A view of the UN General Assembly (AFP File Photo)

The year 1920 saw the creation of the League of Nations whose covenant promoted collective security and the peaceful settlement of disputes through arbitration while threatening countries that fail to abide by the covenant with economic sanctions.
One of the major shortcomings of the League of Nations was its failure to serve as a universal body incorporating all countries of the world. Its failures in several areas including the economic and political, led to World War II.
Before the end of the war the big powers sought to create another international body to protect the world from wars, and were keen this time to avoid the shortcomings that weakened and eventually led to the demise of the League of Nations. The United Nations was born and its Charter came into effect on Oct. 24,1945. Its first General Assembly opened in London on Jan. 10, 1946.
Today, the people of the world seem to have lost faith in the international organization and its fledging bodies. The feeling has intensified after the United States emerged as the sole superpower thus heightening fears the world may plunge into yet another regional or universal conflict seriously threatening international peace and stability. It is from here that calls for reforming the world body intensified, especially following the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq without the consent of the Security Council.
It is true the UN Charter sought to avoid many of the mistakes of the League of Nations but the charter resulted in even more serious mistakes. Under instructions from big powers Secretary-General Kofi Annan was asked to push ahead with an agenda for UN reform and appointed a high-level panel to submit recommendations on the issue.
Instead of assessing the threats facing the world and combining policy and institutional changes to deal effectively with global threats including continued poverty and environmental degradation, terrorism, civil war, genocide, conflicts between states, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, HIV/AIDS and a host of other threats, the picture drawn by the panel for a reformed UN is unfortunately very disappointing.
The 100 plus proposals formulated by the panel for dealing with the areas identified as being the greatest threats to worldwide security in the 21st century, called for increasing the Security Council membership from 15 to 24, giving six countries permanent seats but without a veto.
The panel said countries must ensure the protection of their own people and for any military intervention to be proportionate to the size of the threat. The call for providing the Security Council with the means for rapid and active intervention in member countries' internal affairs was warmly welcomed by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw who said the suggestion would facilitate the use of force against what Britain views as dictatorial regimes.
This is an open invitation for others to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries and a serious breach of international law and would only lead to further consolidating the big powers' control over the world.
It must be said that the organization is in crisis because for nearly 60 years the veto system has proved to be the main obstacle to any reform. What is important is not how many members should join the council but whether impartiality, integrity and honest dealing is observed in the implementation of the resolutions.
Reforming the UN would only be possible if the veto and permanent membership are abolished and the General Assembly given full authority.
ARABNEWS.COM

A four-day ride on the westbound express train out of Beijing takes you to China's Wild West. The massive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, hundreds of miles beyond an eroded mound that was once the Great Wall, lies southwest of Mongolia, east of Afghanistan and north of the Tibetan plateau. Full of dusty deserts, soaring mountains and eight million Muslims, Xinjiang is--like so many geopolitically sensitive places--the middle of nowhere.
"From the premodern era until the mid-18th century, Xinjiang was either ruled from afar by Central Asian empires or not ruled at all," Joshua Kurlantzick writes in Foreign Affairs.
Mao's Communist Party worked to consolidate power during the 1950s by centralizing Chinese culture and politics in Beijing. That meant suppressing cultures and religions out of step with the ruling majority Han Chinese, such as the Tibetans and Mongols.
The jackboot came down hardest on Xinjiang, where in 1955 more than 90 percent of the population were Turkic Muslims--mostly Uyghurs along with smaller portions of such Central Asian tribes as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Tatars. The Uyghurs, whose rich pre-Muslim Buddhist culture gave their language (which can be written in Arabic and Roman script) to Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire, were a threat to national cohesion.
After all, they had revolted against pre-communist China 42 times in 200 years.
"Thousands of mosques were shuttered, imams were jailed, Uyghurs who wore headscarves or other Muslim clothing were arrested, and during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party purposely defiled mosques with pigs," wrote Kurlantzick. "Many Muslim leaders were simply shot.
The Uyghur language was purged from school curricula, and thousands of Uyghur writers were arrested for 'advocating separatism'--which often meant nothing more than writing in Uyghur."
The demographic manipulation has been even more devastating. The Chinese imposed forced birth control on the Uyghurs while shipping 300,000 Han settlers west every year. By 1997, the Uyghurs had become a minority in their own homeland. But Xinjiang was far from pacified when I visited the provincial capital of Urumqi that summer.
By the time of my 1999 trip to the Silk Road city of Kashgar in southern Xinjiang, what Western media call "a low level insurgency" had heated up. The Chinese had torn down all but a few blocks of the ancient old town to put up prefab apartment buildings.
But the Uyghurs weren't taking it lying down. ETIM separatists, some of whom had trained at jihadi camps in Afghanistan, were blowing up a Chinese government office every few days. "Goodbye, Interior Ministry!" gloated my server at a sidewalk noodle joint after the sound of an explosion ricocheted down the boulevard. "We are fighting hard against China to show you Americans we are serious. The U.S. stands for freedom."
Then came 9/11. The Bush Administration, wanting to avert a Chinese veto of its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the U.N. Security Council, drafted China into the "war on terrorism" by granting it a free pass to beat up its Tibetans and Uyghurs.
Citing the fact that ETIM members had received arms and training from the Taliban (but only to fight China), China convinced the U.S. State Department to declare the group a "terrorist organization" affiliated with Al Qaeda. In "Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland," Graham Fuller and Jonathan Lippman write that this "U.S. declaration [was] catastrophic" for the Uyghurs.
The United States had given Beijing "carte blanche to designate all Uyghur nationalist...movements as 'terrorist.'"
COMMONDREAMS.ORG

