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UN still indispensable but needs to be more responsive: Shashi Tharoor
Shashi Tharoor said that the next step for the UN would be to become more representative and responsive.
The United Nations (UN) remains “indispensable” despite its “failures over Gaza and Ukraine”, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said on Thursday, adding that the body needs be more responsive.
Tharoor said that the next step for the global body would be to become more representative and responsive in a world where global cooperation is a must, PTI reported.
“Today, when people decry its failures over Gaza and Ukraine, I acknowledge again that the UN is not perfect nor was it ever meant to be, and yet it remains indispensable,” Tharoor said.
Tharoor, who has in the past served as the UN under secretary general, called for the need to “recommit” to the global body at the 15th Desmond Tutu International Peace Lecture in Cape Town, South Africa.
“As someone who served the UN for three decades from 1978-2007, I witnessed first-hand its evolution from a Cold War battleground to a post-Cold War laboratory of global cooperation,” PTI quoted the Congress MP as saying.
He further said that he was part of the UN's efforts to protect refugees and its struggles to build peace, and had seen it falter in Rwanda and “rise to the occasion in Timor-Leste and Namibia.”
However, he highlighted that there was a need for “moral reimagination” of the UN.
To abandon UN is to abandon the very idea of common humanity, says Tharoor
While calling the UN an “indispensable symbol”, not of “perfection but of possibility”, Tharoor said that abandoning it would be equivalent to abandoning “the very idea of our common humanity.”
“It matters to all of us who believe that cooperation is not weakness and that justice is not luxury,” Tharoor said, adding that the UN's survival depends not on nostalgia but on renewal. “…That renewal begins with the recognition that in an interconnected world, no nation is truly sovereign unless all are,” the Thiruvananthapuram MP said.
Tharoor said that despite the struggle with bureaucracy and politics, the global body had continued its mission to “feed the hungry, shelter the displaced and give voice to the voiceless.”
The former minister of state (MoS) for external affairs said he is convinced that the UN still matters to those seeking shelter, the peacekeepers, and to diplomats while negotiating a fragile truce.
