The agony of the UN

António Guterres, head of the UN, has been harshly criticised in various circuits because in the current conflict, announced since 4 December in the Washington Post, he has lacked initiatives to stop it. Not even at the negotiating tables proposed by Turkey on Turkish soil, between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations, has the UN been present, whether it was Guterres or Martin Griffiths, recently appointed by him to the role of peace mediator between Russia and Ukraine. A position he took on more than a month after the invasion began. 

On 24 October, this body will have been in existence for 77 years, an evolution of the League of Nations concept (born in 1919), which served no purpose because it was unable to contain the escalation that ended up destroying Europe with the Second World War and drawing the United States into the war after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. 

Only two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese territory, and the liberation of Nazi-occupied territories by the Russian and American armies ended six years of devastation and suffering and stopped the human carnage that was taking place. It was the most devastating war in living memory. 

The UN was born out of the American vision: the aim was to make it universal, inclusive, so that all countries would feel represented in a body whose essential mission is to ensure world peace and respect for international law, in order to prevent differences from being settled in war. 

In its first ten years of life, it had already had terrible trials with the following conflicts: the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1946; the Greek Civil War from 1946 to 1949; the Indochina War from 1946 to 1954; the Second Paraguayan Civil War from 1947; the Malagasy rebellion from 1947 to 1948; the First Palestine War from 1947 to 1949; the Indo-Pakistani war of 1947; the Arab-Israeli war of 1948; the Costa Rican civil war of the same year; the Berlin blockade in 1948; the violence in Colombia from 1948 to 1953 and the Korean war from 1950 to 1953. 

Too many trials by fire, especially with the Indo-Pakistan war, with the Korean war that ended with one country split in two; and then came the Vietnam war from 1955 to 1975. It was just a warning that the world would continue to be warlike, voracious and fast-paced, and that sustaining peace sometimes depends only on the will of a ruler. 

The 1960s were plagued by war in Africa, with deplorable slaughter, and in the Middle East there was the Six-Day War involving Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq.
It has been a time full of war violence, atrocities, invasions, genocides, assassinations, trampling over and over again a written peace that has become the number one target of supremacists, invaders, messianics, psychopaths and murderers. 

In 1956, the UN arrived with the well planted idea of developing an Emergency Force, a military unit colloquially known as the Blue Helmets. It is basically a brigade made up of special forces from various parts of the world, currently numbering over 40,000 blue helmets.  

It does not have a warlike function, but rather the protection of the civilian population, which is the most harmed when there is a war; it also acts in humanitarian catastrophes or can even act as a guarantor in elections to avoid a bloodbath. It has many functions. 

They are neither offensive nor defensive. Only humanitarian protection and even in the field, in their actions, they can have a mediating capacity.

If the UN was already weakening with the entrenchment of the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian conflict, it began to bleed to death with the attacks of 11 September 2001, which served as a pretext for the United States to invade and bomb Afghanistan and then continue to invade Iraq in March 2003.

The body whose tough mission is to sustain global peace has been groaning in agony for several years because the great powers do not respect it, do not value concord above their strategic ambitions. 

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is burying the UN with a Guterres completely overwhelmed by the situation and so frightened that he has been unable to show the character to meet personally with the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, to put the UN Charter on the table and agree with him and the Ukrainian leader, Volodymir Zelenski, on a dialogue to stop the war massacre.

There is no real initiative to bring about a ceasefire in an invasion that will be two months old, with thousands dead, millions displaced and refugees, and with powers, each playing their cards, using Ukraine as a pretext to destroy human beings. The US is interested in arming Ukraine to wear down Russia and reposition itself in Europe. It is worrying that peace is not being discussed as seriously as it should be in the face of the imminent risk that, one day or night, a Russian missile could fall on NATO territory or that things could get so complicated that Russia could detonate not one, but several tactical atomic bombs on Ukrainian territory, which would be devastating for human life and the environment. The question is, where the hell are the UN blue helmets? Why doesn't Guterres propose to send them ipso facto to Ukraine?