The Time to Confront Guterres is Now
Disgraced UN chief must finally be "compelled" to act against Iran and Russia
This morning I logged in my Twitter (sorry, X doesn’t stick with me) and saw a tweet that made me cry.
From happiness, that is.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz announced that Jerusalem will ban UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres from entering the country.
Following many months of fights and tensions, it was hardly a surprise that the hardliner Israel would resort to such a move. Especially in light of Guterres’s response on the night Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel when he failed to call out Tehran for this act of aggression, insisting on a ceasefire instead — a tweet that garnered so many insults in response that it’d take some time to go through them.
Let alone pick the wittiest.
Without a doubt, Ukrainians are observing the clash with great interest. More so since, our frustration with the UN agencies and Antonio Guterres personally has been building up for a while now.
Over the years, the amount of wrongdoing from the UN and UN-related agencies — whether we’re talking about bloopers, lack of moral principles, or borderline criminal acts like endangering the lives of people — reached astonishing heights.
Just think of the time the OSCE left all the sensitive data in eastern Ukraine before fleeing the embattled region. Or the IOM’s complete lack of basic human compassion, with senior management telling their Ukrainian staff in 2022 that “they do not read the news about Ukraine every day due to so many other armed conflicts in the world.”
Guterres’s choice to keep shaking hands with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s in a manner that doesn’t even a tad suggest that Russia is carrying out a war of aggression, condemned by his own agency, only serves to fan the flames of our anger.
Or, shall I say, wrath?
Indeed, Guterres is a bureaucrat and his powers are limited — but anyone dealing with bureaucrats knows well that their ability to take action is very much whimsical.
Article 99 of the UN Charter, according to which the UN chief “may bring to attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion, may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security”, is a good illustration of that.
In December 2023, Guterres officially invoked it in relation to the Israel-Hamas war, as a result of which trapped civilians in Gaza are bearing the brunt too. All because, according to his secretary, he felt compelled to do it “for the first time since taking office in 2017” and this way, making it clear that the bloodshed in Ukraine and reports of Russian heinous crimes and mass-scale murder are simply not as compelling.
At least for a man like himself. After all, Guterres is a Portuguese socialist and like many European leftists, he appears to sympathise with the so-called resistance in the Middle East and most likely Russia, or rather its very “happy and equal” Soviet past.
But it’s not the genocide Olympics matters that play the most important role here.
Guterres’s immediate inability to condemn Iran’s attack on Israel — or take any meaningful actions against the UNRWA that proved to have members of Hamas in it or other institutions that have displayed disgraceful conduct throughout the years — impacts Ukraine too.
Iran is a close ally of Russia and has supplied it with Shahed drones and ballistic missiles that the Russian army uses to bomb Ukraine’s infrastructure. Unlike Russia, whose Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia praised Iran for "exceptional" restraint in recent months, Tehran isn’t in the UN’s Security Council.
And yet it faced virtually no ramifications for its actions even at a rhetorical level. In fact, it feels comfortable enough to troll Ukraine by officially congratulating it on its Independence Day on Aug.24.
Now that Guterres is in hot water it is time for Ukraine and the likeminded to put pressure on him so that he starts acting not only when he personally feels compelled to trigger Article 99.
He already condemned Iran’s attack on Israel, — though likely hesitantly as it happened following Jerusalem’s ban — but he’s nowhere close to doing what he must, and not just in relation to Iran whom Guterres has never called out for taking almost a direct participation in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
His chief task is to deal with Article 23 of the United Nations Charter, Chapter V, which reads: “The Security Council shall consist of fifteen Members of the United Nations. The Republic of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America shall be permanent members of the Security Council.”
To this day, Russia, which seized the Security Council seat in 1991 even though the Soviet Union comprised 15 republics, continues to occupy it the very same way it occupies Ukrainian, Georgian, Moldovan territory and more.
This has been brought up by the Ukrainian Ambassador to the UN Serhiy Kyslytsia on multiple occasions, including during my interview with him in 2022. And it seems like now is a good moment to learn from Israel’s resolve for this message to stop falling on deaf ears.
Which brings me to say this:
Mr. Guterres, should you not feel absolutely and profoundly obligated to trigger Article 99 to bring this matter to the Security Council?
After all, there’s an impostor sitting in it!
An aggressive one too.
You absolutely right.