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Top ten list for bad UN resolutions

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Anchor Marco Werman speaks with journalist Colum Lynch about a column he wrote for Foreign Policy magazine where he names his picks for the ten worst U.N. Security Council resolutions ever.

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MARCO WERMAN:  As we heard in that report, peacekeeping operations are an instrument, a tool, of the U.N. Security Council.  So the mandates given to U.N. peacekeepers often come straight from Security Council resolutions.  Colum Lynch covers the United Nations for the Washington Post.  He also writes for Foreign Policy magazine’s Turtle Bay column about the U.N.  He recent wrote about what he calls the top worst U.N. Security Council resolutions ever on F – P dot com.  So, Colum, what in your opinion was the worst U.N. Security Council resolution ever?

COLUM LYNCH:  My God, there’s so many to choose from.  I think that probably a couple would stand out.  In 1993 the Bosnia resolution, the safe haven resolution which was supposed to protect the civilians of Srebrenica.  That was a pretty bad one.  A short some time afterwards there was one of the largest scale killings in Europe since the Second World War.  Of course, there’s the Rwanda Resolution 914 in which after the genocide began in Rwanda, the U.N. Security Council decided to actually reduce the size of its presence in the country.

WERMAN: Well as long as you mentioned Resolution 819 which was the creation of safe havens for Bosnians, one of which was in Srebrenica and as you said, it turned into one of the worst mass murders in Europe since World War II, did it have, in your opinion, the worst unintended consequences of any U.N. resolution?

LYNCH: I think that there are resolutions which probably people wouldn’t think of that had far more reaching consequences.  Resolution 661 which was imposed by the Security Council after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.  That was essentially the last time that the U.N. Security Council imposed a comprehensive economic embargo on a country.  The figures have been disputed, but there have been numbers in the hundreds of thousands that may have died as a result of it through malnutrition.  That’s kind of disputed, but there’s still sort of a consensus that these kinds of resolutions impose really terrible conditions on ordinary people and the U.N. doesn’t even talk about them anymore.  They talk about targeted sanctions against elites from various regimes, like Iran and North Korea.

WERMAN: Now I often hear diplomats using resolution numbers oh, you know, 1706 and I don’t really know what they’re talking about.  Can one assume that like resolution 1910 through 1920 are kind of addressing the same subject or are they always going to be completely different from number to number?

LYNCH: No it depends.  If you were during the period of the first Persian Gulf War, almost all the resolutions were on Iraq.  Today you would have one day you would have something on Somalia, you’ll have something on Iraq the next day.  It’s a big mix of things.

WERMAN: Does the U.N. ever retire resolutions?  Do they remain in effect forever?

LYNCH: They remain in effect forever.  There’s a debate going on right now on the Iraq resolutions.  There were a lot of resolutions imposing restrictions on weapons of mass destruction, on purchase of chemicals, all sorts of other pesticides for the Iraqis and this was done under the regime of Saddam Hussein and now there’s a concern that this is a new government, they shouldn’t have all these conditions imposed on them and we need to lift these resolutions.  But it is becoming a very complicated, difficult process.  There is a real fear that if you go back and change resolutions, that this will open up a Pandora’s Box and people will want to go and rewrite all the legislation over the Middle East resolutions and that sort of thing.

WERMAN: Let’s talk about Resolution 1706 which gave the green light to the U.N. troops to go to Darfur and Sudan to protect civilians facing a genocide there.  The resolution was designed so that it required the consent of the Sudanese government.  Now most people recognize that the genocide was being perpetrated by a Sudanese government sponsored militia, the Janjaweed [PH] and, not surprisingly, Sudan’s government never consented.  Why was Resolution 1706 designed that way?

LYNCH: Political cover.  Essentially the United States, which sponsored the resolution, was under enormous pressure to do something to stop the killing there.  So they led a negotiation over a resolution that would set up a peacekeeping operation to address these issues.  They could go back to their constituents and say look, we did something, now the ball is with the U.N.  But the way it works here, is unless you’re going to go in with a fighting force, which nobody was willing to do in Darfur, you can’t do it unless you have the consent of the government.  I think that people find that a bit perplexing, but that’s the way the world functions here.

WERMAN: What’s on the table for the Security Council resolution wise in the next couple of weeks?  What movement specifically on North Korea?

LYNCH: On North Korea we have an effort by the South Koreans and the Americans to try and bring some draft or resolution the Council condemning North Korea’s attack on the South Korean vessel.  The Chinese have taken the position that they’re not 100% persuaded that the attack occurred and they want irrefutable evidence before they will go in that direction.  So that’s going to be an interesting debate to watch over the next couple of weeks.

WERMAN: Colum Lynch writes for Foreign Policy magazine’s Turtle Bay column.  Thank you very much.

LYNCH: Alright, thanks for having me.

WERMAN: You can find a link to Colum Lynch’s top ten list at the world dot org.

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