The British organised a conference in Shimla in 1914, which the representatives of China and Tibet attended. The conference’s objective was to negotiate a treaty that would demarcate the border between Tibet and British-ruled India. The British plan was to put pressure on the weak Chinese central government to grant more autonomy to the Tibetans and redraw the border in India’s favour.
There was a bigger imperial British plan: to gradually dismember China, by first cutting off Tibet and then Xinjiang. Britain expected China, which was then under a weak central government and was being dictated to by European powers, to capitulate easily.
The Chinese delegation refused to be browbeaten and succumb to the machinations of the British. But the British went ahead and signed an agreement with a handpicked Tibetan delegation delineating the northern border, which came to be known as the McMahon Line. It was named after a British colonial officer working in India by the name of Henry McMahon.
China vehemently rejected the ad hoc border that the British sought to thrust down its throat. The British warned the Chinese government that there would “be great trouble” if Beijing did not accept the McMahon Line as the border between Tibet and India. Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary at that time, warned: “If China does not sign but resorts to an aggressive policy, the consequences must be disastrous for China.”
Both the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists under Mao Zedong refused to recognise the McMahon Line, arguing that Tibet was not an independent country and therefore had no right to sign a separate border agreement with the British.
Independent India and Communist China established good relations that lasted almost until the end of the first decade of Indian Independence. The Chinese side tried to prevail on the Indian government to negotiate an acceptable solution to the impasse on the border, but Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru swore by the sanctity of the McMahon Line bequeathed by the departing colonial power.
Zhou Enlai’s visit
In a last-ditch attempt to find an amicable solution to the border dispute, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai visited New Delhi in 1960. The Chinese government offered to recognise India’s claim over Arunachal Pradesh up to the McMahon Line in return for India’s recognition of China’s claim over the Aksai Chin peninsula. Nehru rejected the offer and adopted an inflexible diplomatic posture on the border issue.
Nehru was in a unique position to compromise as the border issue had not become as emotive as it is today. The ruling Congress party had an overwhelming majority in Parliament and controlled all the State legislatures. Only the Jan Sangh (the Bharatiya Janata Party’s predecessor) and the small Socialist bloc led by Ram Manohar Lohia, all supporters of Tibetan independence, were against the resolution of the border issue.
The issue of Tibetan independence had become a “cause celebre” in the West and among right-wing and social democratic political parties in India. The Dalai Lama, who had raised the banner of revolt against the Chinese government, sought and was given political refuge in India in 1959, angering Beijing.
A Tibetan government-in-exile was set up under the Indian government’s patronage with liberal funding from the West. The Chinese Communist Party did not let the Tibet issue come in the way of negotiations although a noticeable hardening of positions on each side was visible.
Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama’s elder brother, has claimed that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) covert operations in Tibet, which had started in 1956, had made Beijing suspicious about India’s reluctance to settle the border issue. With the tacit approval of the Indian authorities, the CIA had trained and financed a failed guerilla campaign under the leadership of Thondup for a few years after the 1962 war. It is indisputable that one of the major reasons the Chinese decided to go to war in 1962 against India was the perception that New Delhi wanted to restore the “status quo ante” in Tibet so that the autonomous region could return to its pre-1949 status.
‘Forward policy’
Nehru’s “forward policy”,which gave the Indian military the green light to set up military outposts in territory under the military control of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), sparked off the 1962 war. The goal was to expel the Chinese military from all the areas claimed by India. It was a serious miscalculation.
The Henderson-Brooks Report on the 1962 India-China war,which the Indian government commissioned, concluded that the “forward policy” increased the chances of conflict with China. The classified report, which is now widely available online, stated that the Indian Army was not militarily in a position to implement Nehru’s “forward policy”.
According to Chinese military scholars, Nehru’s adventurist military policy was aimed at turning Tibet once again into “a buffer state” between India and China. The Chinese viewed this as a continuation of Britain’s imperial policy.
There is no doubt that Nehru harboured sympathies for the Tibetan cause, but at the same time it should be remembered that it was India which turned down an U.S. proposal made in 1951 for joint action to support the cause of Tibetan independence.
In 1954, India had formally recognised Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. However, New Delhi also encouraged the Dalai Lama to fight for increased autonomy from Beijing. Beijing accused the Nehru government of playing a role in the uprising staged by the Dalai Lama’s followers in Lhasa in 1959. Nehru had sent a message to the Dalai Lama saying that he was welcome to seek political sanctuary in India.
Bruce Riedel, who has held senior posts in the CIA and is an expert on the region, in his book JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino–Indian War (2017), has revealed that the covert operations by the CIA and others in Tibet played a role in Mao’s decision to invade India.
The Dalai Lama later said that the covert American actions were only part of the “Cold War tactics” to undermine the socialist bloc. The CIA was actively supporting the Tibetan separatists from 1957 to 1961 and it could not have been done without the cooperation of the Indian intelligence agencies.
After the recent clash between the Indian Army and the PLA on the Ladakh border, Riedel, in an article, observed that there was a danger of the clashes escalating into a full-blown war like the 1962 conflict “which almost brought the United States to war with China”.
