SOCIALIST former Portuguese Prime Minister, Antonio Guterres, was elected Secretary-General designate of the United Nations recently. He will assume duty in January with the expiration of Ban Ki-moon’s two-term tenure on December 31. Guterres’ new assignment does not provoke anybody’s envy with the world sitting perilously on the cliff. But it is heart-warming that his election was smooth, against the backdrop of mutual distrust and bitter disagreements among the super powers in the UN Security Council that often plague such a transition process.
Among the nagging issues are the armed conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Salafist extremism exemplified in the activities of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Israeli-Palestinian question, refugees, hunger, diseases, climate change, sustainable development challenges, growing number of rogue states and countries’ unbridled defiance of UN resolutions. It is just as well that Guterres sees a “huge challenge” ahead of him. He has made aiding victims of war, poverty and injustice his focus.
In spite of these daunting challenges, there is high optimism that his antecedents, first as an insider, having been the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from 2005 to 2015, and as someone widely viewed as a conciliator and a bridge builder, bode well for his job. Ban acknowledged this when he lauded his choice. He said, “…Guterres is best known where it counted most: on the frontline of armed conflict and humanitarian suffering and for the compassion and solidarity, which remained at the heart of his effective advocacy around the globe.”
However, there are no easy solutions. The Syrian conflict, which began in March 2011, has remained intractable because of the Russian effect. Apart from its arms and ammunition generously given to President Bashar al-Assad, its fighter jets have been busy on the battle fronts, bombing rebel groups fighting to remove him from office.
With President Vladimir Putin seeing the war as a proxy brawl between Russia and the United States, which leads other Gulf states for the “al-Assad must go” campaign, peace will remain elusive. So many European countries like Germany, France, Spain, Denmark, and Greece as well as those in the Middle East are bursting with refugees from Syria and other conflict zones, creating growing concerns for their hosts.
According to the UNHCR, the Syrian conflict has spawned about 4.8 million refugees, who, at first, fled to Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt, as well as 6.6 million internally displaced persons. They are an integral part of the 21 million globally, of which 51 per cent, awfully, are children under the age of 18. This is a real humanitarian burden for the UN. Syria with Somalia, South-Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Myanmar/Burma and Eritrea lead the global chart of this humanitarian tragedy.
Commendable as the UN assistance to “victims of war, poverty and injustice” might be, the ultimate solution is the prescription of the immediate-past Prime Minister of Britain, David Cameron: “…the most important thing is to bring peace and stability” to all the troubled areas of the world.
As a result, a new diplomatic construct to effectively engage all the actors in these conflicts has become expedient. The Middle East is a hotbed of global tension partly because of Russia and Iran’s misconduct – not willing to act within the framework of the UN charter and its resolutions. The arms these two countries pour into Damascus, more than anything else, have aggravated the conflicts in Syria and Libya.
President Francois Hollande of France, in 2015, regarded Libya as “his biggest concern at the moment.” The danger still remains. As a UN independent panel on sanctions against Libya said, it has become the primary source of illicit weapons trade globally. The panel said, “Transfers to 14 countries reflected a highly diversified range of trafficking dynamics; and that trafficking from Libya was fuelling conflict and insecurity – including terrorism on several continents.”
It is through this conveyor belt that ISIS derives energy or armour to advance its malevolent agenda in the Middle East; al-Shabaab in Mali and East Africa; and Boko Haram in Nigeria and West Africa. ISIS has a five-year expansionist agenda that will bring the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, India, Eastern China, Europe and Spain under its control.
Such an agenda needs to be destroyed; but this cannot be achieved with a frail UN, which Ban is handing over to Guterres. On account of this, the world is facing the danger of Cold War recrudescence. Russia, in 2014, unfurled a plan to increase its nuclear arsenal with 40 missiles while North Korea repeatedly tests its nuclear weapons amid belligerent rhetoric against the US and her immediate neighbour, South Korea.
Russia remains a big menace to Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states, a situation that has provoked NATO into air surveillance flights over Poland and Romania and military patrols along a swathe of territories of its allies in the eastern border. So ominous is the situation that the Polish Prime Minister, David Tusk, once cautioned that the world “stands on the brink of conflict, the consequences of which are not foreseen.”
This eerie atmosphere, therefore, requires a fine-tuned UN, especially the Security Council for effectiveness and responsiveness to the demands of the time. In the council, where the US, Russia, Britain, France and China sit as permanent members, lies the power house of the UN.
Under Putin, Russia has become an irritant in the international system. Guterres, with his socialist background, therefore, should exploit it to halt Russia’s dangerous drift. If he resolves the Russian jigsaw and restructures the UN agencies and bureaucracy for efficient service-delivery, he would have initiated a process that could guarantee global peace and security.
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