Playing the diplomacy game at the UN
Sridhar K. Chari

The Horseshoe Table
An Inside View of the UN Security Council
by Chinmaya R. Gharekhan Pearson Education, Delhi, 2006. Pages: 328. Rs 550

The Horseshoe TableChinmaya Gharekhan’s lively, frank, and nugget-filled account of life in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is a worthy addition to the growing list of writings on international diplomacy by Indian diplomats.

Gharekhan spent nearly 25 years dealing with the UN in various capacities. He was not only India’s Ambassador/Permanent Representative to the UN, he has also been the "Personal Representative of the Secretary General to the UNSC," a post which Boutros Boutros Ghali created during his secretary-generalship. The reason for the post, as Gharekhan tells us, was that Ghali found the meetings too frequent, quite "a bore" and the ambassadors of that time rather mediocre!

Gharekhan himself is clearly anything but that, and readers will benefit from his friendly, anecdotal style, and his involvement with the UNSC in multiple, very different capacities. They will be saddened to confirm an essential truth of the world of realpolitik. When the Council responded to crises, Gharekhan demonstrates, "the national perspectives of its members, rather than the merits of each case, dominated the thinking, positions, and actions of the members of the Council."

Blue ink to black ink

Chinmaya Gharekhan’s book on the UN Security Council (UNSC) has an excellent, and amusing, preliminary piece on the procedures and practices at the UNSC, that sets the stage well for the case studies to follow. Procedural issues are of great import there, considering the very nature of the playing field. Everything from the seating order to the nature of the meeting to be convened to whether it should be convened at all, is fraught with issues and conflicting positions.

And when that is the case, one can imagine the situation on resolutions – from draft stage (blue ink) to document stage (black ink) to a vote. The UNSC secretariat even permits itself some humour, and Gharekhan reproduces a summary report on a meeting that comments on the Council’s "favourite pastime" of drafting and redrafting what has already been drafted and redrafted several times. The members, you see, "agree that a fine draft is like a fine painting in that one can never be sure when it is finished."

Gharekhan looks at a series of case studies, which includes the Gulf War of 1991 and the subsequent issues related to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and the oil-for-food sanctions regime; the former Yugoslavia; Bosnia and Herzegovina; the Middle East; Libya and the Lockerbie disaster; Haiti; the Rwanda genocide; and the elections of the Secretary-General in 1991 and 1996.

The response to the Rwanda genocide was a low point for the international community, and though widely cited as a UN failure, Gharekhan shows how Western powers denied necessary resources to the UN, though the tragedy also showed up inherent weaknesses in the UN secretariat.

Power relations at the UNSC are skewed in favour of the veto-wielding P-5 countries, the most exclusive club in the world, and others are reduced to wooing them to ensure that a particularly damaging resolution does not go through. Another thread that emerges from his account is that weaker countries try to establish and formalise procedure, while the powerful prefer the ad-hoc, which gives them more flexibility. Power, after all, plays out the same way, whether the field is the UNSC or the local municipality.

Boutros Ghali is one of the many figures that come alive in Gharekhan’s account. The former secretary general, who has penned a foreword to the book, used to describe himself as a politician rather than a diplomat, and one gets a sense that he did not entirely succeed in being either. The tale of his much publicised clash with the United States and Madeleine Albright, which resulted in his being denied a second term, makes for gripping reading.

Among the many nuggets to be picked up is about the "Arria formula", named after the Venezuelan representative who instituted it, where the Council hears a person who is neither a country delegate nor representative. In 2003, Pakistan wanted a hearing from Kashmiri militants under this formula, and the Indians evidently had a hard time preventing it. They succeeded, only with "crucial support" from the Americans.

Gharekhan rounds it all off with a measured discussion on UN reform. He makes an important point regarding the much debated veto, suggesting that its diplomatic usefulness may in fact be eroding. The P-5 is going to be resistant to new permanent members even without a veto, as any such new member will carry considerable weight in any case.

There are occasional blemishes in style which are easy to ignore, and the Horseshoe Table is overall an enjoyable and educative read.

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