” was accused of hiding the import of contracts secured
by Russia
and France since 1996 (although each contract is public). In
the April 28
edition of The Weekly Standard, Lawrence Lindsay, who left the
White House
economic team in January, described how the UN is not as “humanitarian”
as
people think: The proof, that UN bureaucrats prevented his adoption
of two
children from Kosovo (the orphanage official, he insists, was,
moreover, a
Frenchwoman). Be reassured: Mr. Bush’s former counselor succeeded
all the
same in adopting a baby, one whose mother had the good idea
of delivering
in Montenegro.
The neo-conservatives had prepared the ground for an eventual
second
skirting of the UN, in the unlikely event the Security Council
should
oppose the Bush administration with regard to reconstruction.
The legal
point for which Washington would need the Security Council,
to lift the
sanctions against Iraq, was already swept aside on the pretext
that regime
change had already rendered existing resolutions null and void.
This
argument is developed in a report published end-April by the
Heritage
Foundation, which recommends that President Bush “limit the
role of the UN”
in Iraq.
NEW MECHANISMS
Universities and international relations specialists have hardly
been
more encouraging for the UN. In the May-June issue of Foreign
Affairs, the
influential State Department journal, Michael Glennon published
an article
which has been much photo-copied and commented upon at the UN.
Iraq, he
writes, sounded “the end of a great experiment”, the “monumental
internationalist experiment of the twentieth century”, which
aimed to
“submit the use of force to the domain of law”. In fact, he
explains, it
could not have happened otherwise: as soon as the United States
attained
such enormous power, “the fate of the Council was sealed”. The
author
reckons that the United States will be confronted with “pressures
to limit
the use of force”. They should “resist them” and construct in
their wake
“new international mechanisms” for the preservation of peace
and global
security. In other words, another UN
|
