This year the world celebrated the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, seeking through its work and existence to epitomize a commitment to multilateralism in international affairs.
As José Antonio Ocampo, former Colombian Minister of Finance and UN Under-Secretary-General, rightly noted, “The UN was built on three pillars: First of them – peace. Its primary goal was to succeed where its ill-fated predecessor, the League of Nations, had failed: to prevent a new world war. Founded at the dawn of the Cold War, the UN became a crucial forum for dialogues, and since the fall of the Berlin Wall it has played an important peacekeeping role in a number of countries.”
On October 13, on the eve of the Valdai International Discussion Club, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, on his part, stressed that, despite criticism, often well founded, the World Organization fulfills its core mission and it is thanks to it that the world has been spared a catastrophic conflict between the great powers. The minister does not deny that the basic principles of international law enshrined in the UN Charter are often violated, but this does not mean that the UN is useless. “For all its obvious shortcomings (as nothing created by human hands and minds is ever perfect), we see no alternative to the UN today,” Lavrov added.
After the creation of the UN, a fairly wide network of specialized UN organizations was established, in particular the World Health Organization, the World Meteorological Organization, UNESCO and many others, as well as a number of international organizations. However, despite their distinctive nature, the UN and some international organizations have already repeatedly shown their inability to adapt to the rapidly changing global political realities. In this regard, lately more and more criticism of international organizations has been voiced for their ineffectiveness, lack of democracy, lack of attention to the problems of developing and poorer countries, bureaucracy, bloated staff, and exorbitant budgets. An unclear position on resolving a number of international conflicts, and sometimes even catering to rising tensions, in particular over Iran, Venezuela and a number of other crisis regions, looking to the US position and very often building their own policy, add fuel to the fire of criticism of the UN and several international organizations.
Thus, according to many observers, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is losing its credibility and has been transformed from a once respected organization that does important work into a pocket organization that serves only the interests of Western countries. All of its recent decisions are blatantly anti-Syrian or anti-Russian, which only worsen the settlement of the issue of controlling the use of chemical weapons in the Middle East.
On December 11 the Permanent Representative of Syria to the UN Bashar Ja’afari stated that the Syrian government had sent about 210 reports to the OPCW about the presence of chemical weapons among the militants of terrorist groups. However, many of Syria’s reports on the threat of terrorist use of chemical weapons have not been taken seriously. The reason for this is that today the OPCW has turned into a tool for geopolitical interests of Western countries, primarily the United States, which drew their conclusions from the data provided by the White Helmets, known for their fakes. The Syrian authorities have repeatedly pointed out that the OPCW and UN reports on the chemical weapons situation in Syria were formed in violation of the principles of investigation laid down in the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Another aspect that has recently attracted particular criticism is WHO’s involvement in organizing the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. This year, the international organization failed to organize timely and effective work in this area, which resulted in a number of countries (in particular Italy) finding themselves in a very difficult situation due to the miscalculations of their own healthcare systems. They didn’t receive help from a centralized body, which should have been WHO, but instead appealed directly to countries that have demonstrated their ability to deal with the disaster that has struck the world. Neither did WHO properly intervene in the distribution of pandemic prevention products, leaving the matter to various businessmen, or to the rich countries of the West, which, by their cowboy laws, began to buy up protective masks and other medical equipment to the detriment of the poorer nations.
WHO also failed to centralize the development of a vaccine and drugs against coronavirus, allowing it to be used in the political games of individual countries and politicians, unjustifiably dispersing the efforts of the global scientific community. Even today we do not see any such global consolidation of efforts to jointly develop drugs and vaccines, with each state in this area working on its own in one way or another. As a result, as acknowledged by the US media, several states, including Britain, EU members and Canada, have been actively acquiring potential cures for the coronavirus for months. Such overprocurement may result in many developing countries not getting the necessary vaccines and being left on their own to deal with the disease. Health officials in developing countries admitted that this was a stark reminder to them that the race to defeat a deadly pandemic will reinforce the divisions between poor and rich nations, something the UN, WHO, and other international institutions must certainly not allow.
All coronavirus vaccines that have already appeared have gone through a similar path of accelerated certification, but the use of individual vaccines is not only artificially hindered for blatantly political reasons, but a wave of fake accusations is raised against them, as, in particular, is the case in Western countries with the already ready-made Chinese and Russian vaccines. And behind the backs of such wire-pullers there is a growing number of deaths from COVID-19, which could have been saved if artificial barriers had not been created. But who will be held responsible for this? And where is the peacekeeping role of international institutions, in particular the WHO?
Unfortunately, in recent years, the determining factor in the activities of a number of international organizations has become the position of the United States, which, by blatant dictatorship and disregard for international law and public opinion, seeks to impose its tenets on the world on the basis of its own interests. As soon as the International Criminal Court decided to investigate American war crimes in Afghanistan, Washington immediately trashed the judges and imposed sanctions. The US did not need the agreements with Iran, so it immediately withdrew from the international multilateral deal. When the missile treaty was no longer needed, Washington withdrew from it as well. So do other countries have to follow the path suggested by the US in order to be heard? Or will the world live by international law and the charters of established international organizations, which in turn will keep in mind that they do not work for the United States, but for the needs of the world!
Valery Kulikov, political expert, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
