Africa

Nigerians are finding ways to get over the heartbreak of losing the Africa Cup of Nations final.

Secretary-General António Guterres.

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 12 2024 (IPS)

The United Nations and its Member States are up against what the Secretary-General António Guterres calls existential challenges for the world, and they must be organized in taking a united approach to addressing these issues through ambitious plans and widespread reform.

In his statement to the General Assembly on February 7, 2024, Guterres laid out his priorities for the coming year, consisting of various ongoing issues that call for urgent action. He has called for member states to fulfill their obligations to the UN Charter, under which every person’s right to life and dignity should be guaranteed. But at present, governments are undermining the tenets of multilateralism with no accountability, he said.

The mechanisms in a multipolar world that would keep relations in check are not present, he added. “We are seeing the results: a dangerous and unpredictable free-for-all with total impunity,” he said. “…As conflicts proliferate, global humanitarian needs are at an all-time high, but funding is not keeping pace.”

When he spoke to reporters on February 8, 2024, he added: “When the world is divided and the geopolitical divides today are enormous, when we see that we are no longer in a bipolar or unipolar world, we are kind of on the way to a multipolar world, but in a very chaotic situation. Power relations became unclear. And what we see today in the world is political actors doing whatever they want and with total impunity.”

Since the previous year’s SDG Summit, calls have been made for major reforms, notably in the Security Council and in international financial architecture. Much has been said about the divisions within the Council that have prevented decisions from being made. In the context of the current war between Israel and Hamas, resolutions that would have called for a humanitarian ceasefire have not been passed due to those member states that did not vote in favor.

To that end, Guterres has said that the Council’s working methods must be updated in order to make and implement decisions, even where there is division. He added that the Council must also take steps to become more representative, noting that it was unacceptable that the African continent did not have a permanent seat in the Council.

In the context of international financing, Guterres remarked that the architecture was failing to provide all countries with the affordable finance needed to achieve shared goals. They do not provide the “basic function of providing a financial safety net for all developing countries,” he said. This has come as a way to address the ripple effect of disruptions in development and the global supply chain that have been caused by the compounding crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate-induced disasters, and conflicts.

The countries that would benefit most from stronger financial support in the current architecture are receiving the least of its benefits. Developing countries in particular have been hit hardest by the disruptions in the global economy, which Guterres noted will be addressed in the upcoming conferences for Small Island Developing States and Landlocked Developing Countries.

The Summit of the Future, which is scheduled to take place this September, is the hope that the international community will not only accelerate its efforts to meet its existing commitments but implement concrete measures to respond to present and emerging challenges. Guterres expressed that among the outcomes of the summit, what should emerge is a path forward “for a number of important transformations,” understanding that the institutions are outdated and that what is needed is multilateralism that is more inclusive and reflects present realities.

In addition to proposing institutional reform, some of the intended outcomes from the Summit include accepting A New Agenda for Peace, which outlines the Secretary-General’s vision for multilateral measures in peace and security. A Global Digital Compact was also proposed as a document that would, according to Guterres, “maximize the benefits of new technologies and minimize the risks”. This is pertinent when considering the public interest in artificial intelligence in recent years, and efforts that have been made within the tech sector and even in the UN through its AI Advisory Board to determine how to regulate it.

When it comes to climate change, Guterres stated that he would be “mobilizing the entire UN system to assist” to support member states to take action in addressing climate change through financing, among other plans of action. He called for expanding the channels for climate finance through innovative sources and for all countries to agree on their goals at COP29 this year. This must be of service to the countries “at the frontline of climate chaos”.

What the Secretary-General is asking—and has been asking for some time now—is ambitious reform while seeking urgent action. The Summit of the Future is one of the answers to the concerns raised in the previous year, when it was made clear that we were far off track in achieving the SDGs. What should have been markers of progress stand now as reminders of the work left to be done, and even regression in some cases.

As long as these issues persist, and as long as the international community is reminded of how they impact everyone, they are interconnected. “In one form or another, every element connects to the most essential of all human endeavours: the pursuit of peace,” Guterres said.

“In today’s troubled world, building peace is a conscious, bold, and even radical act. It is humanity’s greatest responsibility. That responsibility belongs to us all, individually and collectively.”