The leader of the group of Al-Qaeda militants that attacked the US Consulate in Saudi Arabia was found to be a former member of the Saudi religious police-a fact that is further evidence of Al-Qaeda's penetration of the Saudi state system.
As militant Islamism grows and the Saudi government faces increased pressure to crack down on jihadists, the kingdom's rulers eventually will come into conflict with the religious establishment.
The Saudi English-language daily Arab News on Dec 13 quoted Saudi Ambassador to the United Kingdom Prince Turki Al-Faisal as saying there could be no solution to the problem of terrorism until the Palestinian issue is resolved.
Al-Faisal's comments come a week after a group of Al-Qaeda militants--led by Fayez Jihani, a former member of the Saudi religious police known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or Mutaween-attacked the US Consulate in the western Saudi city of Jeddah.
Al-Faisal's comments do not address Saudi Arabia's real threat from militants. There might or might not be a correlation between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Islamist militancy--jihadists use the conflict to justify their actions while they have other motives--but it is clear that Islamist militants are threatening the Saudi state because of the widespread perception that the Saudi government has abandoned Islam.
Al-Qaeda's infiltration of the Saudi state--evidenced by Jihani's leadership in the Jeddah attack--and US pressure on the House of Saud to crack down on its religious establishment and enact reforms seen as anti-Islamic eventually will lead to a clash between the country's political and religious leaders. Having to deal harshly with a state-militia-turned-official-vigilante-force is not unprecedented in Saudi history.
The Ikhwan (Brotherhood), a group of Wahhabi zealots, was the backbone of the fighting force Abdel-Aziz bin Abdel-Rahman Al-Saud (the father of the current Saudi king and his brothers) used when he conquered territory the Ottomans had taken from his ancestors.
Al-Saud then had to wage a military campaign in the late 1920s to eliminate the Ikhwan when the militia began to oppose the king's Western-inspired modernisation drive--much like Al-Qaeda's opposition of the direction the current rulers have taken the kingdom. Like Al-Qaeda, the Ikhwan saw Al-Saud's policies as a betrayal of Islam.
Back then it was the British in Iraq urging the ruling family to move against the Ikhwan.
Today, the Saudis are seen as being in collusion with the United States--not only in Iraq but also inside the kingdom. The openness of US involvement in Saudi Arabia and the availability of information about US-Saudi cooperation in the media--as opposed to the United Kingdom's more covert influence before the era of mass media--make the situation far more explosive than it was 75 years ago.
It is difficult to gauge the level of infiltration Al-Qaeda enjoys in the Saudi state's security forces and religious organisations.
The fact that the latest attack was carried out by a cell commanded by a member of the Mutaween bodes ill for the future of the group--which already is under fire from Saudi society's more liberal elements and the West for alleged human rights abuses.
If the religious police force is deemed a threat to the state's stability, the Saudis likely will try to reduce their powers, which will place further strain on the Saudi political system.
The sons of the founder of modern Saudi Arabia will have to take on the Mutaween, just as their father had to eliminate the Ikhwan. Al-Saud was able to quash the Ikhwan without any danger to his own power and authority. His sons might not be that successful in dealing with a similar emerging scenario with the Mutaween in the 21st century.
KUWAITTIMES.NET

