The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (57 page)

These resolutions presaged and helped lay the groundwork for international acceptance, in 2005, of Israel’s unilateral steps to end the occupation of Gaza. On 23 September 2005, the Security Council endorsed the position taken by the Quartet, welcoming and accepting Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. In 2005, the Security Council articulated its vision of a ‘viable, democratic, sovereign, and contiguous Palestine’.
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Taken together, the Security Council resolutions of this period constitute, in effect, an international shift away from the premise of ‘land for peace’ on the basis of negotiations, and towards a quasi-managed, quasi-supported, quasi-coordinated process of (a) unilateral steps by Israel to disengage from Palestinian territory and (b) internationally supported steps to establish the economic and institutional preconditions for a Palestinian state. At the time of writing, however, this trend had been shaken by the election in January 2006 of Hamas to a majority position in the Palestinian parliament.

If the Security Council’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian process was in some ways complicated by the Hamas victory in 2006, its broader role in the management of Arab–Israeli conflict in the region was expanding. The character of that expansion has been unusual.

In September 2004, by way of a joint French-US initiative, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1559 in response to indications that the Syrian government would seek, through proxy actors inside Lebanon, to rig Lebanon’s national elections scheduled for that month.
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The rigging of Lebanese elections is hardly new. However, given the close political relations between France and Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the main opponent of the Syrian-backed candidates, France sought international support to push back against Syrian interference. At the same time, relations between the US and Syria (which had quietly improved in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, as Syria had provided some useful intelligence to the US on the whereabouts of some al-Qaeda members) were deteriorating rapidly in light of US perceptions that the Syrians were allowing Baathist remnant forces to operate out of rear positions inside Syria and that Syria was allowing foreign fighters into Iraq through its territory. France and the US joined forces on Resolution 1559, which called for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Lebanon and for free and fair elections in Lebanon. The resolution also called on the Secretary-General to report on the parties’ implementation of the resolution, which he did by tasking Terje Roed-Larsen, shortly before he retired from UNSCO, with the mandate of Special Envoy for the Implementation of Resolution 1559.

The Security Council role in dealing with Syria–Lebanon issues was then dramatically magnified when Rafik Hariri was assassinated in Beirut. In response, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1595 and established an International Independent Investigation Commission into the assassination of Rafik Hariri.
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Detlev Mehlis was appointed as Commissioner of the Investigation Commission and, over the course of 2005, developed a detailed report which directly pointed the finger at the Syrian government. At the time of writing, the Security Council is continuing to push for deeper investigation into Syria’s role in Hariri’s death.

Meanwhile, of course, also at the time of writing, the Security Council had the question of Iran on its agenda. The referral of Iran to the Security Council by the International Atomic Energy Agency on 4 February 2006 created an entirely new dimension to the Security Council’s work in the broader Middle East.

Indeed, the relationship between the UN Security Council, Iran, and the Middle East came to a head as fighting broke out between Israel and (Iranian-backed) Hezbollah inside southern Lebanon in July 2006. Over the course of July, Hezbollah fired several hundred Katusha and other rockets (from an estimated arsenal of over 10,000) into Israel, and Israel launched a major air and ground attack on Hezbollah positions and related infrastructure in southern Lebanon.

At the time of writing, the Security Council was negotiating a resolution that would do two things familiar to students of the region’s history: set out in formal terms the basic requirements of a ceasefire that had been negotiated among several of the major parties, and lay out the elements of a UN-authorized international force to be deployed in southern Lebanon in the context of Israeli withdrawal.

