Russia vetoed a proposed United Nations Security Council resolution intended to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the genocide at Srebrenica, which took the lives of at least 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. They were slaughtered in an area that UN peacekeepers were supposed to protect but had abandoned, as armed Bosnian Serbs overran the UN positions. The massacre was the worst to occur on European soil since the end of World War II.
The United Kingdom had drafted the text of the proposed Srebrenica commemoration resolution, which it submitted for a vote on July 8 after having failed to satisfy Russia’s demands for certain changes. Though supported by a majority of the Security Council members, the proposed resolution was said to be too “confrontational and politically-motivated," according to Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin in explaining the reason for Russia’s veto. "The draft that we have in front of us will not help peace in the Balkans but rather doom this region to tension," Churkin added.
In response, the United Kingdom’s Deputy UN Ambassador said that "Genocide occurred at Srebrenica. This is a legal fact, not a political judgment. On this there is no compromise."
This stand-off was an embarrassing demonstration of the Security Council’s increasing irrelevance. Russia, perhaps smarting from rebukes in the Council chamber over its own aggressive actions in Ukraine and urged to exercise its veto power by Serbian leaders, blocked a consensus over what should have been a no-brainer. The Security Council would have simply adopted the legal conclusion of two international tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice, which had already found after investigation of the facts that what happened at Srebrenica was indeed an act of genocide.
“We gather in humility and regret to recognize the failure of the United Nations and the international community to prevent this tragedy,” said UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson in remarks he delivered to the Security Council before the failed vote.
Divisions in the Security Council over how to characterize this past tragedy are tragically repeated in the UN’s handling of today’s crises in such places as Syria, Sudan and South Sudan, and Yemen.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, who joined the Security Council meeting via videoconference, minced no words in his critique of the UN’s conduct twenty years ago and today. He said that “so long as there is no respect for the UN, it will be likely that further massacres will be perpetrated.”
There is little respect for the UN today. It has not learned fully the lessons from the genocide that occurred in Srebrenica in 1995 or the genocide of a year earlier in Rwanda. Yes, its peacekeepers have better resources and clearer mandates today than they did twenty years ago. In many peacekeeping missions, they have authorization to use all necessary means in defense of civilians rather than simply play defense in static positions. And they are better armed. That is all for the good, but is not enough to really make a critical difference. It is the UN culture itself that is the problem.
On one level, the UN is no more than the sum of its member states. It is in essence a collection of sovereign states with disparate interests and political systems that accords the same voting rights in the General Assembly to dictatorships that it does to democracies. And when a permanent member of the Security Council believes it has a strategic national interest at stake, it will use its veto, as Russia did in knocking down the proposed Srebrenica resolution. As a collection of member states, the UN will necessarily reflect the conflicting interests and agendas of its members on fundamental issues of war and security, and no cosmetic reforms can change this basic fact. For that reason, the UN has still not reached an acceptable definition of “terrorism,” for example, let alone figured out how to deal with it effectively. Genocide has a legal definition, as set forth in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Nevertheless, as the Russian veto demonstrates, political agendas will sometimes trump international legal niceties.
However, on another level, the UN as an institution is actually less than the sum of its parts. The UN system consists of bloated bureaucratic silos interested in preserving their own fiefdoms and entitlements. Its leaders moralize, while covering up corruption and other misdeeds in their own ranks. They operate on the assumption that “international law,” a phrase they use with abandon and define willy-nilly on the fly, is a label with special meaning if used in UN resolutions or other official documents. The fact, for example, that the UN Human Rights Council and parts of the UN Secretariat treat Israel as a worse violator of “international law” than the Syrian regime or the Sudanese regime shows just how empty this assumption really is. And when asked to take a position on a politically complex but morally straight-forward matter, the UN’s leaders and spokespersons often equivocate. They hide behind lowest common denominator generalizations and the “both sides must show restraint” defense. Sometimes they just refuse to answer at all. For example, the Secretary General’s spokesperson would not provide the Secretary General’s position on whether the current UN Security Council embargo on Iranian imports and exports of conventional arms should be lifted, as Iran has reportedly demanded in connection with the nuclear-related negotiations going on in Vienna. Such Iranian arms have flowed to Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen, enabling more killings in all those war-torn areas. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has often condemned the violence in those areas and the proliferation of weapons in general terms. But Iran, which is a prime source for such weapons and trained terrorists, gets a free pass. Even when asked to comment on ending the arms embargo separate and apart from the negotiations, the spokesperson would not address the principle at stake on its own terms.
To be sure, Russia’s veto of the proposed United Nations Security Council resolution intended to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the genocide at Srebrenica resulted in another bad day for the Security Council. However, changing the rules on the exercise of the veto power, as some have suggested, will not fix what is wrong with the UN’s prevalent culture of moral relativism, self-righteousness and an entitlement bureaucracy. Until those deficiencies are addressed, the UN will continue to lose respect.
