SOMALIA HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION 1992-1993 by G. P. ...

626 G. P. Valladares
INTRODUCTION
It looks as if the 20th century turned out to get buried in the remains of the
Berlin Wall, which collapsed in 1989.
This short century began with the First World War in 1914. Towards its end,
the International Community, horrified by the indescribable suffering it had gone
through, set up the League of the Society of Nations, by means of which the basis
for collective security was laid down. Twenty years later, the world goes up in
arms again.
And once again Mankind witnesses the most sorrowful war spectacle, and
sees, to its astonishment, multiple human slaughter, the result of undiscriminated
use of massive-elimination weapons, such as nuclear arms.
In January 1942, 26 countries signed the Declaration of the United Nations.
Such assertion of a common cause on behalf of those who fought against the Axis
powers was one of the stages leading to the San Francisco Conference in 1945
where the Charter was drafted, a charter which exposes the principles and purposes
of the Organization, the main one being the maintenance of International Peace and
Security.
By its end, the war had left a new power game of chess. All over the century,
the colonial empires gradually deteriorated while, on the other hand, two
superpowers which would leave the world insecure within the framework of what
was known as the "Cold War".
Such "Cold War" was latent in the United Nations Security Council when
one superpower or another exercised the veto over matters of interest to its
counterpart, thus preventing the Organization from acting fluently in its attempt to
fulfil its main objective.
In November 1989, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics declared in a joint statement their intention to improve the
effectiveness of the United Nations Organization and to ensure the observance of
the Security Council's mandate with respect to the maintenance of International
Peace and Security.
This was immediately seen. During the last two years, the Security Council
has dispatched the same amount of Operations for the Maintenance or Restoration
of Peace as has been done from its birth.