Rhetoric or reality?

With escalating wars, toppling regimes, bloc-based geo-politics, foreign policies guided by media, vested interests, ICC arrest warrants against world leaders, occupation, re-drawing of redlines and territorial boundaries, ethnic cleansing, rampant crimes against humanity and the military industrial nexus, 2024 shook the foundations of ‘peace’ and pragmatism of symbiosis. When the United Nations Charter was unanimously adopted in San Francisco in 1945, ‘peace’ was at the core of its mission. Ironically, 2024 marked the 25th anniversary of the General Assembly’s adoption of the Declaration of Action on a Culture of Peace that defined it not only as the absence of conflict, but a process of sustained dialogue to prevent wars.

While lofty proclamations and photo-ops have often ruled the roost of rhetoric, the world is in unchecked chaos and conflict, teetering on the brink of an Armageddon. Global diplomacy and leadership are languishing in an abyss of bloc-based power politics, dwarfed by the dark forces of disdain for Human Rights. From expanding border skirmishes, use of long-range weapons in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, strikes in Lebanon by Israel to counter Hezbollah, false flag attacks, use of mercenaries and contractors, cultural intolerance, coups, censorship of the media, manipulation of social media, to exploding pagers and radios, new redlines are struggling to make sense of the senseless loss of human life. Add to this heady mix, the overt and covert pillage of natural resources and the avarice of the military industrial complex. It is a nuclear catastrophe waiting to mushroom an antithesis of peace.

With evaporating peace in nearly every flashpoint around the world, one wonders what happened to the UN Peacekeeping Force and the sanctity and faith of nations in the bold diplomacy to restore sanity of world order. Peacekeeping Mission of the UN began in 1948 with the Security Council deploying military observers in the Middle-east followed by their un-armed presence in Jammu & Kashmir. Armed operations began in 1956, following the Suez crises. Since then, 70 peacekeeping missions have been authorised around the world, costing over 4,200 lives lost among the forces drawn from over 120 countries.

Many of these missions including, the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, Cambodian Violence (1975-79), Somali Civil War (1991-Now), Rwandan Civil War (1994), Srebrenica Massacre (1995), Darfur Conflict in Sudan, et al, have been massive ongoing failures. These failures have cost millions of civilian lives and destroyed generations aspiring for peaceful civil societies and a Right to exist. A combination of lack of political will, international polarisation, short-term thinking, ineffective resource allocation and a vacuum in global commitment to lasting peace continues to plague and torpedo, well-intended efforts, despite the embedded Chapter VII to use force beyond the mandate of self-defence.

New definitions of terrorism, geopolitical boundaries based on interpretation of religion, armed conflict driven by proxy, regional and continental blocs of collective coterie, pre-emptive pre-cog pro-active notions of justice, justification of collateral damage, and excessive use of Security Council Veto powers in Peace programmes, forced the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to launch the Action for Peace (A4P) initiative in 2018 that provides a framework of reforms, aimed at the future of effective enforcements.

For an average global citizen, many of these complex discussions and word-smithing on resolutions for consensus declarations, are but a mere expansive gesture, without tangible impact on the ground-zero of strife, aided by the dark-web, oscillating between fear and freedom. It will take more than an A4P programme on paper to translate into an effective ground reality.

With the Trump Presidency taking effect on 20 January 2025, the promise of ‘peace’ has never been stronger and more resolute in its impending manifestation of ceasefires and smothering of NATO fuelled unipolar world-orders. It becomes important to project and implement decisive results-driven leadership, if people are to be assured of credible and timely help in moments of dark despair, hunger, fear and sheer survival. A rapid self-reflection on the time-frame of achieving critical restorative impact versus tedious consensus building that eventually gets a veto smack-down, makes a mockery of an exercise of bandaging a scratch while gaping wounds haemorrhage unchecked in plain sight. A new mechanism is needed that places a premium on redlines of strategic deterrence, overhaul of international justice principles, accountability of axis of unilateral engagement, use of force, political pressure and conflicts of interest while exercising veto, are the analog meta-mimetics vital to sustain the universal realisation of true PEACE. Om Shanti hi!