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Imams and protesters unite in anger at a poll delay rocking Senegal's democratic credentials.

Credit: Pexels/Plato Terentev

By Jessica Henn, Channe Lindstrom Oguzhan and Angie Elizabeth Carrion Cueva
BANGKOK, Thailand, Feb 12 2024 (IPS)

Let’s call her Anita. Four years ago, her life took an unexpected turn when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted everything she knew. As businesses closed and economic uncertainty loomed, Anita, like countless others, found herself forced out of work. Providing for her three young children became a daily struggle, prompting her to seek informal work as a subsistence agricultural worker to ease the financial burden.

Just as Anita began to rebuild her life, hoping for a semblance of normalcy, climate change left Anita’s village facing the worst drought in decades, destroying the crops on which they survived. With no social protection for informal workers like Anita, the aftermath left her grappling with the devastation, both emotional and economic.

Yet, through it all, Antia’s resilience shone bright. She sought opportunities, determined to shield her children from the harsh realities they faced.

However, the challenges did not cease. Against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions and global climate shocks, food prices began to soar. Anita, despite her tenacity, found it increasingly difficult to put food on the table for her children. In a difficult situation, Anita reached out for assistance, seeking a loan to navigate the financial hurdles.

Yet, discriminatory legal frameworks and gender norms prevented Anita from accessing the financial lifeline she desperately needed, pushing her further into poverty.

Anita’s story is not an isolated case. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 165 million people globally have fallen (back) into poverty, with an additional 75 million more people living in extreme poverty, on less than USD $2.15 a day. It is estimated that 8 per cent of the world’s female population (342.4 million women and girls) will live on less than $2.15 a day by 2030 if current trends continue.

In the Asia-Pacific region, existing gender poverty gaps have widened, particularly in South Asia which is forecast to have 129 women in the 25-34 age group living in poverty for every 100 men by 2030, rising from 118 women to every 100 men in 2021.

Yet, while recent polycrises have reversed hard-won gains towards poverty eradication, strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective can get us back on track to eradicate extreme poverty and close the growing gender poverty gap.

A policy simulation analysis using the International Futures Model estimates that nearly 150 million women and girls globally could be lifted out of poverty by 2030 with increased spending on social protection, investments in the green economy, better infrastructure and education.

Pooling resources for these investments is achievable through a combination of public and private financing mechanisms, ensuring gender mainstreaming in all economic policies and interventions.

Strengthened gender-sensitive public institutions play a pivotal role promoting gender equality in all spheres, supported by investments in women’s leadership and political participation, alongside institutional initiatives aimed at overcoming biases and stereotypes.

With this compelling case, has there ever been a more important moment in history for multilateral collaboration and action than now? For many voices at the just concluded Asia-Pacific Regional Consultation on the 68th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW68), the call to action rang equally loud and clear.

Participants from diverse backgrounds shared valuable contributions and insights on accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective.

While noting the challenges, they shared innovative solutions to strengthen the policies and institutions and develop innovative new sources of financing for women’s economic empowerment. These included promoting access to finance for women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises, and policies and programmes to reduce poverty and vulnerability by promoting labour markets.

Credit: ESCAP Photo/Caio Perim

The two-day regional consultation resulted in a set of suggested actions highlighting the importance of addressing the interconnections between gender, poverty, and economic inequality, and stress the significance of regional collaboration, involving governments, civil society, the private sector, and other stakeholders.

These suggested actions will contribute towards the set of agreed conclusions for member States to take under advisement at CSW68 that will take place from 11 to 22 March 2024 in New York.

It is now that the global community must come together in solidarity, for the benefit of the most vulnerable population groups, to make good on the promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, to leave no one behind.

Disclaimer note: Anita’s story is inspired by real accounts of women experiencing poverty in the Asia-Pacific region. However, the story has been fictionalized for narrative purposes, and any similarities to real individuals or events are purely coincidental.

