webmaster
© Copyright DEHAI-Eritrea OnLine, 1993-2011
All rights reserved
From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Sat Apr 02 2011 - 16:24:17 EST
UN's 'coalition of the opposed' growshttp://en.m4.cn/archives/7014.html
Post Categories:
Africa<http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://en.m4.cn/archives/7014.html&t=UN%27s%20%27coalition%20of%20the%20opposed%27%20grows>
By The 4th Media | 16:12 BeiJing Time,Thursday, March 31, 2011
148 views
<http://en.m4.cn/archives/7014.html#comments>
NEW YORK - At the United Nations headquarters, signs of a brewing debate as
heated as the 2003 invasion of Iraq can be found aplenty.
Parallel to the growing criticisms of the Barack Obama administration's
military gambit in Libya in the US Congress, which saw the House of
Representatives speaker John Boehner demand an explanation from President
Barack Obama on the "contradictions" of his Libya policy, there is also a
rising chorus of discontent in the UN community.
This reflects sharp divisions over UN Security Council resolution 1973 last
Saturday, which established a no-fly zone in Libya and was weakened from the
outset by abstentions from several key
countries - Russia, China, Germany, Brazil and India.
On Wednesday, after closed-door deliberations at the Security Council, an
upbeat UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon expressed the optimism that "the
international coalition will have a successful operation" regarding Libya.
Unfortunately, this view is not shared by a large number of UN member
states, many of whom, including the 53 members of the African Union as well
as many members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), including Cuba,
Venezuela, India and Brazil, have openly expressed their "rejection of any
form of foreign military intervention in Libya".
Thus, while Western supporters of "liberal humanitarian intervention" in
Libya dominate the airwaves, their sway over the collective opinion of the
UN community is actually diminishing, in light of the growing skepticism on
the part of many developing nations regarding the true Western intentions
behind Operation Odyssey Dawn.
The opinion that "Libya is attacked because of oil", to paraphrase a China
People's Daily's commentary, is far more popular among Third World
delegates, some of whom have told this author that the UN and its prestige
are bound to suffer as a result of its "inappropriate" action on Libya.
"We need a General Assembly intervention on this matter as soon as
possible," a NAM diplomat said on Wednesday, adding that "time is not on the
UN's side" as the longer foreign intervention continues the less popular the
UN's role will become. This is already reflected in a dwindling list of
countries enlisted in the military campaign, compared to a growing
unofficial yet powerful list of a "coalition of the opposed" at the UN.
A diplomat from South Africa, on the other hand, expressed optimism that the
African Union's call for a mediation meeting in Addis Ababa this Friday
between the Libyan government and the rebels would be heeded by both sides.
"Tripoli has accepted the invitation but we still don't know if any rebel
leader will attend," he said.
Part of the problem concerns the (rather amorphous) rebels, who have set up
a provisional government, and in New York have usurped the authority of the
Libyan mission to the United Nations. A delegate from the African Union
blamed both the rebels and the US-led coalition for preventing the landing
in Libya earlier in the week of an African Union delegation - consisting of
representatives from South Africa, Congo, Mali, Uganda and Mauritania - that
was seeking to mediate between the warring sides.
Nor so far has the UN secretary general expressed any genuine backing for
the AU's conflict-prevention efforts in Libya, throwing his weight instead
behind the US-led military campaign.
The trouble with Ban's statement that "the military campaign will continue
until Libya ends its hostilities with rebels" is that it looks at one
direction only and, by ignoring the rebels' share of responsibility for the
ongoing hostilities, in effect condones violence by the rebels. This points
at one of several "contradictions" of Ban's shaky position on Libya, that
includes his choice of a former Jordanian former minister, Abd al-Ilah
al-Khatib, as UN special envoy on Libya.
"This was a poor choice by the secretary general because of bad blood
between [Muammar] Gaddafi and the Jordanian king, who has supported the
foreign military campaign and is now providing logistical support to the
coalition - that is a veneer for US and NATO," said the NAM representative.
Another reason for widespread misgivings in the UN regarding the no-fly
resolution is that it is increasingly viewed as an American operation
launched by the American president securing UN authorization to circumvent
blocks in the US Congress, thus exacerbating legitimacy problems that were
reflected in stinging criticism the UN as a pawn of Western powers by Iran's
spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (see Obama fans flames of animosity
in Iran Asia Times Online, March 24).
Also, the fact that US diplomats at the UN forced exemptions for Algerian
and Ethiopian mercenaries from prosecution added fuel to the mounting
criticisms of the UN's initiative on Libya. As a result, only mercenaries
from Tunisia, Chad, Niger, Kenya and Guinea will be subject to prosecution
by the International Criminal Court, which is now investigating the crimes
of Gaddafi's regime.
To his credit, Ban has exerted some pressure on the US and its Western
allies to limit their military campaigns, by expressing "extreme concern"
about the plight of civilians, urging the countries enforcing the no-fly
zone not to endanger civilian lives; this after receiving written concerns
from Ukraine about the safety of its nationals in Libya.
Irrespective of Ban's qualifier that the "operation in Libya is not
open-ended", the endgame is nowhere in sight and the conflict may turn into
a protracted stalemate, in which case it is a sure bet that the proponents
of resolution 1973 will lose the popularity contest in the international
community, with debilitating consequences for the UN's prestige and its
secretary general.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click
here. He is author of Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11
(BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and his latest book, Looking for
rights at Harvard, is now available.
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
----[This List to be used for Eritrea Related News Only]----