• What powers does Article 99 give to the UN secretary-general?
• How will this make a difference to the genocide in Gaza?
On Wednesday, October 6, United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres enacted Article 99 for the first time in his premiership. A move that hasn’t been enacted by any UN secretary-general since the Lebanon civil war in 1989.
What does Article 99 do?
Article 99 gives the United Nations secretary-general the power to call a meeting of the United Nations security council on his own initiative to discuss new threats to international peace. Now that Article 99 has been triggered, Secretary-General Guterres has the right to speak at the security council without the invitation of a UN member state, which would have normally been required. The United Nations Security Council consists of 15 member states, five of whom are unelected permanent members who hold vetoes within the UN. Under the UN Charter, all UN member states are obligated to comply with council decisions, regardless of what they desire or want. So if the UN council members voted with a majority to end the genocide taking place in Gaza, it would enable the UN to have additional powers at its disposal, including sanctions or the authorization to deploy an international force to end the conflict. This would undoubtedly be enough to end the genocide in Gaza, as Israel is a nation whose economy has already taken a hit after October 7th, with businesses in many cities still fearing to operate because of the fear of missiles coming from Gaza. However, unfortunately, although in theory the majority of the council members within the UN agree that a ceasefire is needed as of now, the veto power that exists among five UN member states makes the prospect of a vote for a ceasefire going through extremely unlikely.
What countries have veto power in the UN, and what does it mean?
In 1945, after the end of World War II, the United Nations was formed. In it, there were 51 founding states, but of those 51, only five had been given the privilege of having a veto. Those five are the same five permanent member states of the United Nations Security Council today. The US, UK, France, Russia, and China are all the countries that have a veto in the UN and therefore the constitutional right to reject a decision or proposal made by the United Nations Security Council, even if the majority of members have voted for that decision. A good recent example would be today, the 8th of December. A UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza was vetoed by the US, even though 13 out of the fifteen security council members had voted for it. Only the UK abstained, and the US voted against.
This is not the first time the US has blocked action against Israeli aggression through a veto. In fact, the US has used a veto at least 36 times over the past decades to defend Israel from the international community. In fact, in this current genocide alone, this is the second time it has been used. On October 18th, the US also blocked a UN security council vote on humanitarian pauses.
So why has article 99 been enacted now?
After the deaths of more than seventeen thousand civilians, including seven thousand children, Israel’s military is now moving to south Gaza, something even the US warned not to do because of the high civilian casualty rate that will ensue. In addition to the largest single-day bombing campaign since the start of the war, videos and pictures from south Gaza are now perpetuating that a mass massacre is about to take place with many Palestinians stripped of their clothing and blindfolded by the IDF in northern Gaza. It is more evident now than ever that Israel’s goal was more than just eradicating the resistance forces that exist within Gaza; as the US secretary of state said himself, “And there does remain a gap between… the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground.” This again reinforces the reality that Israel wants to drive out the Palestinians from the entirety of Gaza with or without the end of the resistance, and if they cannot do that, recent pictures have shown that Israel may be willing to repeat the atrocities that occurred in Srebrenica by killing thousands of men and boys after taking them away from the women.
Israeli forces stripped Palestinian men and boys to their underwear and separated them from the women and families only later to put them on trucks to be transported to undisclosed locations; there was a stark similarity between the prior events of the massacres that took place in Srebrenica (Bosnia) and Gaza.
Will Article 99 change the outlook of the war?
The chances of Article 99 leading to a ceasefire are extremely low, as both recent and former history has proven the US will stop at nothing to defend its staunch ally Israel using their UN veto. Even if every other member of the United Nations Security Council were to vote tomorrow in favour of a ceasefire, it would be to no avail so long as the United States has access to this unjust veto power. December 8th was the first time a resolution was put forward because of Article 99 during this genocide, and yet still, it was not enough to encourage the US to budge on its unwavering support for Israel through using its veto. The chances of the triggering of the Article making any real-time change are inconceivable, as today has proven, and as long as the US administration has its veto power, there is no hope for change any time soon.
Is Article 99 completely useless for the Palestinian cause?
In the war of narratives at play in the western world that may lead to future revolutionary political conversations that have the ability to shake the systems at play here in the west, it is imperative that we do not forget the significance of Article 99 being triggered, as it shows that the world had indeed spoken at the international level but was just forced into inaction because of the unjust dictatorship-like system that plagues the modern world, whose leader is the United States of America. The war against the narrative that the institutions of the west try to enforce down our throats is one of the main frontiers of this war against the injustice of the Palestinian people, and in order for us to help propagate our side of this war by gearing up the great minds that will come after us, it’s vital that we do not forget the historical symbolic significance of Article 99, and it’s dictatorship like Blocker, who claims to be the leader of the free world, the United States of America.
