Growing cold war in our midst
The United Nations Organisation (UN) celebrates its Diamond Jubilee (75th anniversary) next month. Its annual General Assembly sessions this year got underway this week with the theme “The Future We Want; The UN We Need”. It was an eerie setting with an empty hall -- a sombre reminder of what a precariously fragile planet we Earthlings live in.
Absent were the annual pilgrimages to the ‘Big Apple’ (New York) by cavalcades of ‘Third World’ leaders and their hangers-on busting up the limited financial resources of their unfortunate citizens, living it up at the Waldorf Astoria and similar plush hotels. In fact, the UN session was like a mega theatre with a huge screen but no audience. World leaders holed up in their respective capitals were having their say due to COVID-19 through pre-recorded video presentations.
The US President given the second slot on the opening day after Brazil, the US being the host nation of the UN headquarters, true to form, launched straight into a tirade against China accusing that country of exporting the virus while locking down its own citizens. He did his best to shift mounting criticism of his own mishandling of the virus spreading at home.
Calling it the “China virus”, he said China “unleashed this plague” into the world. He slammed the UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO) saying it was “virtually” controlled by China. In today’s increasingly virtual world, if this had any greater significance than the ordinary meaning of the word is open to interpretation. He went further to accuse China of overfishing, dumping plastics in the oceans and emitting more toxic mercury than any other country. As the UN Secretary General warned of an impending new ‘Cold War’, 75 years after World War II that saw the birth of the world body, and a period soon after that saw a ‘Cold War’ between the US and the former USSR (a war that the US eventually won with the collapse and disintegration of the former socialist empire), the Chinese leader said, also in a pre-recorded video speech the same day, that China has “no intention to fight either a Cold War or a hot one with any country”.
The once isolationist China spoke of multilateralism as the way of the future, a jibe at the US that used to be at the forefront of a global village now increasingly isolationist.
The French and German leaders weighed in to refer to China’s appalling human rights record and battle lines were being drawn in the UN for the whole world to see via television channels and the worldwide web. World peace was no closer at hand.
Sri Lanka’s President had a message for the UN. Calling upon the world body whose agencies have been endlessly needling the country guided by different agendas of essentially Western powers, he asked that democratically elected Governments be supported and helped to bring sustainable solutions for the needs of their people.
He said Sri Lanka was committed to a neutral foreign policy. Only last week the Maldives signed a Defence Treaty with the US as India, the US, Japan and Australia gang up against China in the seas close to Sri Lanka. The President’s public pronouncement seems intended to avoid the diplomatic coercions at play in this looming ‘Cold War’ the UN Chief referred to.