Jessica Henn is Consultant, SDD, ESCAP; Channe Lindstrom Oguzhan is Social Affairs Officer, SDD, ESCAP; Angie Elizabeth Carrion Cueva is Intern, SDD, ESCAP

Relevant SDGs: 1, 5, 10, 17

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Myanmar’s resistance called a ‘silent strike’ on February 1, the third anniversary of the military coup. This main street leading to Sule Pagoda in central Yangon was relatively quiet, but residents said fewer people heeded the strike call this year. Credit: William Webb/IPS

By William Webb
YANGON, Myanmar, Feb 12 2024 (IPS)

Landing in Rangoon nearly 100 years ago, a young Chilean poet described “a city of blood, dreams, and gold” with “leprous streets”. The flourishing capital of then British-ruled Burma and its major port were a must-see staging post on an Asian tour.

Pablo Neruda’s poem from 1927 rings true today. The city, now called Yangon, with well over five million inhabitants, is bursting with life—part hedonistic and part dystopian—and both fuelled and choked by the grip of the junta that seized power three years ago.

Empty rail tracks in central Yangon. Fewer trains are running in Myanmar because rail workers quit in protest at the 2021 coup, and resistance fighters are targeting lines and trains used by the military up and down the country. Credit: William Webb/IPS

 

The military regime organised a rally in central Yangon on February 1 to counter the resistance’s strike call. People were transported there under heavy security and given flags and a free lunch. Credit: William Webb/IPS

The reality is that Myanmar no longer exists as a coherent country, except on maps. Three years of extremely brutal conflict between a complex patchwork of pro- and anti-military forces has left Yangon—still a vital commercial hub—a relatively calm yet deeply troubled bubble amidst a stop-start process of nationwide fragmentation.

The military that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s twice-elected government in February 2021 is losing control over large chunks of Myanmar. Armed mainly by China and Russia, the junta uses aerial supremacy and artillery to terrorise a population that, for the first time in modern history, has seen the Bamar majority turn overwhelmingly against the generals in Myanmar’s heartland.

But the war is not quite knocking at Yangon’s door yet, and the military has been emboldened to issue tourist and business visas to foreigners, no doubt welcoming their US dollars.

Yangon’s other “reality” is that despite being ranked as one of the world’s poorest countries, it is actually awash in money—the blood and gold described by Neruda. Billions of dollars flow from the expanding production and trade of narcotics, particularly methamphetamines, ketamine, and opium/heroin, and from vast casinos, brothels, and scam centres along the border with China and Thailand, populated by victims of trafficking.

Street markets in Yangon are brimming with food, but people complain vociferously about soaring prices and low wages. Despite the conflict, food is in plentiful supply in Myanmar’s biggest city. Credit: William Webb/IPS

 

Aung San Suu Kyi, whose government was overthrown after a second landslide election victory, is jailed in the capital, Nay Pyi Taw. She remains popular, and her image can be occasionally spotted in the street, here with other icons. Credit: William Webb/IPS

 

Chinatown in Yangon is packed with people preparing Chinese New Year celebrations on February 10. Tense relations between China and the Myanmar junta have made the community nervous. Credit: William Webb/IPS

 

A woman with two toddlers and a baby on her lap begs outside a temple in Yangon. People say more children can be seen begging these days as the economy struggles and migrants move into the city from conflict areas. Credit: William Webb/IP

The junta does not directly control all these operations, but it takes a large slice, as do allied militias, criminal gangs, and some ethnic armed groups.

A gleaming white Bentley is parked outside one newly opened nightspot frequented by the offspring of the Yangon elite—the “cronies” whose businesses prosper in spite of, or often because of, sanctions imposed by the West. Inside the plush bar, youngsters in smart and sometimes scanty attire order expensive western drinks and truffle-flavoured fries.

“Madness prevails,” says a charity worker who describes walking through a compound and seeing a Rolls Royce, a Ferrari, and “even a Bugatti” parked there. Such ostentatious wealth abounds, but he cannot find a nurse to employ.

Elsewhere, the boom-boom of Burmese techno-rock and the strobe lights of the Levitate nightclub exclude conversation among the heaving dancing mass. There is “the choice of ecstasy, ketamine, or cocaine” instead, as one regular put it.

“FUCK THEM WE SLAY,” a neon sign proclaims ambiguously.