International Human Rights Day usually passes without notice in Canada. There aren't many egregious violations of human rights to talk about.
This year, things were different. On Dec. 10--the 56th anniversary of the adoption of Universal Declaration of Human Rights--the Federal Court of Appeal handed down a ruling that got a lot of people talking.
A three-judge panel affirmed Ottawa's right to use security certificates to detain suspected terrorists without charging them or giving them full access to the evidence against them. The court said such treatment--while unusual--was neither unjustified nor unconstitutional.
This procedure makes it virtually impossible for a person accused of threatening Canadian security to mount a credible defence. It strips him or her of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, on which Canada's justice system is based. It gives the state the power to deport individuals for reasons they will never know.
"The security certificate process denies both justice and security," said Alex Neve, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada.
"These secret trials may be Canada's worst dirty little secret," said Deborah Bourque, president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.
It would be easy to dismiss these comments as typical left-wing caterwaulingÑ-except for one detail. Fifty-one law professors at 16 universities across the country have spoken out against security certificates. The Canadian Bar Association has questioned their use. Representatives of the Criminal Lawyers' Association and the International Commission of Jurists have registered their disapproval. And growing numbers of ordinary Canadians are uneasy about depriving non-citizens--no matter how suspicious they look to authorities--of the right to a fair hearing.
"I think it's building," said Neve. "People no longer take at face value that these procedures are warranted. They don't want to be told: Just have faith in the system.
Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan, who must sign every security certificate issued, sees no cause for concern. The government uses such certificates sparingly, she says, and takes great care to weigh the rights of the individual against the security of the state. "While controversial in the minds of some, they have been reviewed by the courts," she reminded parliamentarians last week.
This leaves civil libertarians with a limited number of options.
They can--and undoubtedly will--seek to appeal last Friday's judgment to the Supreme Court of Canada. Although the lower courts have consistently sanctioned the use of security certificates, there is still a chance that the country's highest court will find that they violate an individual's right to be free from arbitrary detention.
They can--and intend to--raise the question of security certificates when Parliament begins its three-year review of the Anti-Terrorism Act, known as Bill C-36, in the New Year. Although these certificates pre-date the anti-terrorism legislation (they have been a provision of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act since 1991), human rights activists will argue that they are a counter-terrorism tool, one too draconian for a nation that prides itself on upholding the rule of law and respecting basic democratic principles.
"There's still a lot of work ahead to build the kind of concern that leads to political change," Neve acknowledged. "But I do sense increasing dubiousness and concern."
THESTAR.COM

Supporters of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave Turkish and EU flags in Istanbul, Dec. 17. (AP Photo)

Last week I stood among flag-waving demonstrators in Independence Square in Kiev and heard the leader of Ukraine's "orange revolution," Viktor Yushchenko, triumphantly declare that Ukraine was a European country. Not Western, not merely democratic, and obviously not American--European.
Thursday in Brussels, the leaders of the 25 member states of the European Union agreed to open negotiations with Turkey next year to join the union.
These two large, poor states on the edge of Europe will pose a huge challenge to the adaptive capacity and internal coherence of the political, economic and security community that is the European Union. But their desire to become part of the union is a tribute to the magnetic power of a body that American policymakers have dangerously underrated in the last four years.
There are signs that in his second term, President Bush is preparing to take the European Union more seriously as a union--not just a collection of diverse states from which Washington can pick and choose its allies. This is a welcome development, since only by working together can the United States and the European Union hope to surmount the challenges that face these twin heirs to the Enlightenment in today's dangerous world.
The most immediate challenge, of course, is terrorism. And one could make a strong case that the European Union's agreement to open membership negotiations with Turkey will be a bigger contribution to winning the war on terrorism than the American-led occupation of Iraq.
Robert Kagan describes the difference between America and Europe as the difference between power and weakness--American power, that is, and European weakness. This description is sustainable only if power is measured in terms of military strength.
In economic power, the European Union is the equal of the United States: the combined gross domestic product of the union's 25 member states is some $11 trillion at current exchange rates, about the same as the G.D.P. of the United States. American business has long recognized the importance of the European market, and it is also beginning to understand the influence of its regulators.
The European Union is also strong in a less tangible kind of power--what is known as "soft power." The European way of life, its culture and societies, are enormously appealing to many of its neighbors. Meanwhile, the policies of the Bush administration have prompted a wave of hostility toward America around the world.
Yet the most distinctive feature of European power is a fourth dimension--one that the United States wholly lacks. It is the power of induction. Put very simply: the European Union is getting bigger, and the United States is not.
The history of the European Union can be told as a story of the expansion of freedom: from the original six postwar democracies in western Europe; to 12 member states, including three former dictatorships in southern Europe; to 25, including many of the former Communist states of central and eastern Europe; and now on to the Balkans, Turkey and, one day, Ukraine.
Yet by overlooking the true dimensions of European power, America is failing to recognize the potential of what could be its greatest ally in the most hopeful project of our time: the advancement of liberty around the world.
Timothy Garton Ash
NYTIMES.COM