Who should lead our anti-terrorism efforts? - UN Conventional: A Point of View

UN Chronicle, March-May, 2003 by Edward McMahon, Kaveh Afrasiabi

In his address to the United Nations General Assembly on 12 September 2002, President George Bush of the United States challenged the world Organization to prove its relevancy. One way to do this would be to ratchet up immediately its response to the terror threat. A small cluster of Security Council resolutions followed the horrific devastation at "Ground Zero", aimed at embodying a new global spirit of anti-terrorism. As resolution 1373 (2001) set up the Counter-Terrorism Committee, another--1390 (2002)--imposed sanctions on Usama bin Laden's organization and its financial backers. A UN policy-working group issued recommendations on dealing with terrorism, which were limited in number and scope.

While noble in intent, these UN initiatives have clearly fallen short of addressing the world community's huge need for collective response to global terrorism. The Security Council Committee has resulted in a rather benign bureaucracy, collecting routine progress reports from Member States on their anti-terrorism campaigns, including several States suspected of harbouring or promoting terrorism. At the same time, UN monitors of anti-terror sanctions have limited themselves to the occasional addition of names of individuals and organizations to their pro-terrorist list--an effort which even the United Nations has admitted in a draft report has been insufficient. As a global multilateral organization formally charged with the management of international peace and security, the United Nations antiterrorism role may be doomed to flabbiness by the limits of its capability, not to mention the increased diversity and heterogeneity of interests bedevilling UN politics.

For some UN watchers, a more robust anti-terrorism role for the Organization may seem fanciful, given the post-cold-war divergent threat perceptions among its Member States. Yet, it is not fanciful to imagine a more developed UN response that embodies the moral unification of the world after the slaughter of thousands from some eighty nations on 11 September 2001.

The United Nations should be able to assume a more direct role, resembling that of collective global security as specified in its Charter. To this end, it should take the next logical step of centralizing its anti-terrorism efforts by appointing a high commissioner on terrorism, much like for human rights or refugees.

A key role of this commissioner would be to specify the steps necessary to ensure States' compliance with the UN anti-terror "regime", and to assign weight and priority to different complaints. Another role would be to facilitate global cooperation against the long-term as well as short-term roots of terrorism.

We can safely assume that a UN anti-terrorism commissioner would be susceptible to charges of bias or ineffectiveness, especially given the divergent views of Member States on the meaning(s) of terrorism. However, there have always been disagreements about the meaning of many buzzwords that have echoed in the UN halls. Terms such as "human rights", "aggression" and many others have been the subject of definitional discord, but a sufficient consensus has emerged in many instances to enable the United Nations to move ahead. Given the clear and present danger of international terrorism, the UN role in combating it obviously cannot await semantic clarification or linguistic unity. As with "human rights" or the "common heritage of humankind", we can anticipate the acquisition of shared meaning of terrorism through States interactions over time.

All this said, a new United Nations-led global anti-terror regime is desperately needed to play a pivotal role in forging a new identity, as well as to serve as a bastion of global collective anti-terrorism. To reach this objective, its members must be willing to alter the road map to action through authoritative initiatives that carry more weight than those enacted a year ago. A UN anti-terrorism commissioner would be able to react swiftly, and thus more efficiently, to terrorist-related events or situations usually marked by suddenness and surprise. The beast's nature demands a different type of response than that prescribed so far, one that has the purpose of maximizing peace and anti-terror values within the framework of the United Nations. If allowed to make certain authoritative and controlling decisions, somewhat like the other UN Commissioners, the anti-terrorism commissioner would not only crystallize the Organization's unique relevance and viability as an effective source of combating the evil of te rrorism, but would also reflect the world community's need to move ahead with a new approach to global anti-terrorism. At a minimum, this would strengthen the currently weak and slow response to terror incidents at the UN level, and hopefully reflect the universal need to rid the world of terror.

Edward McMahon is Dean's Professor of Applied Politics at Binghamton University (State University of New York).

Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, Ph.D., is senior associate at the Center on Democratic Performance, Binghamton University, founder of the nongovernmental organization Global Interfaith Peace, and author of Dialogue of Civilizations/Dialogue of Theologies, among other publications.