New Delhi: As usual, the politics between the permanent five dominated briefings at the UN Security Council as they verbally clashed over Libya, even as India expressed reservations at the prior leak of the report of the panel of experts committee on Libyan sanctions
During the week, there were briefings on Afghanistan, Libya, Palestine, Golan Heights and Sudan. Kenya also initiated an Arria formula meeting on protecting UN peacekeepers from IEDs.
The key actions taken by the Council were a presidential statement on Haiti and an extension of the mandate of the panel of experts monitoring the implementation of sanctions on North Korea.
At the video briefing on Libya, India revealed that it had been annoyed at the leak of the panel of experts’ report on Libya sanctions. The leaked contents had been first reported in The New York Times and focused on the documented role of former Blackwater founder Erik Prince in violating the UN arms embargo.
India’s T.S. Tirumurti, who is also chair of the UNSC Libya sanctions committee, said that he had expressed “our strong concerns regarding news articles and speculations in the media reflecting some of the contents of the final report of the Panel of Experts on Libya”. “Such unauthorised disclosures undermine the credibility of the sanctions regime,” he added.
China also stated that the incident of the leak of the panel of experts report “must not occur again”.
Tirumurti also noted that the arms embargo violations, as reported by the Panel of Experts, “pose serious threat to peace and stability in Libya”.
The UK and France also expressed concern at the scale of the arms embargo violations, with the British diplomat pointing a finger at Russia by noting that the panel of experts had identified a permanent council member.
Russia’s Vassily Nebenzia asserted that if any Russians were present in Libya, they did not represent the Russian state. He also claimed that the report of the panel of experts had inaccurate content. “By the way, we many times spoke of the falsity of data at the disposal of the Panel of Experts that do not even bother to double check on the information that has been “leaked” to them from the open sources. Whereas this information can be easily refuted, and Russian journalists actually did this. All these revelations are easily accessible on the Internet.”
He also called on Western countries to address the panel of experts’ report regarding their citizens operating in Libya. “It is clear that some of these operations cannot be carried out without governmental support. So instead of making such allegations one might rather need to look in the mirror.”
Nebenzia also revealed that the final report of the 1970 Sanctions committee was not endorsed due to differences over the legitimacy of the EU’s Operation Irini that enforces the UN arms embargo to Libya.
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The US’s last whole week as Council president in 2021 had begun with the quarterly briefing from Deborah Lyons, the secretary general’s special representative to Afghanistan, who is also head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). It was a stock-taking exercise, according to Lyons, of the signing of the Doha agreement that launched the intra-Afghan talks, which is currently stalled.
She noted that attacks on civilians have escalated, with the first two months of 2021 witnessing the targeting killing of 80 Afghans, mainly from civil society, media, judiciary and religious scholars.
In the last few weeks, there have been hectic diplomatic manoeuvring triggered by the new Joe Biden administration proposing a new roadmap with an interim government, inclusive of the Taliban. The joint statement of the extended troika conference in Moscow also endorsed the call for talks between the Afghan government and Taliban, which would draw the roadmap of an “inclusive government”.
With the intra-Afghan talks set to be held in Turkey next month, the UN has also got into the action with the secretary-general appointing a “personal envoy” on Afghanistan.
Lyons hoped that by her following brief before the UNSC in June, there would be real progress in Turkey and “if no a ceasefire, a substantial reduction in violence”.
Chairman of the Afghan independent human rights commission, Shaharzad Akbar, warned that if the peace process continued to be dominated by elite men, it could decrease its acceptability among the general public. “Building peace takes more than a deal among elites,” she said.
Akbar noted that the peace process should uphold citizens’ fundamental rights – and ensure they’re not violated or “bargained off”.
She also raised a red flag about the invisibility of women in the peace process. “At the recent conference in Moscow, I, like many Afghan women, was shocked and angered to see only one Afghan woman, Dr Habiba Sarabi, in a room full of men discussing the future of my country,” she said.
India’s statement by permanent representative T.S. Tirumurti at the Afghanistan briefing mentioned all the key talking points. “The gains of the last two decades must be preserved in any constitutional framework that Afghanistan designs for itself,” he said.
India also endorsed the Afghan government’s call for an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire. “These attacks are aimed at forcing the Afghan people to make pre-determined choices through coercion and spreading fear and intimidation within the society. As Afghanistan’s immediate neighbour, we are deeply concerned at the rising use of violence as a tool for pressure tactics”.
With the May 1 deadline of departure of foreign troops looming, the Chinese envoy cautioned that “serious consideration” should be given to their orderly withdrawal.
This week in the UNSC
The last two days of the US presidency will see a briefing on the humanitarian situation in Syria, the UN Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and implementation of Resolution 1540, which is about the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Vietnam is scheduled to take up the Council presidency from April 1. It already circulated a letter last week that the signature open debate next month would be on “mine action”.
