Tag Archives: UN

09Jan/17

An Indian settles a score (Translation from German: Ein Inder rechnat ab)

Source: Die Zeit, 5 January 2017, page 5

The diplomat Hardeep Singh Puri blames the West of moral hysteria. The result would be wrong wars. A meeting

By Jan Ross, New Delhi

Once the Russian UN envoy remarked that whoever speaks after Hardeep Singh Puri in the UN Security Council sounded like a harmonica player after the concert of a symphony orchestra. You believe it right away. Ambassador Puri is one of those eloquent, cultivated appearances that the Indian elite are so rich of. We are sitting in his apartment in New Delhi; there is a framed photograph at the wall showing the host in a discussion with Barack Obama. Hardeep Singh Puri’s father was a diplomat before; he was filling a post in the old Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s:  “I attended the kindergarten in Bad Godesberg for four years”, tells Puri, who is retired and lives between India and New York. He still remembers the address of the house where the family lived at that time: Goethestraße 42.

Puri was in the UN Security Council in the years 2011 and 2012. He witnessed the decision about the mission of war against the Libyan dictator Gaddafi. (India was sceptical then, just like the government of Merkel/Westerwelle.) Puri just published a book about his experience, a bitter reckoning with the policy of military intervention. Arming rebels, the overthrow of regimes initiated from outside, the smashing of state structures, which cannot be replaced by anything better in the end: In his eyes all this is a decisive factor for the bloody disaster, which the Arab world has been sliding into since then.

Interventions for humanitarian reasons are less popular by now after the complicated experiences of the past years. For Puri, they are an expression of a generally misguided political idealism, which he sees as dangerous. The hopes for an Arab Spring, the awakening of freedom in the Middle East were an illusion from the very beginning in his view: “The unrest in the Arab streets was no call for democracy like in Central Europe before 1989”, he says. “They liked the West in Poland and its political leadership. In Egypt they thought that the western leaders had been in bed with their own dictators.” No wonder that this bitterness turned into hostility and violence, he believes.

According to Puri the well-meant mistakes began in Libya before the military mission. It was wrong to bring Gaddafi before the International Criminal Court because of his violations of human rights. Why should the dictator give in and resign, if he was threatened with a trial after losing power? In Puri’s perspective America and Europe tend to moral hysteria: “The West has no means to decide what a core interest is”, he thinks. “Your political leaderships fall victim to an emotionalised journalism.” They had themselves confused by media reports about the malpractices of Gaddafi and then brought about anarchy and civil war with ill-conceived punitive or aid actions.

The meeting with Hardeep Singh Puri is something like a basic course on the multipolar world. His criticism is no special radical singular opinion, on the contrary: Most Indian diplomats or foreign policy experts would probably agree with him. Western attempts to make the good things on the globe win in conflict, with weapons or just with sanctions or loud protests are seen in New Delhi as a general expression of arrogance or naiveté or both. And India is no opponent or competitor of the Americans or Europeans, unlike Russia or China. It is not hostile, it is simply different, and it sees the world differently. It sees it like many in the “global South”, in the growingly important non-Western democratic countries like Brazil or Indonesia or South Africa.

Puri is no pragmatic cynic at it, who simply wants to stand aside in case of major state crimes. He is proud of his country for having successfully stopped a murderous policy once, in 1971, when the Pakistani army brutally oppressed a protest and independence movement in East Pakistan, which is today Bangladesh. India intervened then, made an end to the violence and helped the East Pakistanis to get their own state. Puri says: “If atrocities are committed on a massive scale, one must stop it.” However as minimalist as possible.

“All we had needed in order to protect the citizens in danger in Libya would have been a physical safety zone around Benghazi,” he says, the city into whose direction Gaddafi’s troops dangerously advanced at the time. What happened instead was a regime change, which went so wrong, that in the next and worse case no-one was willing to take any action against the bloodshed: “If Syria would have happened before Libya, then Assad would have disappeared today,” says Puri.

