WANA (Sep 03) – Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei has criticized the notion that the United Nations’ mission should be limited to preventing wars between superpowers, saying such an interpretation of the UN Charter undermines the organization’s fundamental principles and could pave the way for justifying aggression and crimes against other countries.

 

Referring to the views of the late UN Secretary-General **Dag Hammarskjöld**, Baghaei recalled that Hammarskjöld had warned against turning the United Nations into a “machine for holding static conferences” serving the diplomacy of major powers. Instead, he believed the organization should be a dynamic instrument for safeguarding the security of smaller states.

 

Baghaei said Hammarskjöld devoted much of his tenure to advancing that vision. Today, however, he argued, the UN Secretary-General appears to have reduced the organization’s mission to “preventing war between superpowers.”

 

The Iranian spokesman described this narrow interpretation as “misleading and dangerous,” arguing that reading Article 2(4) of the UN Charter in such a limited way effectively makes the vast majority of UN member states irrelevant to the organization’s core mission and could be used to justify almost any war.

 

He further warned that such an approach would undermine the fundamental principles and purposes of the UN Charter and, even more seriously, could amount to “whitewashing” crimes committed by so-called superpowers in their acts of aggression against other countries.

 

Baghaei pointed to wars and conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan and Gaza, asking rhetorically whether, under such a standard, these wars and atrocities should also be regarded as successes simply because they did not occur between superpowers.

 

He concluded by addressing the UN Secretary-General directly: “Is this an appropriate message from a Secretary-General approaching the end of his term?”