SELECTING A suitable candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize year after year must have always been a difficult task in a world fraught with perennial conflict, inequality and stark poverty. How much more so this year to make such a choice when the globe is entering what many have already dubbed as the beginning of a Third World War.
And yet the brave souls manning the Nobel Peace Prize selection committee have decided to grant the prize to none other than the fifty-plus something United Nations and its CEO, the always affable and often very pliable Kofi Annan.
“Through this first Peace Prize to the U.N. as such, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes in its centenary year to proclaim that the only negotiable route to global peace and cooperation goes by way of the United Nations,” says the citation for the Award. That statement is an obvious disapproving reference to the unilateral way in which the United States and Britain have gone ahead with their bombing of Afghanistan without even the fig leaf of a UN Security Council resolution authorizing such strikes, unlike in the case of the Gulf War a decade ago.
But the irony of Norwegian Nobel Committee placing its high hopes for ‘peace and security in the world’ on the UN is that it comes at a time when this global body, already emasculated by the wrangling of the Cold War period, has become completely dysfunctional and devoid of any credibility even in the eyes of the few masters it serves, leave alone the rest of the world. By allowing itself to be used as a front for the Gulf War and then turning a blind eye to the completely illegal US bombing of Kosovo two years ago the UN under Kofi Annan has paved the way for the current US war on Afghanistan and its own irrelevance in the world.
The UN as a forum for dialogue between all nations of the world, a concept born out of the death, destruction and misery of the Second World War, certainly has a role to play in the future. But it will need a complete revamping in terms of the way it is dominated by a few Western powers and the high-priced, low-impact bureaucracy that runs it to bring it closer to its original mandate of serving all citizens of the world equally.
Two important steps that need to be taken urgently are 1) withdrawal of the right to veto possessed by the select group of US, UK, France, China and Russia, and selecting members of the security council more democratically and 2) revamping the organization of the UN drastically to staff it with people from all walks of life instead of the domination by government bureaucrats that exists currently. Without these minimum reforms and probably more the organization is headed for extinction like its predecessor the League of Nations, the dodo, the dinosaur and countless others who failed to read the writing on the wall.
--Sundaram