A neon sign illuminates the Levitate nightclub in Yangon, where revellers dance through curfew hours, fuelled by booze and cheap drugs. Credit: William Webb/IPS

 

A book seller said motivational books were popular these days. This classic by Carnegie was translated into Burmese by U Nu, a former prime minister who was ousted by the military in 1962. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Further down the social scale, Yangon’s familiar open-air “beer stations” are thriving too. Supporters of the resistance take a stand by boycotting the once popular Myanmar Beer brand owned by a military conglomerate, but more expensive alternatives exist.

And then there are the growing numbers of beggars, especially children who dodge traffic to thrust their hands through open car windows or huddle with their mothers in the shade of overpasses.

Rush hour traffic is still chokingly intense and was even quite busy on February 1, the third anniversary of the coup, when the resistance called a ‘silent strike’, urging people to stay off the streets in peaceful protest. Adherence in Yangon was patchy and less than last year.

“People are tired and want to get on with their lives,” comments one long-time observer.

And this is the nub of it. Life goes on, but it does not mean the Burmese are less opposed to the junta, as before when troops crushed street protests in 2021 with mass arrests and live bullets. Aung San Suu Kyi, stuck in prison and turning 80 next year, remains popular.

However, people do seem to be losing faith in the opposition’s declarations of the military’s imminent collapse, even if, as one businessman opined, “There’s a strong sense that things are falling apart now, that the military is overstretched.”

Some Yangon residents are also tired of feeling guilty that they are living relatively well while young resistance fighters in far-flung rural parts are dying in combat and conflict-zone civilians are being bombed in villages, schools, and temples.

A woman selling umbrellas made of waterproofed cotton. She said times are difficult. Credit: William Webb/IPS

Many are leaving the country—legally with passports, risking dangerous routes through the jungle to Thailand, or clandestinely by sea for the persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority. Studying Japanese is suddenly popular in Yangon.

The city by day seems normal enough, with little visible military presence in most places, but by night it changes. Plainclothes police demand ID papers and go through mobile phones. Suspicious bank payments, perhaps to the opposition, mean arrest or demands for a bribe.

Ye, whose business collapsed in the post-coup pandemic lockdown, has sent his children back to a public school after taking them out of classes, as many did. They won’t see their mother for a long time. She has gone abroad to earn money as a care worker.

Like everyone you meet, the family frets about the soaring cost of living, especially food.

Daily power cuts, sometimes scheduled but often not, make life almost unbearable in the intense pre-monsoon heat. People are drawn to the air-conditioned cool of shopping malls, powered by giant diesel generators.

Still, Yangon’s vibrancy is irrepressible. Artists are again holding exhibitions (staying clear of controversial themes). Chinatown is a hive of shoppers ahead of the Lunar New Year, ushering in the Dragon, a symbol of good luck and prosperity, but also of power.

• William Webb is a travel writer whose love affair with Asia began 50 years ago

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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In Gaza, every day is a struggle to find bread and water. Without safe water, many people will die from deprivation and disease. Credit: UNRWA

By Robert Misik
VIENNA, Austria , Feb 9 2024 (IPS)

A bloodbath is taking place in the Middle East, and yet, the world is embroiled in absurd debates. One is tempted to say, paraphrasing Marx: here the tragedy, there the farce. The German-speaking world – and Germany in particular – takes a decidedly pro-Israeli stance, while in other societies, an equally dubious anti-Israeli position prevails.

At the beginning of October, Hamas and other Islamist groups not only launched an attack from the Gaza strip but also carried out a cruel massacre. Over 1 200 people were killed, most of them civilians, young party people, including many peace activists: the majority of the inhabitants of the affected kibbutzim belonged to the Israeli left.

Horrific war crimes were committed, which cannot be justified as ‘collateral damage’ of legitimate resistance. Nor can we ignore the fanatical ideology of radical Islamism, which eliminates empathy and justifies acts of bloodshed.

However, due to the bloody history of at least 75 years of conflict and the recent history of occupation policies and the irresponsible escalation strategies of Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical right-wing governments, the attack met much approval within the Palestinian population. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have been weakened for years, and their support is dwindling.

Rights and obligations

The Israeli government responded with massive military action and retaliatory strikes. This, on the one hand, was to be expected – no nation in the world could not have reacted to such an attack – but, on the other hand, the war immediately escalated in a horrific manner, which was, unfortunately, also to be expected. Around 27 000 people have now lost their lives in Gaza. Entire families have been wiped out by the bombardments.

