Look who8217;s talking

It is very nice of the United Nations to agree that Kashmir is a bilateral issue. It is even nicer of it to call upon the five nuclear weapons powers to display the sort of responsibility that ought to accompany the possession of weapons of mass destruction. Precisely what India has been saying all along, but these are just words in the wind, for the UN has no locus standi to talk on disarmament issues. It does not have the legal right to call down the wrath of nations on India, or to try to keep it out of the nuclear club which it has de facto joined. Neither does it have the moral authority to talk peace, not after years of artless blundering in every theatre of conflict known to post-Wall man. The fulminations of the Security Council call attention not to the tensions in South Asia and their possible fallout but to the increasing irrelevancy and impotency of the UN. It reveals an organisation that no longer knows where it is coming from, or where it is headed for.

Over the decades, the UN has devolvedfrom its role as the community of nations, a body mandated to steer the world to a better future. It has been reduced to a mere peacekeeper, little better than the havildar whose brief extends only to maintaining public order, and about as efficient at its job. Worse, that brief has been administered by the globocop. With increasing American domination in peace management affairs, the UN has begun to look like a subsidiary of the US Department of State. The operations of the last few years are a series of debacles, starting with the Balkans. In other areas where the UN should have been assertive in its role as peacekeeper, it was barely visible 8212; Somalia, for instance. The biggest developments in the international arena 8212; Ireland and the Middle East have taken place with almost no UN involvement. It blundered in its handling of the situation in Iraq. The inspectors of its International Atomic Energy Agency only succeeded in giving free political mileage to Saddam Hussein and projecting him as a martyr toFirst World oppression. The UN has been further weakened by the Third Worldism that was launched during the reign of Boutros Boutros-Ghali and which is now being institutionalised in the reign of Kofi Annan. The UN seems to have forgotten that it is a body for all nations and all regions.

The final result of this shameful saga is a body which has lost sight of its purpose. How else could it have committed the supreme folly of issuing a resolution on an area over which it has no jurisdiction. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty are multilaterally negotiated documents, a private affair between nations. The UN has absolutely no business dictating terms on disarmament issues. And having failed to keep the peace in its proper area of competence, it does not have the moral authority to take a stand at all. India appreciates the Security Council8217;s stand on the internationalisation of the Kashmir issue. But when it comes to the diktat calling for a stop to the nuclear weaponsprogramme in the interests of world peace, well, look who is talking.