As the world's attention turns to whether yet another U.N.
Security Council sanctions resolution will convince Iran to stop enriching
uranium,
Turtle Bay
thought it would
be useful to look at previous resolutions that have strained to meet
expectations. Here's a list of 10 of the most ill-conceived, pointless, or just
plain bad resolutions that have been adopted by the 15-nation security club.
Some of these resolutions are perfectly fine, but contain flaws that have come
back to haunt their authors. Others are good for some countries, but disastrous
for others. And still others have simply outlived their expiration dates. In
any case, they all highlight the fallibility of what dignitaries here like to
call "this august body."
The Somalia Swan Song
Resolution:
1863
Four days before
Barack
Obama
was inaugurated as president of the United States,
George W. Bush
's administration pressed
through a Security Council resolution calling for the establishment of a U.N.
peacekeeping mission in Somalia, which was on the verge of losing its Ethiopian
occupiers and being overrun by Islamist militants. The move had been
strenuously opposed by the U.N. secretariat, which argued that there was no
peace to keep in Somalia and no countries willing to send troops.
"Some view U.N.
Security Council resolution 1863 as simply an empty gesture -- a call for a
U.N. peace enforcement operation in Somalia by an outgoing Bush administration
which knew the force would never be deployed," said
Kenneth Menkhaus
, a scholar at Davidson College. "But others argue
this resolution was actively harmful. It handed the jihadist group al-Shabab a
perfect mobilization tool against the U.S. and the U.N. precisely at the moment
when an Ethiopian troop withdrawal from Somalia and a change of government in
Somalia had put the Shabab on the defensive. The resolution only served to stir
up a hornet's nest in Somalia."
Susan Rice
, the new U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, was also cool to the idea. "I am skeptical, too, about the
wisdom of a United Nations peacekeeping force in Somalia at this time," Rice
said at her confirmation hearing.
The Condi & Sergei
Do-Nothing Iran Resolution:
1835
Relations between the United States and Russia deteriorated
dramatically after the United States sided with Georgia in its conflict with
Russian troops over the breakaway republics Abkhazia and Ossetia. In the midst
of the standoff, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a report
concluding that Iran had not complied with U.N. demands to cease its enrichment
of uranium and that it could not verify whether Iran's nuclear program was
peaceful. Such reports typically serve as a trigger for sanctions. Moscow made
it clear it was not prepared to support a U.S. push for imposing new measures
against Iran. But in an effort to demonstrate that relations between the two
powers were not irreparable, then Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice
and Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov
agreed
to put forward
a resolution
reiterating each country's support for existing U.N.
agreements on Iran's nuclear program, but including no new measures.
The "We Command You to
Stop Killing Your People ... Please" Resolution:
1706
In August, 2006, the U.N. Security Council passed this
little-remembered resolution authorizing the deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping
mission in Darfur, Sudan, to use "all necessary means" to protect Darfuri
civilians. But the resolution, which was championed by the Bush administration,
required the consent of the Sudanese government to be implemented.
"Well, I
think there's a chicken and egg situation here," then-U.S. ambassador
John Bolton
said after the vote. "I
think once the resolution is passed, the consent may be forthcoming more
rapidly than people think."
Sudan never
gave it, and the U.N. was not prepared to fight its way into Darfur. It would
be nearly another year before the council finally reached agreement with Sudan
on a force that it would accept. On July 31, 2007, the Security Council passed
resolution 1769, creating a hybrid United Nations/ African Union peacekeeping
force that has been handicapped by a confused command structure and a shortage
of advanced military hardware, such as attack helicopters.
"The go-to
prescription for any problem is to throw a few peacekeepers at it, no matter
how inappropriate or ineffectual," said
John
Prendergast
, the cofounder of the
Enough
Project
. "Instead of a diplomatic investment in a political solution,
backed by real consequences for continued genocidal crimes, the U.S. supported
a few thousand non-integrated African troops to be deployed throughout a vast,
hostile Saharan terrain. They predictably had little impact, and the political
problems continue to fester unaddressed."
