Recent discussion about UN reform has focused on Security Council
composition and the veto. What would such reform mean for the Arab
world?
When world leaders assembled at the UN last month, the legitimacy
and effectiveness of the organization, particularly that of a
Security Council undermined by disagreements over Iraq, was much on
their minds. Calls for a “UN of democracies,” which would
potentially disenfranchise most of the Arab countries, have been
heard from some in Washington, bizarrely ignoring that the key
disagreements over Iraq were between the major Western democracies
not between Washington and undemocratic states (many of which lined
up on the US within the political coalition it cobbled together to
front its Iraq venture).
The Council today has 15 members, with five having been granted
permanent status in 1945 and endowed with vetoes: China, France, the
USSR (later replaced by the Russian Federation), the United Kingdom
and the United States. The remaining members are elected for
two-year terms by the entire UN membership. By tradition, the Arab
world has occupied one non-permanent seat within the Council drawn
from either Africa’s quota or Asia’s.
With the Council’s higher profile since the end of the Cold War, its
flaws have become more readily apparent. It is secretive, dominated
by the Permanent Five, and heavily weighted toward the
industrialized world, with four of the Permanent Members and several
non-permanent members from the global North. The existence of vetoes
irritates many member states, not least Arab populations frustrated
by repeated American vetoes of resolutions giving expression to
Palestinian aspirations.
Discussions on reform got under way in 1992. Only on working methods
has any progress been recorded. The Council is today more
transparent and meets more frequently in public than used to be the
case. But its composition is bedeviled by anachronisms. As the
distribution of power in the world has evolved, British and French
claims to permanent status have become more tenuous. If a common
European foreign policy is ever to take off, a single European seat
and voice would make much more sense. (The divide between France and
the UK over Iraq, for example, has made a mockery of EU foreign
policy pretensions in the short run.).
Meanwhile, Japan and Germany both staked claims to permanent
membership on their economic weight and their share of the UN’s
bills. Thus an additional permanent seat each is mooted for Asia,
Africa and Latin America.
Where does this leave the Arab world, and, beyond it, the 1.2
billion-strong Islamic community that, since the events of Sept. 11,
increasingly has felt targeted by the “war on terror”?
The profile of Arab countries at the UN has been a disappointing
one. While other regions of the world, notably Eastern Europe,
Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America, have made significant
strides economically, politically or socially in recent years
(sometimes in all three areas), the Arab world is perceived to have
stagnated under ossified, self-serving governments, some of them
oil-addled, displaying few economic development or management
skills. The family-dominated monarchical management by several of
the Gulf countries is little understood elsewhere and seen as a
throwback to models long discarded by the rest of the world.
Arab strategies at the UN have been dominated by the struggle
against Israel, marked by various inglorious episodes. The “Zionism
as racism” resolution of 1974, repealed in the early 1990s, is seen
in retrospect as having been bought with promises to African and
other countries of oil-funded assistance that never materialized.
(African countries that agreed to cut off relations with Israel in
the 1970s have now mostly re-established them.) Arab military losses
in the 1967 and 1973 wars are seen as self-inflicted. And the
Palestinian cause, nearly universally supported at the UN in
principle, has been seriously undermined by suicide bombings that
horrify, and scare, populations worldwide. Three of the countries
under UN sanctions in recent years (Iraq, Libya and Sudan) have been
Arab ones. Arab tactics at the UN itself are also questioned. Every
time a US veto counters a resolution addressing the
Israeli-Palestinian divide, the principal winner appears to be
Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, both internationally and
domestically.
Some Arab states are well represented here at the UN in New York.
Jordan’s UN Mission, notably, is led by one of the few
internationally creditable representatives of Arab royalty, Prince
Zeid bin Raad, a distant cousin of King Abdullah. Young, energetic,
smart and telegenic, he brings to the job deep convictions, an
ability to articulate a compelling Arab case, and earlier experience
as a UN staffer in the Balkans. He is among the 20 or so delegation
leaders at the UN (out of 191) who really matter. Perhaps not
coincidentally, the Arab world’s two most impressive figures on the
New York UN scene are women: UNDP Regional Director for Arab States
Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, a former deputy prime minister of Jordan, and
Al-Hayat’s fearless and articulate correspondent Raghida Dergham.
Egypt and Algeria have both invested heavily in highly professional
foreign services. Both countries have clout here within the African,
Arab and non-aligned groups. Their overall effectiveness is
sometimes undermined by ideologically driven posturing, but when
Libya was forced to renounce its “turn” for a Security Council seat
in 2004-2005, Algeria was tapped to step in for it. That said, there
is widespread awareness that these successful diplomatic operatives
front for tired regimes that have delivered little for their
populations in many years.
The Palestinian authority is represented by Nasser al Kidwa, an
intelligent and popular veteran of the UN scene, who keeps racking
up US vetoes and hollow victories in the UN General Assembly, all of
which may be counterproductive to the extent that they can seem to
encourage current Palestinian strategies that are producing
disastrous results on the ground for the long-suffering Palestinian
population.
The developing countries most often cited for new permanent seats
are India, Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria. Egypt has tried to
register a claim of its own. However, it is Pakistan that has
emerged as the most prominent spokesman for the Islamic world in UN
circles, improbably under its military president, Pervez Musharraf.
Musharraf has made clear that an Indian permanent seat is completely
unacceptable to Pakistan. At a summit of 20 or so world leaders on
terrorism on Sept. 22, Musharraf spoke movingly of the deep-rooted
worry among Muslims that the struggle against terrorism is
increasingly targeted against them. Would a Muslim permanent seat
help? Are other UN members prepared to entrust a veto to any Islamic
government obsessed with Israeli policies as its key (often sole)
foreign policy priority?
These questions require thought within Arab societies. Arab
diplomacy is seen by many here as self-defeating, driven by
frustration with Israeli successes as opposed to the interests of
Arab populations and long-term strategies. The Arab League, while no
worse in terms of cohesion or seriousness than a number of other
regional organizations, inspires little confidence, in spite of
occasionally strong leadership by Egypt’s accomplished Amr Moussa.
Its inability to address meaningfully the depredations of the Saddam
Hussein regime on its neighbors and its own population do not accrue
to its credit.