Under international law, Israel has the right to respond to such an attack, but every country also has the duty to act ‘proportionately’. What is proportionate – in relation to threats or to defined, legitimate war aims – is a complicated legal debate.

But it is largely undisputed that the shrugging acceptance of tens of thousands of civilian casualties cannot be justified, even in the fight against a ‘terrorist’ organisation. And excessive force that literally razes Gaza to the ground, which destroys the livelihoods of the civilian population, the supply of food and the medical-care system, is itself a war crime.

Put quite simply: to a bestial war crime by Hamas, Israel has itself responded with war crimes. And the matter is made worse by the fact that leading members of Israel’s government have engaged in appalling rhetoric, from Manichean religious-war language to vile fantasies of mass expulsions and ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Just as the history of the conflict has for decades provided both sides with arguments for viewing the other as the perpetrator and their own side only as the victim, the same has been true in these recent months. Palestinian figures see Hamas’ actions as a justified reaction to oppression, while their Israeli counterparts see excessive (and criminal) military action as a legitimate response to terror.

Yet, that is precisely the problem. Those who paint a Manichean, black-and-white picture fall far short of the terrible complexities of this conflict. There are horrible pogroms in the West Bank by right-wing extremist settlers and members of the army, and violent expulsions of Palestinians and an expropriation of their land. And there are terrible acts of violence involving unspeakable cruelty by Palestinian militias.

But the world is increasingly sorting itself into vocal supporter groups of fans and followers. In many societies, this is obviously about their own history and identity. To be more precise: a complex reality is being accommodated to the apparent requirements of their domestic politics of remembrance — and if it doesn’t fit, it is being made to.

Manipulation strategies

Germany and Austria have adopted a decidedly pro-Israeli position. First, this can be explained by their own history, the fatal past of genocidal anti-Semitism which escalated under the Nazi regime into the Shoah against European Jews.

This is why Germany has been an ally of Israel for decades: the former chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared it an important element of the German Staatsräson (reason of state). This is why there is, properly, a strong sensitivity in Germany towards anti-Semitism and the threat to Jews and why the identity of Israel as a safe ‘home’ for all Jews is supported.

The extreme right in both Germany and Austria supports Israel today, on the one hand because Israel’s opponents are Muslims (whom it hates even more than contemporary Jews) and on the other because this is the best way to immunise itself against the accusation of being ‘Nazi’.

In addition, however, the Israeli right – above all the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his party, in alliance with right-wing Jewish lobby groups abroad – has sought in recent decades to denounce almost any criticism of Israeli policy as ‘anti-Semitic’ and thus morally eliminate it.

In German-speaking countries and some other societies with a very well-founded sense of guilt, this manipulation strategy has worked: nobody wants to expose themselves to the suspicion of being seen as a person with morally reprehensible opinions — in other words, as an anti-Semite.

Susan Neiman, a Jewish-German-American intellectual who is director of the Berlin Einstein Centre, recently wrote a major essay in the New York Review of Books in which she spoke of a ‘philosemitic McCarthyism’ that had taken on the characteristics of ‘hysteria’.

Things had gone so far that ‘non-Jewish Germans publicly accuse Jewish writers, artists and activists of anti-Semitism’. As in the early postwar campaign of denunciation of ‘anti-Americanism’ led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, dissenting views are silenced.

In extreme cases, this has had bizarre consequences. Conferences have been banned, at which large numbers of people with the most diverse views should have been exchanging them. In Kassel, an Indian art critic and curator lost his position because he had signed a (rather stupid) Israel boycott petition years ago, despite having unequivocally condemned ‘the terror unleashed by Hamas on 7 October’ as a ‘terrible massacre’.

A Berlin theatre removed from its programme a humorous play (The Situation) about the conflict of narratives by the Austro-Israeli playwright Yael Ronen — now that the situation ‘puts us on Israel’s side’.

‘Israel’ has become a ‘trigger point’ in the culture wars, as with ‘wokeness’ or similar themes elsewhere. ‘Part of a proper culture war is … to want to misunderstand the other side at all costs’, the critic Hanno Rautenberg wrote recently in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit, about the German debates on Israel: ‘One wrong word or even just one unsaid word and you’re threatened with discursive excommunication.’

