Blueprint for Surrender
In 1992, as the ashes of the Cold War settled, the Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali bestowed upon the leaders a visionary blueprint for strengthening the United Nations’ (UN) role in peace keeping and post conflict reconstruction. The blueprint also included a veto reform to prevent deadlock in humanitarian crises such as genocide along with an early warning system to predict conflicts.
These world leaders ensured it never came to light.
Three decades later, the irrefutable proof of its betrayal is written in blood -the endless burial sites of Rwandan victims and the inability of UN peacekeepers to prevent the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War, stemming from the lack of mandate to use the required forces. As the P5 countries continue to abuse their veto power, the UN behave as spectators, watching the powers that gutted Boutros-Ghali’s vision shield their own interests. Calling it “dysfunction” is farcical - the system is working exactly as it was designed to.
The Smoking Guns
The Syrian strife serves as undeniable proof of how the deliberate sabotage of the 1992 Agenda for Peace enabled said catastrophe. Had Boutros-Ghali’s early warning system been put into action the time protests started to break out, peacekeepers could have been rushed to Syrian Arab Republic (Syria) ergo mitigating any repercussions that were about to take place. In lieu, we saw the unravelling of peaceful protests metastasizing into open warfare. The Russian Federation’s 17 Security Council vetoes were not mere procedural blocks; they were death warrants written in diplomatic ink, shielding Assad and his forces as they carried out attacks that violated every tenet of the peacekeeping policies.
The shadow of Article 43 lurks amongst the dead civilians and the broken civilization- a place that would be intact and blossoming had the UN’s agenda been implemented. However, members of the state prioritized sovereignty over salvation, leading to the nations demise. The systematic sabotage of 1992 is once more evident by the creation of a perverse incentive structure. When countries witnessed the UN’s abilities being stunned and paralysed by veto-wielding powers from P5 countries, they resorted to unilateral interventions or cynical alliances that ultimately ended up worsening the situation. “Parties to this conflict, have benefitted from the selective intervention and woeful negligence of the international community, that has left no Syrian family unscathed,” said Commission Chair Paulo Pinheiro as he comments on the taxing price Syrian families had to pay.
The Ghost Army
Provided Article 43’s “ghost army” had been legitimate – a rapidly conveyable army of UN peacekeepers- a significant portion of these events could have been barricaded. An army with teeth, subsidized by humanitarian aid and pure intentions, could have efficiently put down Assad’s sieges, proscribed chemical attacks, ergo saving multiple lives. Instead, what was observed as a Security Council paralyzed by Russian vetoes, a UN unable to act and thus a battlefield spilt with blood of innocent lives and external mediators contaminating the ground with their own personal interests.
Not only did the nonfulfillment of the 1992 Agenda of Peace fail multiple citizens and blameless individuals, it provided multiple nations with an incentive for war. Without a neutral UN to establish ground rules and maintain peace, Syria become a common ground for war of all foreign powers. The United States of America along with Gulf states provided weaponry to rebel factions, The Republic of Türkiye invaded Kurdish areas, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hezbollah funded the Assad regime further, and Russia bombed entire cities into submission. Every single nation along with the paralyzed UN played a role in the prolongation of this cruel war.
The reason for this solely lies in the fact that there was no international neutral mediator and enforcement mechanism with enough power to enforce peace in the nation. Today, what we see is the effects of a neutered system in 1992 designed to prevent this blood bath, guaranteeing that when Syria burns, fire trucks would be kept locked up and bystanders would throw gasoline on the raging inferno.
The tragedy, whose repercussions we still see today, is not just an allusion of the UN’s failure, it is a failure that was preordained in 1992 when world leaders tore apart the only system that was capable of preventing the massacre of so many individuals. The ghost army was not just “absent” in Syria, it was buried before the war even begun.
