“So long as the heads of UN member states and UN peacekeeping officials demonstrated that instead of stopping Serbian aggression they were concerned only with preventing the Bosnian population from starving while it was being killed, there will be more Bosnias to come,” Leitenberg predicted. “It was exactly what happened in Darfur between 2003 and 2006.”Ticking off the slaughters that ravaged Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Congo and Darfur, Leitenberg says each failure by the West has left the West “morally degraded” and compromised future interventions by the temporizing UN. “Aggression unopposed and unpunished anywhere will encourage aggression elsewhere, and the United Nations will not be able to mobilize its membership to oppose aggression if it does not do this on all occasions uniformly, and at the earliest moment, rather than ‘as a last resort,’” Leitenberg writes. “That holds as well for intrastate conflict.”
“States still have not taken the lesson that it is ‘in the national interest’ of every state to construct a global security system that protects all nations and their peoples,” Leitenberg says.
Instead, the UN needs to develop a true peace-keeping capability and that means compelling the major powers to surrender the veto over peacekeeping matters and subordinate their foreign policies to the will of the world assembly. It also means they must actively disarm. People everywhere are hungry for peace.
#(Sherwood Ross is an American reporter who covers military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)
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