Trygve Lie, first secretary general of the United Nations between 1946 and 1952, is credited with a famous statement that still sounds like a tarot omen.
“This is the worst job in the world,” said the Norwegian politician when handing over to his successor, Dag Hammarskjöld.
Lie had held the position when the embers of the Second World War were still burning with the beginning of the division by antagonistic blocs that persists today on the board of international geostrategy.
Furthermore, at its time, the UN endorsed a decision that is the germ of the main core of the global tension of the present: the creation of the State of Israel and the Nakba or mass displacement of Palestinians.
Whether Lie saw the future in a crystal ball or knew how to read coffee grounds, his hunch proved correct.
Looking in the rearview mirror, the Swede Hammarskjöld, in the exercise of his mandate, died in 1961 in a plane accident, flying over Katanga, during a peace mission in the Congo. His death continues to be fodder for conspiracy theories. Everything indicates that he was not the victim of an accident, but that the plane fell due to the impact of a projectile. They were going for him.
Back to the present, the Portuguese António Guterres is not free from the premonition that his first predecessor uttered.
It is not risky to say that, of the eight predecessors, none of them had to live through such turbulent times. Guterres faces, after the disaster of Nazi Germany, the first war conflict in Europe (with permission from the Balkans) due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and, in turn, another front in Gaza between Israel and Hamas that has the potential to burn Middle East and beyond.
Between one thing and another, the fatalists assure that we are one step away from World War III, without forgetting North Korea, the African crises, terrorism or the suspicions that China will invade Taiwan.
And what is Guterres, the leader of an organization created to avoid falling back into the mistakes of the past, doing? “The UN is in a coma,” say critics of the inability to stop the two full-scale wars underway today. Ukraine and Gaza are two conflicts that exceed the regional limits of others previously registered under the operational radius of the United Nations.
“When one makes any merit in this life, it is usually for something he has not done,” wrote George Orwell. This sentence applies to Guterres, but changing one word. The “demerits” of others are fully attributed to him, as is his own failure.
We must go back to Lie and his tiptoeing through the embers. From those ashes arose the original sin of the UN, which consisted of attributing the right of veto to the five permanent members of the Security Council, the executive arm of the organization (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China), without this being able to be updated after the planet turned so many times since then.
If the Council presents a resolution to withdraw Russian invading troops from Ukraine, Moscow exercises the veto. If there is a massive demand for a ceasefire in Gaza, Washington blocks it.
Faced with the legacy of this destiny, the Secretary General is only allowed to make speeches to raise awareness among countries, as a right to tantrum. But even then he is not safe from the bullshit.
Russia (with the acquiescence of China and the complicity of members of the so-called Global South) accuses Guterres of having taken sides in favor of the West. And even harsher has been the response from Israel, a country that revolted, to the point of asking for his resignation, when the Secretary General regretted the Hamas attack on October 7, but criticized the excessive Israeli retaliation and pointed out that what happened It does not arise from nothing, but from a long occupation of Palestinian territories.
Guterres, appealing to an extraordinary remedy, forced the Security Council to another vote on the ceasefire. This initiative, according to diplomatic sources, bothered the US because it meant that it was once again seen as the bad guy, right next to Russia with Ukraine.
Revenge came last week. Israel released a report accusing twelve members of the UN aid agency for Palestine, UNRWA, of having collaborated with Hamas in the attack four months ago. Instantly, Washington cut off funding to that agency, despite the fact that the UN immediately fired those involved (two are missing and one died) without waiting for the result of the open emergency investigation.
Nearly twenty countries, all Western (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden) have followed in their footsteps. Spain refused, as did the European Union.
UNRWA has long been a target of Israel. But the United States has understood that it erred in haste. It seeks to cling to an excuse to turn back, recognizing, as Guterres says, that Gaza without this agency will be a disaster with even more gunpowder for the conflict.