No doubt there are forms of criticism of specific Israeli policies that carry more than just anti-Semitic overtones, but in most cases, this is far from reality. As a result, German public opinion is oddly many times more ‘pro-Israeli’ than Israeli public opinion itself.

Good and evil, oppressor and oppressed

If there is one-sidedness in the discourse in the German-speaking world, this certainly exists in other parts of the world as well, and not only in Muslim or Arab countries such as Turkey, Iran, Jordan or Indonesia.

In the United States, Britain and other societies, significant sections of the public and the academic left cultivate their own one-sidedness. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is described in categories of imperialism and colonialism, into which it hardly fits.

The ‘post-colonial’ left has adopted theories, some of which are quite inspiring and have opened up productive new intellectual horizons, but it has radicalised them into Manichean delusions. The world is divided into oppressor and oppressed — and, in this simple-minded worldview, the person identified as the ‘oppressed’ is always right. Since oppressors can never even comprehend the experiences of the oppressed, the oppressed must always be proved right.

From there, it is only a small step to the final clicking into place: the Palestinians are black / ‘people of colour’, the Jews are white, and in Israel, they are beacons of ‘US imperialism’. Even if one cannot find everything Hamas does to be right, as an authentic expression of the resistance of the oppressed against the system of oppression it is ‘right’ in a higher way. Israel, on the other hand, is a ‘settler-colonialist’ project.

Since, in this perspective, the idea of free debate is a ‘bourgeois ideology’ only invented to support the ruling power, dissenting views should be delegitimised or, if necessary, shouted down, because what is deemed ‘sayable’ and what ‘non-sayable’ is merely an effect of power.

Just as in Germany, any criticism of Israel is labelled ‘anti-Semitic’ and thus compromised as morally culpable, so any defence of Israel’s right to exist is dismissed as an expression of ‘racism’.

Amid all this dogmatism, one gets the impression the whole world has gone mad. While Germany unconditionally supports Israel, as an imperative of its own guilt and exterminationist anti-Semitism, American, British and other discourses are also characterised by the imperatives of their own history: racism, the genocide of indigenous populations, the enslavement of black people, imperial exploitation, colonial oppression and exploitation. Fragments of the real are used arbitrarily and pressed into the scheme of one’s own politics of memory, for which ‘identity politics’ is then actually the opposite decryption.

Most of the time, all this has less to do with real Palestinians and real Israelis than who and what one wants to be — how one wants to see the world and oneself in it. One poses as a heroic fighter against anti-Semitism, or against racism and colonialism, while the external appurtenances of reality become at most the set for this show of the self, as props in a play— to whose script reality must be made to conform.

Source: Social Europe and International Politics and Society (IPS)-Journal, Brussels.

Robert Misik is a writer and essayist. He publishes in many German-language newspapers and magazines, including Die Zeit and Die Tageszeitung.

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Sebastien Haller fired Ivory Coast into the 2023 Nations Cup final, having returned to action 13 months ago after testicular cancer.

Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 9 2024 (IPS)

As the UN continues its never-ending saga on the reform of the Security Council (UNSC), one of the political anomalies that keeps cropping up is the absence of Africa, among the five permanent members (P5)—a privilege bestowed only on the US, UK, France, China and the Russian Federation.

The African continent, which has been shut out, consists of 55 states with a total population of over 1.4 billion people.

Providing a list of his “priorities for 2024”, Secretary-General Antonion Guterres singled out the reform of the Security Council— a lingering issue in an institution which is nearly 79 years old—when he told delegates on February 7, “it is totally unacceptable that the African continent is still waiting for a permanent seat”

Guterres said: “And indeed our world badly needs: Reform of the Security Council; Reform of the international financial system; the meaningful engagement of youth in decision-making; a Global Digital Compact to maximize the benefits of new technologies and minimize the risks and an emergency platform to improve the international response to complex global shocks.”

Responding to a question at a press conference during the South Summit in Uganda last month, Guterres was critical of what he called “a clear injustice, a flagrant injustice, that there is not one single African permanent member of the Security Council’.

And, he said, one of the reasons was that most of the countries of Africa were not independent when the UN institutions were created.

“But in recent public declarations, I’ve seen the permanent members being favourable to at least one African permanent member. United States said so, the Russian Federation said so, China has been positive in this regard, UK and France too”.

