Peace (42 page)

While delegates in San Francisco openly approved of disarmament, most were just as openly opposed to granting the UN legislative powers to enact or enforce international laws, putting it in binds, because they would impinge on state sovereignty. Instead, the Charter allows the Assembly to initiate studies and make recommendations for “encouraging the progressive development of international law and its codification” without the power to enact or enforce them.
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The International Law Commission (ILC) was created in 1947, which unlike many other UN bodies is composed exclusively of field experts, not necessarily Assembly delegates. As the International Military Tribunals at Tokyo and Nuremberg headed by Allied jurists prosecuting Axis officials
were winding down, the ILC published its Principles of International Law based on their charters. In them were legally defined in detail for the first time in history:

Crimes against peace
: i. Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; ii. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i); and

War crimes
: Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave-labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, devastation not justified by military necessity.

The ILCs takes progressive development mandate to mean “the preparation of draft conventions on subjects which have not yet been regulated by international law or in regard to which the law has not yet been sufficiently developed in the practice of States.”
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Its mandate of codification is taken as “the more precise formulation and systematization of rules of international law in fields where there already has been extensive State practice, precedent and doctrine.” Within these frameworks, the ILC has produced an extensive body of research. But the Assembly's inability to enact or enforce their findings or recommendations is, to stress the point, among the primary weaknesses the UN has inherited from the League of Nations, which no longer exists.

Post-conflict peacekeeping is, in contrast, an area in which the UN greatly surpassed the League, but again only when the Council and Assembly have taken concerted decisions and the conflicting parties have agreed to cooperate. Since 1945, over sixty missions have been carried out by the UN's peacekeeping forces, recognizable by their light blue helmets, which have also negotiated 172 conflict-ending settlements. But a distinction must be made between diplomatic peacemaking that must be well underway before peacekeeping forces under UN command can be deployed. In other words, without a peace treaty or other accord already in place, there is no peace for the UN to keep, which is why peacemaking always precedes peacekeeping. Early UN operations make this distinction clear and intimate how the organization works. Days after Japan's defeat in the Second World War, Indonesia declared independence from its wartime occupiers only to see its pre-War colonizer, the Dutch, attempt to regain control. Two years into war, the conflict was brought to the Council, which called on them to end hostilities and enter arbitration. They agreed and an international Consular Commission of diplomatic observers from six neutral states was sent to monitor the peace that had
thus been made. Fighting resumed a year later, so the Council replayed its peacemaking role by arranging another ceasefire. With only sixty-three “military observers” working at any one time, neutral zones between the conflicting forces were defined and implemented, and supervised troop withdrawals were complete in months.

This first, unofficial UN peacekeeping operation demonstrated limits and potentials of post-conflict intervention. It and many other post-Second World War conflicts originated with imperialism, as does one of many peaces that have yet to be fully kept. After the Second World War, Palestine and its rapidly growing Jewish population were still a British colony. On Britain's request, the UN created a committee to review and make recommendations on decolonization, which proposed partitioning the territory into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem as an international city. Despite fierce protests, the Assembly voted the plan into effect and by 1948 civil war between Palestinian Jews and Arabs was raging. On the day Britain announced its withdrawal, Israel declared independence. In less than a week, the civil war escalated into an international conflict. Several UN ceasefire calls went unanswered and a truce was finally reached. To oversee its implementation the Council created the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), the first official UN peacekeeping operation. Showing initial promise, UNTSO kept the peace but only for a month due to support constraints and the unwillingness of the parties to cooperate. After a week more of fighting, a second truce was reached as talks for a new peace plan began. When the UN mediator was assassinated by Jewish radicals in September, negotiations fell through, and war resumed by October. In December, the Assembly formed the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, which facilitated Armistice Agreements (1949) between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, respectively. The Commission also held a conference that formally ended this Arab–Israeli War, though no final territorial agreement was reached. The ongoing conflicts in the region, still monitored by UNTSO, can be traced back to these events.

The fact that this UN peacekeeping mission is also its longest-running testifies to the determination of the early organization to overcome the impotence of the League of Nations and its ongoing commitment to seeing them through. The fact that the conflict has yet to be resolved makes evident the magnitude of the problems the UN is willing to tackle. The UN now recognizes UNTSO as its first peacekeeping operation, but the term “peacekeeping” as an umbrella term also covering peacemaking and peace-enforcement only gained currency after the Suez Canal Crisis. In 1954, the US and the Britain withheld funds for a Nile dam when Egypt bought arms from Soviet satellites. In retaliation and need of revenue, Egypt nationalized the Canal halfway into 1956, and England, France and
Israel invaded. The US sponsored a Council resolution calling for a ceasefire. Britain and France vetoed, and the US brought the matter to the Assembly. Under a Uniting for Peace measure, the Assembly called a ceasefire, successfully negotiated by Canadian foreign minister and later Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. He proposed a UN Emergency Force (UNEF) to secure the ceasefire, supervise troop withdrawals and patrol buffer zones along armistice lines, which became a model for future UN post-conflict operations. For this proposal, Pearson is considered the father of modern peacekeeping, which still seeks to secure one world, many peaces one peace at a time.

