The year 2023 does not bode well for the United Nations. With the war raging ferociously in Ukraine and slowly spreading to Russia proper, the United Nations has become a toothless body. The international body had its hands tied down further when the Russian Federation, which a large part of the world sees as the aggressor in the Russo-Ukraine war, assumed the presidency of the United Nations Security Council in April this year.
The international body is fast becoming irrelevant. We have seen a spate of coup d'etat in Africa, with at least one African nation even ejecting the United Nations peacekeeping forces in favor of Russian mercenaries. However, with the Wagner mercenary group falling from grace, it remains to be seen if Mali would proceed to eject the UN peacekeepers.
Threats of war and instability are not only resonating in the African continent. Azerbaijan had just fought a one-day war against pro-Armenian separatists in the Nargano Karabakh region. With the Russian Federation now stuck in a quagmire in Ukraine, it can no longer provide a security guarantee to Armenia, pushing the nation further into a corner. The Russian security guarantee gave Armenia the confidence to go to war against Azerbaijan in 1992, taking over a fifth of Azerbaijani territory. But Russian blaming would not get us anywhere, as the Azerbaijanis are Azeris, part of the more extensive Turkic stock. From 1915 to 1920, the Armenians became a target of genocide by the Ottoman Empire, killing between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians. Till today, the Turkish government denied that the genocide had ever occurred.
Closer to home, Myanmar has been waging a largely unseen war since 2021. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project website, 39,263 have died since the beginning of the conflict. The ACLED tracked the loss of 112 lives in an armed insurrection in the Indonesian Papua region this year alone. The Tentara Pembebasan Nasional Papua Barat ramped up their armed uprising against the Indonesian government. Despite the mounting death tolls, the United Nations has not tried to send any peacekeeping effort to these conflicts.
Once a guarantor to the South Korean existential existence, the United Nations has long gone downward. The Israelis' frequent flouting of the United Nations resolutions on the Palestinians and subsequent inaction by the body has long irked the neutral world. The most egregious face slap on the international body was the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. The very nature of the veto powers in the United States and four other Permanent Security Council members made it difficult to take action against them. Now that the aggressor is the Russian Federation, the actions to try to remove the Russian Federation from being part of the Permanent Security Council members are hypocritical at best.
Another aspect that weakened the international body is that some territories could not join the body due to other members' protests. The Republic of China (Taiwan) is one such territory. Even though they were one of the original founding members of the United Nations, they lost their position once the People's Republic of China usurped their position.
As the Russian Federation began to feel a pinch in their war logistics, their attempt to obtain ammunition from North Korea caught South Korean attention. The South Korean President, Yoon Suk Yeol, criticized the move as a direct provocation to South Korea and the United Nations, especially considering the possibility of North Korea demanding a quid pro quo, likely access to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) from the Russians in exchange for the ammunition.
At the current rate, would the United Nations lose its relevance and end up like the League of Nations? It would be a bleak future for all of us.
Danny Liew is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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