The Bush administration has declared war on the world.
The 450 changes that Washington is demanding to the action agenda that will culminate at the September 2005 United Nations summit don’t represent U.N. reform. They are a clear onslaught against any move that could strengthen the United Nations or international law.
A próxima cimeira deveria centrar-se no fortalecimento e na reforma da ONU e abordar questões de ajuda e desenvolvimento, com especial ênfase na implementação dos Objectivos de Desenvolvimento do Milénio (ODM) da ONU, estabelecidos há cinco anos. A maioria presumiu que este seria um fórum de diálogo e debate, envolvendo activistas da sociedade civil de todo o mundo, desafiando os governos do Sul empobrecido e do Norte rico e as Nações Unidas a criarem uma campanha global viável contra a pobreza e a favor do internacionalismo.
But now, there’s a different and even greater challenge. This is a declaration of U.S. unilateralism, uncompromising and ascendant. The United States has issued an open threat to the 190 other U.N. member states, the social movements and peoples of the entire world, and the United Nations itself. And it will take a quick and unofficially collaborative effort between all three of those elements to challenge the Bush administration juggernaut.
The General Assembly’s package of proposed reforms, emerging after nine months of negotiations ahead of the summit, begins with new commitments to implement the Millennium Development Goals — established in 2000 as a set of international commitments aimed at reducing poverty by 2015. They were always insufficient, yet as weak as they are, they have yet to be implemented. The 2005 Millennium Plus Five summit intended to shore up the unmet commitments to those goals. In his reform proposals of March 2005, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called on governments north and south to see the implementation of the MDGs as a minimum requirement. Without at least that minimal level of poverty alleviation, he said, conflicts within and between states could spiral so far out of control that even a strengthened and reformed United Nations of the future would not be able to control the threats to international peace and security.
When John Bolton, Bush’s hotly contested but newly appointed ambassador to the United Nations announced the U.S. proposed response, it was easy to assume this was just John Bolton running amok. After all, Bolton, a longtime U.N.-basher, has said: “There is no United Nations.” He has written in O Wall Street Journal that the United States has no legal obligation to abide by international treaties, even when they are signed and ratified. So it was no surprise when Bolton showed up three weeks before the summit, demanding a package of 450 changes in the document that had been painstakingly negotiated for almost a year.
But, in fact, this isn’t about Bolton. This Bush administration’s position was vetted and approved in what the U.S. Mission to the U.N. bragged was a “thorough interagency process” — meaning the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and many more agencies all signed off. This is a clear statement of official U.S. policy — not the wish- ist of some marginalized extremist faction of neocon ideologues who will soon be reined in by the realists in charge. This time the extremist faction is in charge.
O pacote de propostas dos EUA destina-se a forçar o mundo a aceitar como sua a estratégia dos EUA de abandonar nações e povos empobrecidos, rejeitando o direito internacional, privilegiando forças de mercado implacáveis sobre qualquer tentativa de regulamentação, marginalizando o papel das instituições internacionais, excepto o FMI, o Banco Mundial e a OMC, e enfraquecendo, talvez fatalmente, as próprias Nações Unidas.
Começa por eliminar sistematicamente cada uma das 35 referências específicas aos Objectivos de Desenvolvimento do Milénio. Todas as referências a obrigações concretas para a implementação de compromissos são suprimidas. Estabelecer uma meta de apenas 0.7% do PIB para os países ricos gastarem em ajuda? Excluído. Aumentar a ajuda à agricultura e às oportunidades comerciais nos países pobres? Excluído. Ajudar os países mais pobres, especialmente os de África, a lidar com o impacto das alterações climáticas? Excluído.
The proposal puts at great risk treaties to which the United States is already a party, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.N. Summit draft referred to the NPT’s “three pillars: disarmament, non-proliferation and the peaceful use of nuclear energy.” That means that states without nukes would agree never to build or obtain them, but in return they would be guaranteed the right to produce nuclear energy for peaceful use. In return recognized nuclear weapons states — the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia — would commit, in Article VI of the NPT, to move toward “nuclear disarmament with the objective of eliminating all such weapons.” The proposed U.S. changes deleted all references to the three pillars and to Article VI.
The U.S. deleted the statement that: “The use of force should be considered as an instrument of last resort.” That’s also not surprising given the Bush administration’s “invade first, choose your justifications later” mode of crisis resolution.
Ao longo do documento, os Estados Unidos exigem mudanças que redefinam e restrinjam o que deveriam ser direitos e obrigações universais e vinculativos. Na referência mais clara ao Iraque e à Palestina, Washington estreitou a definição do “direito à autodeterminação dos povos” para eliminar aqueles que “permanecem sob dominação colonial e ocupação estrangeira”.
Grande parte do esforço dos EUA visa minar o poder da ONU em favor da soberania nacional absoluta. No que diz respeito à migração, por exemplo, a linguagem original centrava-se no reforço da cooperação internacional, na ligação entre as questões dos trabalhadores migrantes e o desenvolvimento, e os direitos humanos dos migrantes. Os EUA querem acabar com tudo, substituindo-o pelo “direito soberano dos Estados de formular e aplicar políticas migratórias nacionais”, com a cooperação internacional apenas para facilitar as leis nacionais. Os direitos humanos foram totalmente eliminados.
In the document’s section on strengthening the United Nations, the U.S. deleted all mention of enhancing the U.N.’s authority, focusing instead only on U.N. efficiency. Regarding the General Assembly the most democratic organ of the U.N. system — the United States deleted references to the Assembly’s centrality, its role in codifying international law, and, ultimately its authority, relegating it to a toothless talking shop. It even deleted reference to the Assembly’s role in Washington’s own pet project — management oversight of the U.N. secretariat — leaving the U.S.- dominated and undemocratic Security Council, along with the U.S. itself (in the person of a State Department official recently appointed head of management in Kofi Annan’s office) to play watchdog.
A administração Bush deu às Nações Unidas o que considera ser uma escolha difícil: adoptar as mudanças dos EUA e concordar em tornar-se um adjunto de Washington e uma ferramenta do império, ou rejeitar as mudanças e ser relegado à insignificância.
But the United Nations could choose a third option. It should not be forgotten that the U.N. itself has some practice in dealing with U.S. threats. President George W. Bush gave the U.N. these same two choices once before — in September 2002, when he threatened the global body with “irrelevance” if the U.N. did not embrace his call for war in Iraq. On that occasion, the United Nations made the third choice — the choice to grow a backbone, to reclaim its charter, and to join with people and governments around the world who were mobilized to say no to war. It was the beginning of eight months of triumph, in which governments and peoples and the U.N. stood together to defy the U.S. drive toward war and empire, and in doing so created what The New York Times called “the second super-power.”
Desta vez, como antes, os Estados Unidos ameaçaram e declararam guerra às Nações Unidas e ao mundo. Tal como antes, é altura de essa superpotência tripartida se erguer novamente, de defender a ONU e de dizer não ao império.
Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies , is the author of the forthcoming Desafiando o Império: como as pessoas, os governos e a ONU desafiam o poder dos EUA (Interlink Publishing, Northampton MA, October 2005.
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