The futility of UNIFIL – by this stage an observer force wholly unable to contribute to the implementation of Resolution 1559 – was evident. In discussing an international force for deployment in southern Lebanon, there was initially no consideration of an expanded UN force and debate moved immediately to the question of an international force, possibly under NATO or EU command (and almost certainly French-led.) Yet at the same time, there was no question about the fact that the Security Council was to be the forum for the negotiation of any set of political or operational arrangements to end the fighting. The Security Council was to be central to any possible resolution, as it had been in the earliest days of the Arab–Israeli wars. Indeed, as a result of both French and Arab pressure, the Security Council eventually authorized neither an EU nor NATO operation, but an expansion and transformation of UNIFIL into a major and credible enforcement operation. Between a major new operational role in southern Lebanon, and with the Hezbollah connection between the Arab–Israeli question and the Iran question, the Security Council is taking on perhaps its most direct role ever in shaping the politics of the region.

The Arab–Israeli theatre has been a laboratory for UN innovation: the first subsidiary organ (UNSCOP), the first specialized agency (UNRWA), the first mediator (Count Folke Bernadotte), the first observer mission (UNTSO), the first peacekeeping mission (UNEF), the first integrated mission (UNSCO), and the first instance of investigatory challenge to a member state (Detlev Mehlis).

In its actions in the Arab–Israeli context, the Security Council has also been a reflection of broader international political realities: of the transition from the United Kingdom to the US as the principal power in international politics; of the rise of the Soviet Union; of US–Soviet tensions, and then détente, and then tensions again; of the dominance of the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union; and of the assertive but complicated role of the US in seeking to shape the political direction of the Arab world in the aftermath of 9/11 and the 2003 Iraq war.

However, at no point in its history has the Security Council been the primary driver of events on the ground in the Arab–Israeli theatre. Nevertheless, at its most active, the Security Council has certainly contributed to the shape of those events. This was particularly so in 1948 and in 2000 – two periods that share the characteristics of seeing Security Council political action directly connected to peacekeeping missions and to peace-making activity by UN envoys.

Evaluation of the Council’s role depends fundamentally on one’s theory of its role. For those who continue to aspire to a UN that is in real terms the primary actor in international peace and security, the UNSC’s role in the Middle East can be
seen at best as limited and disappointing. For those who see the UN as little more than a reflection of the realities of international power, it is important to have regard to two important facts: that the existence of the UN provided the US and the Soviets at critical junctures with a tool for exiting processes of escalation or the risk of confrontation on the ground; and that, at various junctures, UN officials – especially Bunche and in a later phase, Roed-Larsen – were able to combine the political weight of the Security Council, the diplomatic weight of the Secretary-General, and the realities of negotiations on the ground to achieve important results. It is notable that the innumerable ceasefire and armistice resolutions passed by the Security Council in the absence of UN envoy activity – especially in the 1970s – had little or no effect on the behaviour of the parties to the conflict. Rather, it is in the direct connection between political action by the Security Council and diplomatic and operational action on the ground by the Secretariat that we find the UN contributing to the resolution of conflicts on the ground.

RAHUL ROY-CHAUDHURY

A
NALYSIS
of the Security Council’s involvement in India-Pakistan issues tends to focus on the Kashmir conflict and the UN-mandated plebiscite to determine its final outcome that has never been held. This was a result of the messy transfer of power from British colonial rule to two newly independent states of India and Pakistan, currently celebrating their sixtieth anniversaries. But the Security Council also had a role, albeit limited, in the first two India-Pakistan wars in 1947–9 and September 1965, despite the fact that there was no direct great power involvement in these conflicts. At the same time, it was a Permanent Five (P5) member, the Soviet Union, and not the Council, which helped broker the formal end to the Second Kashmir War of 1965, with the Tashkent agreement between India and Pakistan on 10 January 1966. More generally, India-Pakistan issues have challenged UN norms on both territorial integrity (the Kashmir conflict) and the issue of non-proliferation (the nuclear weapon tests of 1974 and 1998). In addition, India’s status as a rising great power, but not a member of the P5, has created tensions in its relationship with the UN – a body which has been highly supportive of India rhetorically but not in India’s own disputes.

