Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Bernard Lewis disses the United Nations
While on the subject of differing perceptions, another thing that struck me when I first came to the U.S. was the scorn a large part of the American public heaped on the U.N. True, the body was rendered ineffective during large parts of the Great Cold War Game, but most of the people I knew tended to believe that the U.N. was the best alternative in a pretty messed up world. There is also a tendency in the US to equate the Security Council (and its attendant games) with the rest of UN. True, the UN did diddlysquat in Rwanda, but can we forget the eradication of Smallpox, for example? Does being aware of the inherent dangers of a mutli-lateral negotiating body have to mean constantly dissing it and not giving the organisation any credit?
I was reminded of this attitude while reading a piece in the WSJ by Bernard Lewis, a Princeton professor best known for his best-selling Islam and the West. While dissing the UN, he makes an interesting comparison between the current imbroglio in Iraq with Palestine and India.
The record of the U.N. in dealing with conflicts is not encouraging -- neither in terms of fairness, nor of efficacy. Its record on human rights is even worse -- hardly surprising, since the members of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights include such practitioners of human rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In dealing with conflicts, as a European observer once remarked, its purpose seems to be conservation rather than resolution.
A case in point: In 1947 the British Empire in India was partitioned into two states, India and Pakistan. There was a bitter military struggle, and an estimated 10 million refugees were displaced. Despite continuing friction, some sort of accommodation was reached between the two states and the refugees were resettled. No outside power or organization was involved.
In the following year, 1948, the British-mandated territory of Palestine was partitioned -- in terms of area and numbers, a triviality compared with India. Yet that conflict continues, and the 750,000 Arab refugees from Israel and their millions of descendants remain refugees, in camps maintained and staffed by the U.N. Except for Jordan, no Arab state has been willing to grant citizenship to the Palestinian refugees or to their locally born descendants, or even to allow them the rights of resident aliens. They are now entering their fifth generation as stateless refugee aliens. The whole operation is maintained and sustained by a massive apparatus of U.N. officials, some of whom have spent virtually their whole careers on this issue. What progress has been made on the Arab-Israel problem -- the resettlement in Israel of Jewish refugees from the Arab-held parts of mandatory Palestine and from Arab countries, the Egyptian and Jordanian peace agreements -- was achieved outside the framework of the U.N. One shudders to think what might have been the fate of the Indian subcontinent if the U.N. had been involved in its partition.
There is one relic of partition -- Kashmir -- thats still alive and unresolved. Kashmir remains a problem partly because Nehru in a self-righteous fit (combined with bad advice from Mountbatten) took the Kashmir issue to the UN and offered to hold a referendum -- one that he hoped to win easily given his excellent relations with the older Sheikh Abdullah. The results of that misguided decision has plagued India since. Dont know if the UN can be blamed for Nehru's naivete though.
PS: Are conservative Europeans as dismissive of the UN as conservative Americans?
I was reminded of this attitude while reading a piece in the WSJ by Bernard Lewis, a Princeton professor best known for his best-selling Islam and the West. While dissing the UN, he makes an interesting comparison between the current imbroglio in Iraq with Palestine and India.
The record of the U.N. in dealing with conflicts is not encouraging -- neither in terms of fairness, nor of efficacy. Its record on human rights is even worse -- hardly surprising, since the members of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights include such practitioners of human rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In dealing with conflicts, as a European observer once remarked, its purpose seems to be conservation rather than resolution.
A case in point: In 1947 the British Empire in India was partitioned into two states, India and Pakistan. There was a bitter military struggle, and an estimated 10 million refugees were displaced. Despite continuing friction, some sort of accommodation was reached between the two states and the refugees were resettled. No outside power or organization was involved.
In the following year, 1948, the British-mandated territory of Palestine was partitioned -- in terms of area and numbers, a triviality compared with India. Yet that conflict continues, and the 750,000 Arab refugees from Israel and their millions of descendants remain refugees, in camps maintained and staffed by the U.N. Except for Jordan, no Arab state has been willing to grant citizenship to the Palestinian refugees or to their locally born descendants, or even to allow them the rights of resident aliens. They are now entering their fifth generation as stateless refugee aliens. The whole operation is maintained and sustained by a massive apparatus of U.N. officials, some of whom have spent virtually their whole careers on this issue. What progress has been made on the Arab-Israel problem -- the resettlement in Israel of Jewish refugees from the Arab-held parts of mandatory Palestine and from Arab countries, the Egyptian and Jordanian peace agreements -- was achieved outside the framework of the U.N. One shudders to think what might have been the fate of the Indian subcontinent if the U.N. had been involved in its partition.
There is one relic of partition -- Kashmir -- thats still alive and unresolved. Kashmir remains a problem partly because Nehru in a self-righteous fit (combined with bad advice from Mountbatten) took the Kashmir issue to the UN and offered to hold a referendum -- one that he hoped to win easily given his excellent relations with the older Sheikh Abdullah. The results of that misguided decision has plagued India since. Dont know if the UN can be blamed for Nehru's naivete though.
PS: Are conservative Europeans as dismissive of the UN as conservative Americans?
