Confronted with the horror of Ukraine after listening to President Zelensky, the Security Council considers the impossible reform of the body created after World War II to avoid a repetition of the horror
Before a diplomatic corps accustomed to hearing about massacres and atrocities, the images of the Ukrainian town of Bucha brought a new dimension of horror to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday. The power of the video presented by the Ukrainian president Volodimir Zelensky went beyond the emotional jolt that the diplomats felt in front of so many charred, tortured, executed and twisted bodies, without losing the red nails or the bicycle. The survival of the UN is at stake.
Not since the Caesar Report confronted the Security Council with the tortured bodies of the Bashar al Assad regime in Syria have ambassadors collectively had to see such horror face to face. If then only the past could be investigated, Ukraine today is the present that will weigh on the consciences of the world in the future for not having done anything to prevent it.
It was no longer just Zelensky, pointing to the very existence of the United Nations for having failed in the founding mission of ensuring world peace and preventing the repetition of the Nazi holocaust. “What is the purpose of this organization?” The president questioned them by teleconference. “Are you ready to close the UN? Do you think the time for international legality is over? If the answer is no, they have to act immediately.”
In case anyone was wondering why Ukraine has but not Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen or Libya, Zelensky beat them to it. “To be honest, all those wars should have been stopped a long time ago. If the tyranny had been answered at least once, the world would have changed and, perhaps, there would be no war in my country.
language change
More than a month after his ambassador learned live in that same room through the mouth of his Russian colleague that his country was being invaded, not even this one, Vasili Nebenzia, spoke this Tuesday of “special operation”, but of war. Everyone knows that if it is lasting longer than expected, it is not, as he said, because the Russian troops are advancing slowly “so as not to cause civilian casualties”, but because the UN has failed in “the goals it set for itself in San Francisco in 1945 for the creation of an international organization, impossible to maintain without reforms,” Zelensky said.
His message of renew or die resonated strongly with other members of the Security Council. The Brazilian ambassador, Ronaldo Costa, lamented that the body made up of 15 countries, of which five have permanent seats with the right to veto – the USA, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China -, has not been able to speak with a single voice in this conflict. The proposal to prevent Russia from using that privilege to avoid being punished for its own crimes ran up against China’s supposed neutrality, whose ambassador Zhang Jun asked that no one rush to accept the version of either side, which they blame the other for the massacres of civilians.
Beijing will not allow the power it has in the UN to be taken away from Russia, although it will not be able to prevent the General Assembly, where all countries do vote, from deciding to withdraw it from the Human Rights Council as the US is pursuing. the option of dissolving the organization, which Zelenski put on the table as Hugo Chavez did in 2006 when the world exuded outrage at the US invasion of Iraq. But the idea of updating it in Geneva with a rapid action office to keep the peace and prevent human rights violations was left in the air and also in the mouths of several ambassadors.
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