The Pick Your Terrorist
Resolution:
1530
In the hours after al Qaeda-inspired militants bombed a
Spanish train in June 2004, in Madrid, killing 191 people, Spain's President
Jose Maria Aznar
mustered universal support
in the Security Council for a resolution condemning the armed Basque separatist
movement, ETA, for carrying out the attack. The Spanish initiative, taken three
days before Spain's presidential election, showed how easy it is to bend the
will of the council when a member is confronted with a national tragedy. But
the ruse didn't work at home. Aznar was voted out of power, in part because of
anger over what was seen as a political ploy to win support. Although no one in
the Security Council still considers ETA responsible for the attack, the
resolution still remains on the books.
"This is
part of the modus operandi: well, we got it wrong, too bad, let's move on,"
said
Colin Keating
, a former New
Zealand ambassador to the U.N. who now runs the
Security
Council Report
. "This is not an organ that sees itself as accountable to
anybody, and certainly not to the principle of historical accuracy."
The "Trust Me, He's a
Terrorist" Resolutions
:
1267
and
1390
Resolution 1267, passed after the bombings of two U.S.
embassies in East Africa, imposed a series of travel and financial sanctions on
members of the Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan for refusing to
surrender al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to stand trial for the embassy bombings.
After the September 11 attacks, the council expanded the list of targets to al Qaeda
and affiliated groups, setting the stage for the United States, Russia, and
other countries to propose the inclusion of hundreds of individuals on a
U.N.
terror list
.
The
measures created a Kafkaesque predicament for those targeted by them. The
accused had no legal recourse to challenge their listing, and in order to be
removed, they had to convince the state that had placed them on the list in the
first place. But some individuals had no way of even establishing which country
had placed them on the list, because the procedures allow governments to
secretly finger individuals.
Garad Jama
, a Somali-born U.S.
citizen who lives in Minneapolis, said his life was destroyed by the appearance
on U.S. and U.N. terror lists. A year later, in August 2002, Jama was removed
from both lists. "My life has been trouble," Jama told me then. "I have never
had any connection with any terrorism."
Dick Marty
, a Swiss investigator for
the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, denounced the U.N.
blacklisting as a "flagrant injustice" that failed to meet basic human rights
standards. He said the council's activities constituted a "dangerous erosion of
fundamental rights and freedoms." European governments have been struggling for
the past decade to revise the resolution and increase due-process protections.
The Genocide Rescue
Brigade That Never Was Resolution:
912
In April 1994, as Rwandan extremists unleashed the largest
mass killing operation in modern history, the Security Council reached
agreement on Resolution 912, which called for the reduction in the size of an
already under-equipped U.N. peacekeeping force. In a compromise, the United
States allowed the resolution to include a provision that stated the council's willingness
to consider any recommendations by then Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali
concerning the size and the mandate of the
mission. Eight days later, Boutros-Ghali appealed to the council to reverse its
decision, saying the U.N. mandate was insufficient to confront mass killings.
But the United States blocked any decision by the council to expand the mission.
"The
international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share
of responsibility fro this tragedy," then U.S. President
Bill Clinton
said in a 1998 tour to Rwanda. "We did not act quickly
enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to
become safe havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by
their rightful name: genocide."
The Bosnian Unsafe
Haven Resolution:
819
In 1992, the Bosnian Serb Army ethnically cleansed large
swaths of north eastern and central Bosnia, forcing more than 100,000 civilians
to flee to enclaves. On April 16, 1993, the U.N. passed Resolution 819, creating
a "save haven" in Srebrenica, but then failed to muster enough forces to
protect it. It compounded the problem by setting up other safe havens. The site
would later become the site of the worst mass murder in Western Europe since World
War II. Even at the time of the resolution's passage, Bosnians had little doubt
as to the fecklessness of the gesture. Bosnia's U.N. ambassador to the United
Nations,
Mohammed Sacirbey
, immediately
denounced it as a cynical and meaningless act.
"The
tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever," then Secretary-General
Kofi Annan
wrote in a 1999 review of
the U.N.'s failure to protect the people of Srebrenica. "Through error,
misjudgment and inability to recognize the scope of evil confronting us, we
failed to do our part to save the people of Srebrenica."
