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The UN cannot escape responsibility for this calamity
Dear Editor,
The situation in the Middle East is extremely volatile. It is indeed sad to see the loss of innocent lives including women and children due to indiscriminate killings not to mention the destruction of buildings and other infrastructure amounting to billions of dollars.
Unlike Tunisia and Egypt where there were minimal loss of lives, the conflict in Libya, Yemen, Syria and to a lesser extent Bahrain, is proving to be much more intractable and costly both in terms of human life and destruction to property.
It is unfortunate in this supposedly age of reason and enlightened thinking that a better way could not be found to resolve conflicts rather than reliance on what is often described as “brute force and ignorance”. One of the main and defining characteristic of a modern and civilized society is the liberation of man from what the English Philosopher Thomas Hobbes referred to as ‘a state of nature’ where a situation of “war of all against all” prevailed.
What is currently happening under the euphemism of an “Arab Spring” is in fact the worst manifestation of human degeneration. The United Nations cannot escape responsibility for this calamity. In a sense this is an indictment on humanity as a whole and the United Nations in particular which has far failed to act decisively in the resolution of conflicts that is currently having a debilitation effect in countries of the Middle East and elsewhere.
The time has come for a major restructuring of the UN body to make it much more responsive to the needs of developing nations as opposed to the existing mechanism which reflects the wishes of the bigger powers. The Security Council in particular needs to be overhauled to give more power to emerging economies such as India, China, Brazil, South Africa and the Caribbean.
One would have though that with the ending of the Cold War and concomitant super-power rivalry more attention and resources would have been put in the area of conflict-resolution and human development but the reverse seem to be happening with increasing expenditure on the military and on weapons of mass destruction. It is clear that the military-industrial complex continue to wield enormous powers in the allocation of budgetary resources at the expense of human growth and development.
Hydar Ally
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