Let’s not fool ourselves over our UN Security Council seat
IT’S an insufferable, selfcongratulatory indulgence to think we’d have made the slightest difference if we’d been members of the United Nations Security Council during the murderous Syrian civil war.
That terrible conflict started in 2011 and has now, in reality, been won by government forces under President Bashar alAssad. His victory was assured when Russian dictator and cutthroat Vladimir Putin waded in on Assad’s side in September 2015, with savage airstrikes against opposition forces and defenceless civilians.
The atrocities were there on television for us all to see.
Neither Barack Obama’s famous red line nor international outrage and revulsion prevented massacre after massacre.
Since the start of the war, the UN Security Council has passed 16 resolutions on Syria – all but one of them unanimous. That means they had Russian support.
That backing by the Russians – on access for observer missions and humanitarian aid, monitoring, ceasefires and, most importantly, stopping the use of chemical weapons – was entirely useless.
Putin proved he was nothing but a thoroughly cynical tyrant with no intention at all of respecting either the spirit or the letter of the UN resolutions he pretended to support.
Ireland has now won a seat on that Security Council, with the help of Bono and former President Mary Robinson who is a member of The Elders, that elite group of top politicians, peace activists and human rights advocates set up by Nelson Mandela.
But let’s not get too excited – it’s good to get the two-year appointment but we don’t have a prayer when it comes to preventing international events based on brute force, as practised by the likes of Putin.
If the thoroughly impressive Samantha Power failed to prevent the carnage in Syria when she was President Obama’s US Ambassador to the UN, what chance do we really think Simon Coveney has?