Afro-complicity in the United Nations

This is a scene from a familiar play. The main star is America, and the other actors—well, if they can even be called actors—simply perform their parts. No one is oblivious to the chokehold America has had on the UN for many decades now. We understand that, in principle, America always gets what it wants from the assembly of nations and that its interests are central to each resolution. However, the trend of doing this, especially within the Joe Biden administration, consistently with Black individuals necessitates curious examination.

Before Robert A. Wood, the alternate representative of the US to the UN whose hand is mentioned above, Ralph Bunche was the first Black face to represent the US as an emissary in the UN in the 1940s. His appointment at the time signified significant progress for the Black race globally. And domestically in America, it exemplified an illusion of Black advancement amidst the Jim Crow era. When Bunche first arrived, he worked in various advisory capacities before attaining positions that granted him some autonomy. One would expect that someone like Bunche, who intimately understood the situation of oppressed minorities in America and the rest of the Global South, would use his new position in the UN to help the marginalized. However, he did quite the opposite. Everything about his actions seemed predetermined, influenced, and in the service of his (often white) superiors. They resemble self-thought, well-intentioned acts that aimed to bring international peace, but in reality, they were disguised means to further Western imperialist ends. To put it simply, Ralph Bunche began his diplomatic career as what WEB Du Bois called a ‘white man’s nigger’ and ended as what Malcolm X called ‘an international Uncle Tom’.

This judgment on Bunche is cumulative. It emanates from the collected outcome of his initiatives in Africa, Asia, and especially in Palestine. Earlier known at Howard University for his anti-racial stance and academic expertise on African colonialism, Bunche joined what became the Central Intelligence Agency at the request of Theodore Roosevelt’s government. He functioned as a think tank for America on colonized Africa. It didn’t matter that this new job was antithetical to the quest for Africa’s complete liberation from Western imperialism; Bunche pawned his knowledge to the then Office of Strategic Services producing what the professor of modern Arabic politics at Columbia University, Joseph Mossad, calls, a ‘series of propaganda pamphlets and handbooks for American military campaigns in North and West Africa’. He also recommended strategies for subduing the native African population, suggesting that the US employ ‘carefully chosen American Negroes’ who ‘could prove more effective than whites, owing to their unique ability to gain more readily the confidence of the Native.’

What makes Bunche relevant as a springboard for discussing Black complicity in the UN, particularly since the start of the Gaza genocide, is due to his multidimensional role in the Palestinian Problem. It is also because of how he became a model that has been followed in producing more Black stooges who now rubber stamp the will of the White House master in the UN. Presenting Bunche as first in a line of complicit Black figures in the UN is not difficult to establish. But in all fairness, not all the policies he pushed for negatively targeted the suppressed and the marginalized. Not at first. Bunche might have turned out to be a true champion of global peace, equity, and fairness had he committed to the UN charter (he helped to draft) which foregrounded the need to uphold the sovereign rights of native populations against prolonged (neo)colonial impositions. Instead, in Palestine, he favoured the Zionist sentiment and unequivocally decried the sustainability of a Palestinian State after the British Palestine Mandate abdicated in 1948. This raises the question of how Bunche’s concern for oppressed Jews in the post-Nazi world clouded his natural sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian Arabs, who had suffered under British colonial rule, suffered massacres by Zionist invaders, and were made to accept the creation of an alien state on their land. Bunche, in collusion with Trygve Lie, the then Secretary General of the UN, and the UNSC’s chosen mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Folke Bernadotte, facilitated the unjust settlement of an alien European population in an inhabited territory, setting the stage for the ongoing bloodshed that has now lasted 75 years.

I say this to establish clearly that there is a distinction between having Black people in leadership roles and using Black people in leadership positions to achieve Western imperial goals. In the case of the former, the long history of racial persecution suffered by Black bodies provides a valid moral basis for creating inclusive seats at the table for Black American representation—since that is not only necessary to correct the injustices of the past, but also essential in preventing similar tragedies in the present. What then do we do when the latter results in the selection of Black representatives who either misuse their positions to pursue non-representational and harmful policies or simply comply with their assigned roles in carrying out questionable actions? To discuss the complicity of the Black American representatives in the UN today, therefore, we must first acknowledge Bunche as their progenitor.

Robert A. Wood’s solo veto symbolizes the inhumane belligerence of the White House, their blind support and complicity, just as Israel ravages Gaza on a scale never witnessed in modern history. But Wood did other things at the 8 December 2023 UNSC meeting, or rather, something more: he showed a complete disregard for the sanctity of the innocent Gazans. The sequence of his lackadaisical actions, with clear innuendos, spelt his veiled disinterest in what happens to the women, children, and men trapped in Gaza. When the Palestinian ambassador, Riyad Mansour, was talking about the precise gore Gazans are undergoing, Wood, showing apathy, mindlessly scrolled through his phone. Mansour’s words failed to elicit any semblance of empathy from Wood. When it was his turn to speak, Wood faced the council with a presentation that was at best double-speak and at worst a reiteration of false reports. He claimed that the authors of the draft resolution ‘failed to acknowledge that Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism,’ but ignored the fact that Gaza (and Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem) has been deprived of the same right to protection against (Israeli) terrorism long before October 7th. He declared that the resolution’s insistence on ‘an unconditional ceasefire’ is ‘unrealistic,’ and ‘not tenable,’ but affirmed that ‘the United States’ is working hard on diplomatic solutions ‘to increase protection of civilians, expand humanitarian aid’ and create the possibility of peaceful coexistence between the oppressive and the oppressed neighbours. He parroted debunked claims that the ‘over 1200 people’ tragically killed on the 7th were mainly ‘women, children, the elderly’ from different countries—all ‘burned alive, gunned down’ and ‘subject to obscene sexual violence’. In reality, however, 48.4 per cent of this figure has now been confirmed to be Israeli combatants, and a more disturbing round of new reports suggests that the Israeli army ‘made difficult decisions’ that resulted in the death of innocent civilians—including its citizens on the 7th. One can evidently discern the double standard of the American envoy, his concession to be the Black token to push this through the UNSC, but also the lie, the inhumanity, and the complacency of Wood as a diplomat.