In a post on his X account on Thursday, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei wrote, “Dag Hammarskjöld once warned against reducing the United Nations to static conference machinery in the service of great-power diplomacy, rather than a dynamic instrument for protecting the security of the small. He staked his entire tenure on that conviction. Today the Secretary-General appears to be shrinking the Organization’s purpose to little more than “avoiding a war between superpowers.”
That minimalist reading is both misleading and dangerous. It twists Article 2(4) into a doctrine that renders the overwhelming majority of the UN’s membership irrelevant, excuses almost every war, hollows out the Charter’s founding principles and purposes, and, worse, whitewashes the atrocities committed by so-called superpowers against everyone else, he emphasized.
By that measure, wars & atrocities in Korea, Vietnam, the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan and Gaza all count as successes. Is this an appropriate message for a Secretary-General only months before the end of his tenure? Baghaei added.
MNA