Indian media campaigns for permanent membership to India in the UN Security Council. But another opinion appearing in the Indian media show how far the Indian state, riding on the masses for the benefit of a few, is different from the peoples of India. Permanent membership to such an India or to any others in the already vicious and outdated Security Council is not the answer to the current global turmoil. It will further aggravate subservience of humanity to the Establishments. The UN and particularly Indian behaviour on Eezham Tamils is a lesson to humanity. Nations and the oppressed inside India should be the first to oppose India’s permanent seat as they would be the first to face the brunt of it. Meanwhile, nations without state all over the world should work for veto-powered collective say in UN to achieve balance for peace, writes TamilNet political commentator in Colombo.
The commentator writes further:
The ‘Security Council’ centred UN, and the five permanent memberships of it, were decided in the wartime conferences of World War II and were made effective after the war by the ‘victorious’ powers. As the permanent members also became nuclear powers, they served the ‘Balance of Fear’ of the Cold War, but the long catalogue of their misuse of the veto power is well known.
The world has moved far away in the last seven decades.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia alone has no moral stand to occupy a permanent seat. It is the same with Britain and France after they becoming part of European Union. Today’s China was not originally the permanent member and the way it became a permanent member is also questionable.
If Chiang’s nationalist China got the status, mainly through the US support, for being an ally of gravity in the war against Japan, then India, which was the main supply of human power and resources to British imperialism in all the wars should also have received permanent representation. It was an injustice of the then international system to the peoples of then India and Pakistan.
By first blocking Mao’s China replacing Chiang’s China in the Security Council, then by conceding the status to Mao’s China when it was needed to counter the USSR, and then by misusing the UN in the ‘war on terror’ after the Cold War, the USA is primarily responsible for making a mockery of the UN and now that is boomeranging against the USA.
Today there is no need for any of them to have veto power in the Security Council since all of them are conquered by corporates that control their state establishments and since they all behave in the same way.
Therefore, who actually need the veto power to achieve a balance for peace are not the so-called powers but the representations of the vast majority of the global masses and nations that are not represented through the degenerating state system of today.
Continuing veto power to a few permanent representatives, especially to those like China, whose human rights records and nationalities rights records are one of the lowest in contemporary history, will soon prove to be dangerous to the peoples of China and to entire humanity.
In the meantime, expanding the permanent representation with veto power to include some more abusers will not serve the balance for peace. It will rather serve only a concerted pounce on humanity first and then lead to a confrontation to the dimensions the world has hitherto not seen.
An effective international check against the tragedy is the world system devising ways and means to include a representation of non-state actors, nations without states and the diaspora phenomenon, and give it the necessary clout to stop aggression.
The shadow power or the real power behind the international scenario today, i.e., the multinational corporates have a duty in this respect to encourage the dialectical process between state and non-state to get the balance, if they really care for ‘peace’ of mutual benefit.
The Indian foreign minister S M Krishna was euphoric in stating recently that India got the support of 187 votes in the 192-member UN in getting elected to a non-permanent member seat after 19 years. The small countries in the UN have to be farsighted about the future of international community.
In June last year the Vice Chairman of the International Commission of Jurists, Justice John Dowd condemning the attitude of governments favouring another government, the jurist said in the context of Eezham Tamils that governments are the greatest invaders of human rights and the United Nations is not an organisation of nations but governments.
He urged his country Australia to do something for the cause of minorities who don’t have a forum or voice and offer them a platform until the world evolves a body for that purpose.
But, Eezham Tamils should strongly oppose the term ‘minority’ to describe the situation. Many of the peoples who have a history of chronic state-oppression and who long struggle against it, are in fact nations without state. They deserve treatment like any other state deemed independent and sovereign, until the World finds suitable remedy. Calling them as minorities is again falling into the trap of the degenerating system of state today.
Eezham Tamils who are the latest victims of state violence and genocide abetted or tolerated by the UN system, its Security Council, and countries like India and China and a host of others in the UN Human Rights Council have to consider it a task to work with other such peoples in the world in creating an awareness about the right kind of UN reforms rather than allowing the UN becoming a den of aggressors, old and new.
Obviously this should go as a long-term agenda of Eezham Tamils, for the sake of them as well as for the sake of entire humanity, while giving evidence to the UN investigations on war crimes in the island, rather than expecting any justice coming in the short-term from the present setup of the UN.
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