Since the partition of British India in mid-1947, India and Pakistan have fought ‘three-and-a-half’ wars with each other. Within months of partition, the first war over Kashmir took place (26 October 1947–1 January 1949). This was followed sixteen years later by skirmishes in the western Rann of Kutch in the spring of 1965, and the brief Second Kashmir War from 1 to 23 September 1965. In December 1971, both countries also fought a fourteen-day war in relation to the crisis in East Pakistan, leading to the creation of Bangladesh. Nearly thirty years later, they fought the eighty-day Kargil conflict in Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), from 4 May to 26 July 1999. Although the Kargil conflict was a tense infantry- and artillery-dominated war, it was restricted geographically with only limited use of air power (by the Indian side alone) and no employment of naval power. This mutual restraint was largely the result of the nuclear weapon tests that had been carried out by both countries a year earlier. In 1962 India also fought a three-week border war with China (22 October-2 November) in the Himalayan region, which left an unresolved territorial dispute between the two countries.

In addition to these conflicts, India and Pakistan faced three mutual military crises short of open conflict. The first erupted in January 1987, following India’s launch of a major military exercise named ‘Brasstacks’, amidst the Sikh insurgency, with subsequent Pakistani troop deployments and Indian forces moving into ‘forward positions’. This was defused the following month with both sides withdrawing their forces. Secondly, in 1990 Indian and Pakistani troop movements and countermovements amidst the insurgency in Indian-controlled J&K raised Western concerns over a conventional war. The crisis was defused in April 1990, with both sides again agreeing to redeploy their armed forces. This was followed by the visit of the US Deputy National Security Advisor, Robert Gates, to India and Pakistan in mid-May 1990.

The most serious crisis between the two countries took place in 2001–2, when over a million armed forces personnel confronted each other across the border following the terrorist attack on India’s parliament on 13 December 2001. India blamed the attack on Pakistani-aided and -based terror groups, a charge denied by Pakistan. After two particularly tense periods in January and May 2002, with prospects of a full-scale conventional war and fears over nuclear escalation, both sides agreed to defuse tensions through US and UK facilitation.

The Security Council’s involvement in these different conflicts and crises varied. The UN first became involved with the India-Pakistan wars on 1 January 1948, when Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, on the advice of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Governor General of India, took the case of Pakistani aggression in princely J&K (following its ruler’s accession to India) to the Security Council. This resulted in the first Council resolution on India and Pakistan, Resolution 38 of 17 January 1948, calling for restraint and an improvement in the security environment on the ground. Further resolutions followed, aimed at preventing the escalation of the conflict between the two countries, and calling for the conduct of a UN-supervised plebiscite to determine the accession of J&K to either India or
Pakistan. Security Council resolutions on India and Pakistan were also adopted during the 1965 war and soon after the 1971 war (during this conflict the Soviet Union vetoed three draft resolutions calling for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of both Indian and Pakistani forces), and the 1998 nuclear weapon tests. There were no resolutions during the India-Pakistan Kargil conflict, or during the three crises in 1987, 1990, and 2001–2. Nor did the Council pass a resolution during the Sino-Indian war of 1962, due largely to the fact that the People’s Republic of China was not represented at the UN at the time, and to India’s reluctance to take any conflict to the UN in view of its prior experience over Kashmir.

During the Cold War, India and Pakistan found themselves on opposite sides of the global political-military divide. While Pakistan eagerly joined the Western military alliance through its membership of defence organizations such as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), India tried to remain detached from military alliances by becoming a major proponent of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). But NAM was more often than not seen as being allied to the Soviet Union, especially at the height of the Cold War. Nonetheless, this did not stop India from seeking arms and weapons from the UK and the US after its defeat in the Sino-Indian war of 1962, although without much success as it was seen with some suspicion in its quest by the West. Its subsequent political and military relationship with the Soviet Union provided it with the guarantee, both perceived and actual, of a Soviet veto for Security Council resolutions when required. Meanwhile, Pakistan could count on the support of its Western allies, especially the US, for an equivalent prospective veto. These promises resulted in the lack of UN involvement in the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars.