It’s time to replace UN Security Council with a newresponsive agency

This past month Western leaders have been remembering and honouring the victims of World War I while guardedly acknowledging the madness of the 1914-18 European atrocity that roped in dozens of countries around the globe. 

The bloodbath that left 19 million dead is sometimes referred to as The Great War. Yet there is nothing great about war. One Irish conscientious objector who refused conscription bluntly and accurately stated, ‘war is organised slaughter’.

There are no winners in war, nothing to celebrate as the poet Wilfred Owen wrote, ‘Where death becomes absurd and life absurder. For power was on us as we slashed bones bare not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.’ 

Media houses are awash with high profile visits to the memorial graves of victims. The bugle plays the haunting Last Post, the wreaths are laid but ask like Owen ‘What passing bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns; only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle can patter out their hasty orisons’.

The mass graves are a sober reminder of the futility of war but some families can trace the resting place of their loved ones and pay their respects there. 

Reduce involvement

Even war, however, has a hierarchy of victims and there are no memorial parks or well kept graveyards for the African soldiers and carriers of World War I. They were just cannon fodder in a war that they were never informed what it was about. History shows that the German forces strategically opened up a front in East and Central Africa to preoccupy the British forces and their allies and to reduce their involvement in the European fronts.

Both sides conscripted locally and up to two million Africans were engaged in this brutal conflict. Kenyans were deployed in the carrier corps or in the Kings African Rifles. The engagements took them in to Tanzania, Zambia and as far as Mozambique. It is estimated by the historian James Wilson that up to 95,000 Africans died in this slaughter. They died of hunger, neglect, disease and exhaustion and the highest number of deaths were incurred by the carrier corps: ‘Happy are those who lose imagination: they have enough to carry with ammunition’ (Owen).  It took over two weeks for news to reach the warfront that the Armistice had been agreed in France on November 11, 1918. Then the body count began and over 60,000 European soldiers were buried in marked graves in Voi and elsewhere.

But there was no room, no headstones, no plaques, no memory for the Africans who did the slave work in this crazy war that was not of their doing. Another 300,000 civilians died in East Africa but no records of their annihilation are found either. 

Thanks to the efforts of the Hotel Sarova Group, a memorial has been constructed to the memory of the unknown Kenyan soldiers who died in the Taita Hills and elsewhere. This is a great beginning and it’s hoped that the County of Taita Taveta might construct a suitable memorial centre to the victims that might become an education centre for the next generation on the futility of war.

Tools and capacities

At last it seems that philosophers, politicians and theologians are beginning to accept there is no such thing as a just war. The just war theory just lets us all off the hook in seeking to develop tools and capacities for the non violent transformation of conflict. War needs to be outlawed and criminalised because it is never a suitable or even a last option.

Yet wars continue. World War II followed with roughly the same parties involved in 1939-45. Today, we have the war in Syria which of course is much more complex than even the world wars that were primarily involved two warring nations.

There are a multiplicity of interconnected fights that occupy the same space and time. Besides, one uprising progresses into another and we have a hopeless and helpless United Nations Security Council. That body includes five permanent members who have a veto on every decision and since several of them have a role in the Syrian conflict then we cannot expect the UN to be anything but a provider of emergency aid.

Next week, we celebrate 70 Years of the UN Declaration on Human Rights.

It’s time to disband the Security Council and find a more fitting body to respond to conflict and make all war illegal. Maybe that would be fitting tribute to our local unknown victims of World War 1. 

-Gabriel Dolan [email protected], @GabrielDolan