Veto Against the “Veto”

The U.S. secretary of state described the Russian veto of the resolution condemning the Syrian regime as a “travesty.” That description, however, is not correct. The real travesty is not the Russian or Chinese veto, but the idea of the “veto” itself!

If we take a larger view, we will be disgusted when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations discusses like a gentle wolf his revulsion at the Russo-Chinese veto: “The United States is disgusted that a couple of members of this Council continue to prevent us from fulfilling our sole purpose here — addressing an ever-deepening crisis in Syria and a growing threat to regional peace and security. For months this Council has been held hostage by a couple of members. These members stand behind empty arguments and individual interests while delaying and seeking to strip bare any text that would pressure Assad to change his actions.”

“The veto” was established after the end of World War II by the five victorious powers — the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China — as their reward for victory and as an advantage over the losers. This was the view in 1945. Are we still living under a “Global Emergency Law” imposed by these victors?

Over the course of 67 years, their power declined and fell apart. The countries were divided into smaller countries, and many departed from the statutes and conventions regarding equality, humanitarian justice, devotion to democracy and the spreading of it to all countries, peoples and individuals without discrimination — or at least that is how we understood it!

All of these changes in power and in values, and still, five countries control the conscience and fate of the world in the form of a singular dictatorship without any reference to establishing democracy or the value of equality.

In truth, the Russian-Chinese veto against the resolution to condemn the Syrian regime’s brutality is a tragedy that calls for disgust. We say this… but the United States is not entitled to say it because we have not forgotten the disgusting resolutions that they adopted against the rights of the Palestinian people, which also exposed the brutality of the aggressive regime of the Zionist occupiers, which the United States protected through a brutal history of 40 U.S. vetoes!

“The veto” system is a singular autocratic regime mixed with ideas of the Middle Ages, which are never consistent with the ideas of the age in which we live, if we are to believe in the ideas of equality, human rights and freedom of multiple opinions.

By examining the veto decisions taken by the five countries from 1945 to 2012, all of them were against humanity and the legitimate rights of the oppressed. This is obvious, because you cannot reconcile 14 members of the Security Council to an inhumane resolution and have one of the five permanent members overrule it with a veto to save mankind! But the opposite can happen, and it happens very often that members states agree on a humane resolution and then one of the five come and overrule it because [the resolution] is in opposition to its interests, irrespective of rights and the people.

It is time for countries and humanitarian and human rights organizations to take these veto-power-wielding countries down from the shelves of the Security Council and let the 70th anniversary of the United Nations in the year 2015 be the time to drop this unfair and racist system.

Let the campaign slogan to drop the veto be: Countries are similar and peoples are equal under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights… that will suffice.