However, it was UN Secretary General Doug Hammarskjöld who, acting on Pearson's proposal, defined the roles, responsibilities and structure of UNEF and was its chief executive. Egypt accepted UNEF in its territory, Israel did not. At its peak, over 6,000 UNEF peacekeepers from ten neutral countries were on the ground. Within months of UNEF's deployment, all foreign troops had left Egypt, and buffer zones were secure. The first victory for the so-called “soldiers of peace” lasted ten years, when Egypt's request for their withdrawal, in preparation for an attack on Israel, was granted. Following the quick though temporary successes of UNEF, the UN carried out several other peacekeeping operations on the same basic premises, with varying objectives tailored to the conditions and participants, including: the UN Observation Group in Lebanon (1958), the UN Operation in the Congo (1960–64), UN Security Force in West New Guinea (1962–63), UN Yemen Observation Mission (1963–64), the Second UN Emergency Force (1973–79) along the Israeli– Egyptian border, UN Disengagement Observer Force (1974–Present) along the Israeli–Syrian border, and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL, 1978–Present). UN peacekeeping forces were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988, which they certainly deserve. But as this summary list of UN peacekeeping operations shows, while UN post-conflict interventions have on the whole been effective, they are limited by the UN's peacemaking efforts which are in turn limited by its inability to take independent action from its member-states, making the success of post-conflict interventions dependent upon their often fickle wills, those of the parties involved and Big Five consent. In the end, the merits and defects of the UN with regards to world peace stems from its aspiration to and partial actualization of a world government on the nation-state model and system of its members.

The UN makes clear that one world, many peaces requires international cooperation as long nation-states exist. Social justice movements, generally holding that isonomic laws only work within isonomic socioeconomic systems, likewise make clear that one world, one peace also requires intra-national transformation as long as discrimination exists.
Two of many social justice movements have had particularly profound but polarizing influences on how non-violence is now perceived. On the one hand, social justice movements like that for civil rights in the US show that non-violence is not only the way for them to succeed, but that the absence of non-violence could lead to their non-existence. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–68), a theology student from the US State of Georgia, heard A. J. Muste speak about Gandhian Satyagraha and how its methods had been successfully applied to challenge and change discriminatory laws on local and national levels. King, already leaning in this direction since reading Thoreau and Tolstoy, was enthralled with the possibilities and results transformative non-violence like civil disobedience and noncooperation had to offer to the ongoing US civil rights movement.

After receiving his doctorate, King joined a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, as preacher and became involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the country's largest civil rights group. There, in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man and was arrested. King helped organize a bus boycott that drew national media attention. When his house was bombed he prevented a riot by convincing an angry crowd not to give in to hate. A year later, with the boycott ongoing, the Supreme Court declared the state's separate but equal policies, by definition not isonomic, unconstitutional and they were lifted. Reflecting on the bus boycott in
Stride Toward Freedom
(1958), in which he advocated transformative non-violence as a platform for civil rights movements worldwide, King wrote “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice. . . Today the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either non-violence or non-existence.”
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He then formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which sponsored a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and together with the NAACP they organized civil disobedience campaigns throughout the country. Soon after extending the transformative non-violence civil rights platform to end poverty and war, he was assassinated.

On the other hand, social justice movements like that against apartheid in South Africa show that non-violence has its limits. After a university dismissal for protesting against its racial policies, Nelson Mandela (b. 1918) committed himself to the cause of the African National Congress (ANC), which was to present a united front against racial discrimination. He helped launch the ANC's Youth League in 1944 to mobilize next-generation activists and in two years was an executive of the ANC itself. At the time, Mandela was for a non-violent approach to change towards social justice through boycotts and non-cooperation campaigns and against non-black ANC membership; he would reverse both of his positions in the coming years. The openly white supremacist National
Party began enacting apartheid laws prohibiting permanent residency in cities to non-whites, forcing them to set up outskirt shanty towns, and outlawing mixed marriages and sexual relations. At this point, Mandela adopted a multi-racial ANC membership position. The ANC worked with the Indian National Congress Gandhi had founded and other non-black groups in a general strike on May 1, 1950, after which the National Party made protests of state policies illegal under pretexts of suppressing communism, an excuse which with the Cold War had become a common practice within the Capitalist bloc.

The ANC then began a Defiance Campaign, including civil disobedience such as black use of white-only facilities and remaining in cities permanently, which led to the imprisonment of ANC leaders but also the quintupling of its membership. But the Campaign only triggered further suppressive and discriminatory laws, so Mandela founded a support group to aid those arrested in the anti-apartheid movement. The NAM was by this time not only speaking out against apartheid, but advising its members not to trade or maintain political relations with South Africa. The UN soon did the same. In 1953, a Freedom Charter was issued by a coalition of South African civil rights groups including the ANC, declaring “people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality.”
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Officials responded by arresting Congress members; mass protest marches, sit-ins and boycotts were carried out but to no avail. The ongoing ineffectiveness of non-violence in bringing about social justice led some ANC members to consider using violence, including Mandela. The ANC was banned by the National Party government, though it continued to work underground. Mandela was arrested, tried for what he intended as a ploughshare but became an act of sabotage in which one person was killed, and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964.