Between complicity and good wishes

It is no coincidence that, in the context of one of the worst contemporary massacres, the 78th anniversary of the creation of the United Nations (UN) is commemorated.

The organization was founded with the goal of maintaining international peace and security, but, almost eight decades later, the world seems further from that ideal and closer to what a Third World War could be. Conflicts like the one in the Middle East or Ukraine slap us in the face to remind us that that idyllic world with which the UN started does not exist and never did exist.

We continue to take up arms at the first provocation, spending more on weapons than on development cooperation and, worse still, being spectators in front of an organization that falls short of any conflict, violation of human rights or the fulfillment of development objectives.

It is precisely at this commemoration that it is time to indicate that its existence has nothing to do with celebration. Clearly, it has not served to stop the suffering of tens of millions of people, especially children in the most vulnerable regions of the world.

It is enough to mention verbatim article 1 of its founding charter to demonstrate that it does not fulfill its objective: “Maintain international peace and security and, to this end: take effective collective measures to prevent and eliminate threats to peace, and to suppress acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.” No administration throughout the organization's 78 years has achieved the main objective of the United Nations Charter.

At this moment, Israel and Hamas are carrying out a massacre that reveals the worst of our species. And that is not the only example that the UN cannot do anything. The outrageous example is that the power and weight of the UN has failed, over the years, to stop Israel from systematically violating resolutions issued by the General Assembly and the Security Council (such as those related to settlements or the presence of embassies in Jerusalem).

Leaving aside the conflict in the Holy Land for a moment, Yemen was another fiasco for the UN. Years of war and missiles. In the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia, luxurious Bentley cars were even given to pilots who hit the Yemeni targets. The result? 11 million children on the verge of dying of hunger. Like Yemen, dozens of failures from Kosovo to Iraq.

To mention the moral quality or corruption within the organization, we have already analyzed to the point of nausea the disaster of the Toby Club's right to veto in the Security Council, but there are plenty of examples.

The Saudi royals and their allies blackmailed the then secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to be removed from the blacklist of countries that commit violations against children and they achieved it. This, despite an excellently documented investigation that showed that, in the war against the Yemenis, the Saudis bombed hospitals and schools, being responsible for at least 60% of the 1953 deaths of Yemeni children killed by bombs. or missiles.

It is not about disappearing the UN and giving direction to a new organization, no. It is about demanding compliance with its responsibilities, but also strengthening it in order to transform it from bureaucratic paperwork and empty pronouncements to a beacon of light in the midst of a system that is breaking down into a new order for which we were not prepared.