The Iraqi Collateral
Damage Resolutions
:
661
and
687
These resolutions played a central role in the defeat,
containment, and ultimate overthrow of
Saddam
Hussein
, showing that U.N. resolutions can have extremely sharp teeth. But
?Resolution 661 of 1990, which imposed a
comprehensive economic oil embargo, inflicted such extreme hardship on ordinary
Iraqis that it has since been politically impossible to rally support for
comprehensive embargos. Today, the council mostly imposes targeted sanctions
aimed at a country's ruling elites.
Resolution
687 of 1991, known to U.N. diplomats as the Mother of All Resolutions, set the
terms of Hussein's military defeat in the first Gulf War and required he
destroy the country's weapons of mass destruction. (A decade later, the U.S.
and Britain cited Iraq's alleged violation of this resolution as the legal
justification for their overthrow of Saddam Hussein, against the objections of
other council members.)
This
resolution in many ways started out as an unqualified success, leading to
Iraq's destruction of its WMD program within a year -- a fact that only became
clear when American forces fruitlessly scoured the country in search of banned
weapons after Hussein's overthrow. But it has also become a symbol of the
council's abuse of power. The resolution established a monitoring system -- including
U.N. weapons experts and sensors, drones, and cameras -- so elaborate and
intrusive that it has been described as the world's first "foreign occupation
by remote control." The United States and Britain piggybacked on the monitoring
system to spy on Hussein's security detail.
Although Hussein's
rule has ended and his regime's weapons are long since eliminated, the
resolution continues to live on, placing restraints on the new government's
ability to function like a normal country. The trade restrictions, which
include a ban on chemicals, including pesticides, are "among the constraints
that continue to prevent Iraq from regaining its status as a responsible and
active member of the international community and, at the same time, deprive it
of the benefits of technological progress and scientific research," said Iraq's
Foreign Minister
Hoshyar Zebari
.
The "You Say
Territories I Say Des Territoires" Resolution:
242
As if the Middle East conflict weren't complicated enough on
its own, the Security Council approved Resolution 242 -- which introduced the
"land for peace" formula in 1967, right after the Six-Day War -- with an
ambiguous translation. In English, the resolution calls for the "withdrawal of
Israeli forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict," which Israel
interpreted to mean it could give back some, but not all, conquered territories
in a final settlement. The French version says that Israeli is obliged to
withdraw from "des territoires occupes," which the Arabs interpreted as requiring
Israel give up all the land it seized in the 1967 Six-Day War. The meaning of
the resolution has never been fully resolved, and has tried the patience of
linguists, politicians, diplomats and armed militants. It has also provided
material for countless university dissertations, books, and papers with
ponderous titles like "A Case Study in Diplomatic Ambiguity," and "A Legal
Reappraisal of the Right-Wing Interpretation of the Withdrawal Phrase with
Reference to the Conflict Between Israel and the Palestinians." The ambiguity
reflected an inability of the council to agree on language defining the fate of
Arab territories. "This situation could lead to real trouble in the future,"
then Secretary of State
Dean Rusk
would later recall.
The "What's Bad For
the Bolsheviks, Is Bad For the Yanks" Resolution:
82
This 1950 resolution authorized the U.S. intervention into
the Korean War and provided an early demonstration of the Security Council's
extraordinary power. It also spurred the development of a way to circumvent the
council entirely. After the Soviet Union realized the folly of its failure to
block Resolution 82 (on account of a decision to boycott the council in protest
over its refusal to transfer the Chinese seat from Taiwan to Beijing), Moscow
committed to vetoing all further resolutions challenging North Korea.
In
response, U.S. Secretary of State
Dean
Acheson
introduced a new procedure to the General Assembly called the "Uniting
for Peace Resolution." Its purpose was to allow a member state to bypass the
Security Council and seek approval for action in the General Assembly,
including recommendations on the use of force.
But the
Uniting For Peace formula would later come back to haunt the United States. The
resolution also allows for convening an open-ended emergency special session to
address threats to international peace and security ignored by the council.
Under the leadership of Arab states seeking a way around the U.S. veto, the 10th
emergency session was first convened in 1997 to address the Israeli occupation
of Palestinian territories, and it has never been formally closed.
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