Why do the countries of the “global South” exercise more restraint on the issue of intervention and generally on a somehow missionary foreign policy? Hardeep Singh Puri does not believe that this is a sign of more wisdom. His explanation is more down-to-earth: “The emerging and developing countries are more unassuming; they have never exercised power in the international system. There is in contrast the danger of hubris if you have power.”

And then he adds a thought that is typical Indian. The original concern in an overwhelmingly diverse country, in which the most different religions, language and ethnic groups live together: “We understand more of the forces of chaos,” says Ambassador Puri, and about how thin the ice of the political order is and how turbid, dark and deep the water below.

31Oct/16

‘Puri: Stalemate over Syria Is Security Council’s “Most Serious Failure”’ – International Peace Institute

Hardeep Singh Puri, former ambassador of India and author of Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos, told a book launch event at IPI on October 25th that the stalemate over Syria and the Council’s consequent inaction was the panel’s “most serious failure.”
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21Oct/16

“Peligrosas intervenciones” del Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU – THALIF DEEN PARA IPS, elpaisonline.com

Cuando el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU discutió los ataques “deliberados” contra hospitales en Siria y Yemen, el secretario general Ban Ki-moon criticó a varios de los países combatientes al señalar que “incluso un matadero es más humano” que las matanzas indiscriminadas de civiles en los dos conflictos en curso.

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03Oct/16

‘Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos’ – Crissie Delvy, Indian American Times

New York – “Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos” (Harper Colins, 2016), a book providing a sharp analysis of the recent history of the UN and non-UN military interventions, by Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, was recently released at an Asia Society event in New York titled “The UN Security Council and Military Interventions.”

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10Sep/16

‘This book is an insider’s view of the games the UN’s Security Council plays’ – The Scroll

A former Indian diplomat blows the cover off the politics of intervention in other countries’ affairs.

There are interventions and then there are perilous interventions. As the world tackles growing fundamentalism and non-state actors, nations are increasingly debating deploying their militaries to take on the new threats. But each intervention comes with a baggage of unpredictable consequences that have led to the creation of new wars and conflicts.
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05Sep/16

‘Into the UN’s lopsided world’ – Simran Sodhi, The Tribune

The need to reform the United Nations and especially the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where the veto power of the five permanent members holds the key to crucial global decisions, is imperative. This is an opinion that has been expressed on numerous occasions in recent times and Hardeep Singh Puri’s book is another important voice in this direction.

The book makes a powerful case of why reform of the UNSC is so crucial and to illustrate this argument, Puri uses the examples of Syria, Libya and Yemen, among others. Closer home, the author Continue reading

05Sep/16

‘India’s intervention in Lanka: Mercy missions don’t draw condemnation, says India’s ex-UN envoy’ – Thalif Deen, SundayTimes.lk

NEW YORK– When the government of Rajiv Gandhi ordered the Indian Air Force to carry out an airdrop of humanitarian supplies in June 1987 inside embattled northern Sri Lanka — infamously dubbed “the parippu drop”– the Sri Lanka government reacted furiously describing India’s action as a “naked violation of Sri Lanka’s independence and an unwarranted assault on Sri Lanka’s territory and sovereignty.”
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05Sep/16

‘Lost Inside The Charmed Circle’ – Humphrey Hawksley, Asian Affairs.in

Humphrey Hawksley lauds a call for reform of the UN Security Council, by a participant who remains unaware of how it reaches its decisions

As a young diplomat in the 1980s, Hardeep Singh Puri cut his teeth on India’s ill-fated intervention in Sri Lanka, and rose to become his country’s ambassador to the United Nations when India was a rotating member of the Security Council.
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02Sep/16

‘Significant interventions’ – K.P. Nayar, Telegraph India

India is on the threshold of a re-engagement with the Levant

For the prime minister, Narendra Modi, Balochistan is not a flash in the pan. The articulation of Indian concerns, stakes and interests in Balochistan is part of a pattern in his government’s evolving foreign policy after two and a quarter years in office. Balochistan is not the only conflict zone that the National Democratic Alliance government is wading into. Ending a hands-off Continue reading