How covid-19 gave peace a chance, and nobody took it

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Ceasefires across the world are coming undone as America and China remain at loggerheads

ON MARCH 23RD, when the coronavirus was beginning to seize the world, Antόnio Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, issued a call for a global ceasefire. “The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war,” he declared. His laudable ambition, echoed by Pope Francis and others, was to secure a respite for those countries and regions so weakened by violence and conflict that they would be especially vulnerable to the pandemic.

Hopes were raised that such armed groups, fatigued after decades of fighting, were using the opportunity of the UN’s ceasefire call to wind up their fruitless revolutionary struggles. They all indicated that they were open to talks with the governments they were fighting. Could some good, perhaps, come out of the disastrous pandemic?

“It has been very disappointing,” argues Richard Gowan, a UN-watcher at the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organisation based in New York. All the early momentum for peace generated by Mr Guterres’s original call has been lost, and that is at least partly because of five weeks of dithering at the UN Security Council. A swift and decisive resolution was needed to back the secretary-general’s words; instead there has been silence.

The Chinese insist that the organisation gets a namecheck; America does not want it mentioned at all. The Trump administration has accused the WHO of mishandling the crisis, and in particular of colluding with the government in Beijing to cover up China’s role in spreading the virus in the first place. The tussle over a mention of the WHO in the resolution has thus become a proxy battle between the two powers over who should shoulder most of the blame for causing the pandemic.

 

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