Hans Köchler

"Quo vadis, humanity?" by Nikolai K., Moscow, Russia, Age: 15

Lecture delivered at the convocation on the occasion of the centenary of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines and the third anniversary of the foundation of the College of Law, Manila, 22 June 2004

(I) From the League of Nations to the United Nations Organization – Compromising the notion of “sovereign equality”

In order to make an assessment of the future prospects of the United Nations Organization, we first have to take a look into the past – at the world organization’s history, but also at international organization as it existed prior to the foundation of the United Nations in 1945.

The relations between states before World War II were characterized by the traumatic experience of the sudden collapse of the old European order of nation-states in the conflagration of the first “world war.” However, the League of Nations, created after that war, could not hold international power politics in check; its Covenant, part of the Peace Treaty of Versailles, did not effectively tame nation-state sovereignty.

The basic challenge before the League consisted in how to integrate the sovereignty of the nation-state into a cooperative international system that is based on the rule of law binding upon all. One of the main achievements of the post-World War I order, in terms of the rule of law, was undoubtedly the ban on the use of force in relations between states through the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. This treaty was concluded at the initiative of the United States[1] – although this country had never acceded to the League of Nations.

At this point in time, efforts were even made towards the establishment of an international criminal court that, for the first time in history, would have determined individual criminal responsibility outside the confines of national sovereignty; but the respective draft convention, adopted by the Assembly of the League of Nations in 1937,[2] never entered into force.[3]

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Hugh Roberts

So Gaddafi is dead and Nato has fought a war in North Africa for the first time since the FLN defeated France in 1962. The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as massive damage to infrastructure. What if anything has Libya got in exchange for all the death and destruction that have been visited on it over the past seven and a half months?

The overthrow of Gaddafi & Co was far from being a straightforward revolution against tyranny, but the West’s latest military intervention can’t be debunked as being simply about oil. Presented by the National Transitional Council (NTC) and cheered on by the Western media as an integral part of the Arab Spring, and thus supposedly of a kind with the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, the Libyan drama is rather an addition to the list of Western or Western-backed wars against hostile, ‘defiant’, insufficiently ‘compliant’, or ‘rogue’ regimes: Afghanistan I (v. the Communist regime, 1979-92), Iraq I (1990-91), the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (over Kosovo, 1999), Afghanistan II (v. the Taliban regime, 2001) and Iraq II (2003), to which we might, with qualifications, add the military interventions in Panama (1989-90), Sierra Leone (2000) and the Ivory Coast (2011). An older series of events we might bear in mind includes the Bay of Pigs (1961), the intervention by Western mercenaries in the Congo (1964), the British-assisted palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment.

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Current Concerns

Taking the Principle of the Subject’s Dignity Seriously - A criticism of the Libya war, the necessary reform of the United Nations and the dialogue among the civilizations.

An Interview with Professor Hans Köchler (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Innsbruck, President of the International Progress Organisation)

Current Concerns: Professor Köchler, 3 months ago you published a memorandum to the attention of the UN Secretary General and the President of the Security Council (cf. Current Concerns No 5, June 2011). This memorandum deals with the Security Council’s resolution 1973 (2011) of 17 March and the ensuing war against Libya 2 days later. Could you tell us the core ideas of your memorandum? What induced you to write this memorandum?

Professor Dr Hans Köchler: The principal reason, why I made this step and sent a text to the Secretary General of the United Nations and the President of the Security Council, lies in my fundamental refusal of the instrumentalization of the Security Council for superficial purposes in power politics. This resolution is more or less a full authorization for the interested states to intervene in another country at their own discretion.

As for myself, I was personally not only irritated, but shocked about the hard to beat hypocrisy forming the basis for the adoption of this resolution; the official reason for adopting this resolution or the goal of this resolution was the protection of civilians in Libya. Actually, the resolution is about some countries’ military intervention in Libya in the name of the United Nations, even if the United Nations themselves do not have any influence on the actions – on the one hand they wanted to install a so-called no fly zone, on the other hand they wanted to protect the civilian population, a goal separately formulated in the resolution.

In reality the use of armed forces has endangered the lives of civilians even more, and another fact is above that this resolution was decided when a civil war situation had already developed in Libya; so that now the intervention by these interested states – and it is not at all the international community of states – is more or less siding with one conflict party against the other one. In the meantime we have seen the implementation of the resolution degenerate into a war, by means of which the government in Libya is to be altered – a goal, that is not compatible with the spirit and the letter of the Security Council resolution.

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Joachim Guilliard

Um Demokratie nach Libyen und Afrika zu bringen...

Seit dem 19. März bombardiert eine neue „Koalition der Willigen“ Tag für Tag libysche Städte und Armeeeinheiten. Alle Vermittlungsvorschläge werden ignoriert. Die Kriegsallianz werde ihre Luftschläge wohl noch viele Wochen fortsetzen, tönte es vom Außenministertreffen der NATO in Berlin. Das Bündnis müsse Libyen weiter angreifen, bis der Revolutionsführer Muammar al-Gaddafi verjagt sei, verkündeten am Tag darauf die drei Kriegsherren, US-Präsident Barack Obama, der britische Premier David Cameron und Frankreichs Staatschef Nicolas Sarkozy, in einem gemeinsamen Kriegsappell, den sie via Washington Post, Times und Le Figaro in die Welt schleuderten.

Der neue Krieg der NATO wird von einer großen Mehrheit der Staaten in der Welt abgelehnt. Die meisten glauben, dass er nicht zum Schutz der Zivilbevölkerung geführt werde, sondern für den unmittelbaren Zugriff auf die libyschen Öl- und Gasvorräte. Die gleichzeitige französische Intervention in der Elfenbeinküste und die forcierte Ausweitung der militärischen Präsenz der USA in Afrika deuten zudem auf Ziele hin, die darüber hinausgehen: die Sicherung und Ausweitung westlicher Dominanz auf dem gesamten afrikanischen Kontinent, um dessen Rohstoff-Ressourcen ein erbitter Wettkampf stattfindet.

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