“So, for the first time, I’m hopeful that at least a partial reform of the UN Security Council could be possible for this flagrant injustice to be corrected, and for Africa to have at least one permanent member in the Security Council”.

But it is not guaranteed, he cautioned, because nothing depends on the Secretary-General. “It depends exclusively on Member States, on the General Assembly, but for the first time I think there are reasons to be hopeful.”

Meanwhile, the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, which has over 670 million people, with 12 Latin American countries and 21 self-governing territories, mostly in the Caribbean, is also missing from permanent membership in the UNSC.

Martin S. Edwards, Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs, School of Diplomacy and International Relations, at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, told IPS: “I think that we should be talking seriously about issues of representation in the Security Council, but the challenge is how to move from rhetoric to a serious proposal”.

There are different ways to frame this, he pointed out.

“The G20 added the African Union (AU) as a member, and of course, we could also think about regional seats along the lines of the Human Rights Council. But this having been said, the key issue is what is the ask.”

The US position has been to increase regional representation without a veto. “I realize that this might not go as far as advocates would want, but since there is already a significant movement underway to delegitimize the veto, insisting on the veto would put those efforts at cross purposes.”

But the bigger and unaddressed challenge for all proposals for reform is that they do not respect the realities of US domestic politics.

The US Senate would have to approve any proposed change to the charter, and the window for any proposed reform is now largely shut because of the realities of the US electoral calendar, declared Edwards.

Responding to a question at a news briefing last month, UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the Secretary-General’s opinion is reflective of a lot of people’s opinion.

“That you have a whole continent, where in fact, a lot of the UN’s peace and security work is ongoing. And no Member State from that continent sits on the body that discusses and decides policies relating to peace and security”.

“And he’s talked about the injustice of those countries that were former colonies that were penalized twice — once by being colonized and second, by not even being at the table when the architecture of the multilateral system was discussed.”

“How Member States decide on Security Council reform, what that will look like, will be up to them. He’s made his feelings known, and I think it’s not the first time he’s said something like that. But in the end, it will be up to Member States themselves to decide. And whether or not they take into account the view of António Guterres is, we will see”, said Dujarric.

Purnima Mane, Past President and Executive Director, Pathfinder International and a former Assistant Secretary General (ASG) and Deputy Executive Director (Programmes) at UNFPA, told IPS the Secretary-General’s regret at the injustice of the absence of even a single African permanent member of the Security Council opens up a long-standing debate on the relevance of the original framework used in the appointment of permanent members of the Security Council.

She said the discussion on the relevance of the current permanent membership of the Security Council is not new but has not really gone anywhere. The issue of the relevance in the modern world of permanent membership based on historical reasons has been somewhat circumvented by establishing the possibility of non-permanent membership.

“The SG in his comments stated that each of the five current permanent members have expressed their openness to this change but when the rubber hits the road, coming to clear rules of implementation will not be easy.

She posed several pertinent questions: “Will the existing rules of the UN SC membership be altered entirely? How many such permanent positions will be created? And will this membership be limited to a specific country like the current membership, or based on regional allocation like Africa as the SG suggests? “

And what will be the process for determining which country gets this privilege and will it also be in perpetuity or a rotating membership like the non-permanent membership? asked Mane.

She said there will be lots of questions will come up, including the willingness of the five permanent members to act on what the SG refers to as their openness to having an African country join the cadre of permanent membership, and the response from other regions which are not represented in the permanent membership currently.

“Knowing how complex the processes in the UN can be, any change process in the membership model is bound to be long, complex and resisted by some countries. If the issue of justice and fairness is to be raised, UN member countries might well question the relevance in today’s world of the need for maintaining the historical reasons for the establishment of permanent membership of the Security Council” she argued.

This certainly opens the door for a broader definition of membership of the Security Council, challenging the hierarchy of privileges which might be seen as unjust in today’s world.

The UN could certainly benefit from a discussion of this nature. Even if this discussion will involve lengthy and complex processes to come to any resolution, it is surely worth the effort in order to ensure that UN membership is seen as equal, in essence, in the eyes of all its members.

https://www.ipsnews.net/2024/02/reform-un-security-council-good-try-lost-cause/

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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