International
The United Nations General Assembly brings together hundreds of world leaders every year in an effort to promote dialogue and make progress on solving the world’s myriad problems. But each conference disperses with many of the most pressing global issues unresolved. Here are just a few of the crises that remain tabled after the end of the 69th session of the global summit.
With over 3 million Syrians registered as refugees outside their country, a further 6.5 million displaced in Syria and at least 191,000 people killed in the conflict, there is still no end in sight to the civil war. On Tuesday, U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos appealed to the Security Council to place pressure on all parties to ensure humanitarian access to the 11 million people in Syria in urgent need of assistance. The council in July passed a resolution authorizing cross-border access for the U.N. to deliver humanitarian aid — a major achievement after three vetoes from Russia, one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's staunchest allies, and China, on resolutions aimed at pressuring Assad to end the war. Despite the successful U.N. resolution, Amos said, “intense fighting and shifting conflict continue to make delivery of aid difficult and dangerous.” And even if the U.N.’s access to those in need improves, the problems on the ground remain the same — horrifying attacks carried out by government forces and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) extremists extending their reach and control in Syria. Barack Obama’s administration has announced plans to further arm and train moderate rebels to fight ISIL, but that likely won’t bring an end to the carnage.
In the wake of this summer’s war, which killed 2,200 people, the majority of them Gazan civilians, and destroyed much of the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure, the international community is watching to see what happens next — and it doesn’t look like much. For now, the uneasy truce between Hamas and Israel holds, but the quiet-for-quiet solution that Israel favors will never be amenable to Palestinians. While Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in his speech to the General Assembly on Friday that Palestine was working on a resolution to present to the Security Council affirming “the goal of ending the Israeli occupation and achieving the two-state solution,” Israeli leaders can rely on the U.S. to veto any resolution that places them on their back foot. In his speech to the General Assembly on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Gaza’s Hamas to ISIL, saying they are branches of the same “poisonous tree” — indicating that Israel is not likely to soften its stance anytime soon.
The crisis in Ukraine and concerns that Russia has designs on other states of the former Soviet bloc formed a worrying backdrop to this year’s General Assembly. The shaky cease-fire in eastern Ukraine has held since early September, but there have been numerous breaches along the way; in three incidents on Monday, at least 10 people were killed and 32 were wounded. And Ukraine is already looking at billions in repairs to private property and public infrastructure, while the industrial cities in the nation’s east remain essentially shut down. But perhaps even more worrying, Russian-backed separatists say they have not given up the fight for independence and that the movement has a different interpretation of the Ukrainian president’s promise of more autonomy. Aside from increasingly tight sanctions placed on Moscow by the U.S. and the European Union, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot the international community can do without engaging on the ground — something the West and NATO have firmly ruled out. But with Kiev fearing that Moscow plans to annex more Ukrainian territory and with other Eastern European states voicing concerns that Moscow could hanker for them next, it remains to be seen if this East-West conflict will remain frozen.
While the General Assembly kicked off with a high-profile climate change summit, the meeting wasn’t expected to result in any agreements and was billed as a warm-up to a climate conference in Paris in 2015 where world leaders will try to forge a treaty. But for the hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched through the streets of New York and other cities around the world calling for action on what many see as the defining challenge of our time, a binding agreement on carbon emissions can't come soon enough. As expected, however, nothing concrete came out of the meeting, leaving to Paris the question of how, when and whether the world’s nations will finally sign an agreement.
Ahead of an Ebola summit held on Sept. 25, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution approving a mission to West Africa to aid the affected countries in the fight against the deadly hemorrhagic fever. The move was significant because it is only the second time the Security Council has addressed a public health crisis (the first was HIV/AIDS in 2000) and because the Security Council members have been deadlocked for years on other issues, preventing them from taking action in many cases. Although the mission’s advance team arrived last week, the recruiting process is ongoing, and with the number of Ebola cases doubling every three weeks — a growth rate believed to be underestimated — President Barack Obama was likely right when he stated at the Ebola summit, “We need to be honest with ourselves. It’s not enough.” Obama recently announced the U.S. military will take the lead in coordinating efforts to control the crisis, sending up to 3,000 military and health personnel to the region. But with a Center for Disease Control worst-case estimate that 1.4 million people could be infected with Ebola by January, attacks on health workers and violent protests over quarantines continue, and no one knows whether the the international community has taken sufficient action to control the epidemic.
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