Nehru had sent an SOS to John F. Kennedy, officially requesting for the U.S’ help after the Chinese invasion. Riedel writes that the Americans and the British had airlifted arms to India soon after the 1962 war to help the beleaguered Indian Army.
But the aid was not enough to stave off a massive military defeat. According to recently declassified Kennedy administration documents, Nehru had asked for 350 U.S. war planes along with 10,000 U.S.Air Force personnel for help in bombing Chinese targets.
Before Kennedy could decide, the Chinese army had withdrawn from most of the Indian territory they had occupied,keeping only parts of Aksai Chin they had claimed. Riedel also writes that the Kennedy administration restrained Pakistan from exploiting the situation in 1962.
Pakistan wanted to seize Kashmir as the Indian Army was busy fighting the Chinese. “Kennedy made it clear that he would view any Pakistani involvement as an act of war,” Riedel has written.
Confrontation in 1967
The war lasted a month, with the PLA making deep inroads into Indian territory. The Chinese announced a ceasefire after less than a month of fighting. The McMahon Line was officially replaced by the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
The next serious confrontation between the two armies occurred in 1967 at Nathu La and Cho La. Then, as now, the two sides had differing perceptions about the LAC. A scuffle between Indian and Chinese soldiers escalated into a full-fledged military fire fight at the time. More than 140 Indian soldiers were killed. The PLA, too, lost a large number of their troops. That was the last serious confrontation between the two sides until the events of June 15 this year in the Galwan valley.
The two sides were on the verge of clashing on several previous occasions but better sense prevailed. In 1986, the two sides were on the verge of a clash on the eastern border in Arunachal Pradesh following a misunderstanding about the goals of a military exercise the Indian Army conducted near Tawang. The eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation did not degenerate into a violent one.
The 1993 pact
To avoid further misunderstandings and accidental confrontations, India and China signed the landmark “Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control” in 1993. The pact’s confidence-building measures included a commitment by both sides against the use of force to settle disputes along the LAC and to resort to the dialogue process to settle boundary disputes.
The two sides also pledged to reduce troop levels along the LAC. Additional border agreements were signed in 1996, 2005 and 2013.
But the undefined border between the two countries continued to witness several minor and a few slightly more serious incidents in the last couple of years. No shots, however, were fired in the past 35 years. But with the coming of the hyper-nationalistic government to power, which coincided with the ascendance of the assertive President Xi Jinping, the temperature along the LAC has risen.
The spurt in infrastructure building on the Indian side of the border, which included building of all-weather roads and the upgradation of airports in the Ladakh sector adjacent to Aksai Chin, has put the PLA on high alert.
The Chinese side would not have forgotten that the previous National Democratic Alliance government had openly identified China as India’s chief strategic rival while justifying the Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998.
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee wrote a letter to the then U.S. President, Bill Clinton, explaining the rationale behind the Pokhran test. “We have an overt nuclear weapon state on our borders, a state which has committed armed aggression against India in 1962. Although our relations with that country have improved in the last decade or so, an atmosphere of distrust persists mainly due to the unresolved border problem,” the letter bluntly stated.
There were no major problems along the LAC during the 10-year rule of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) that followed. However, it was in that period that the government started implementing the India-China Border Roads (ICBR) programme in a big way.
The UPA government ordered the construction of 73 border roads in areas where India and China had differing perceptions about the border. After signing a defence agreement and the nuclear deal with the U.S., the UPA government had moved closer to Washington on key foreign policy and security issues, especially on issues pertaining to China.
The Barack Obama administration found a willing partner in the Indian government as it launched it military pivot to the East as part of its “containment policy” against China. The U.S.wanted India to strengthen its border infrastructure against China and possess a “blue water” navy that would project power in the Asia Pacific region in tandem with the U.S. Navy.
It was the UPA government that started the permanent build-up of forces across the LAC and sanctioned the raising of a 70,000-strong mountain corps.
After the Doklam standoff, the government further hastened the road construction. Many commentators attribute the Galwan clash to the construction by the military of an all-weather Darbuk-Sayok-Daulat Beg Oldie road.
The road is situated very near the Karakoram Pass and the highway connecting Tibet to Xinjian. The road is crucial to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project and the Belt and Road Initiative. The CPEC passes through Gilgit-Baltistan over which India has not relinquished claims.
Relations off to a bad start
The Dalai Lama’s Tibetan government-in-exile was invited for the Prime Minister’s swearing-in ceremony for the first time. India, under the BJP, started using the “Tibet card” more frequently. The Dalai Lama was allowed to visit Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, one of the holiest places in Tibetan Buddhism.
China refers to Arunachal Pradesh as Southern Tibet and has not given up its claims on the region. Chinese forces had seized Tawang in 1962 but had withdrawn after declaring a ceasefire unilaterally. Relations were back on an even keel after the visit of Xi Jinping to India in 2014 where PM hosted him in Ahmedabad.
For the Chinese side, therefore, the incident at Doklam in 2017 came as a surprise. The Chinese leadership was preparing for the all-important 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party scheduled in October of the same year. The face-off between the two militaries lasted more than two months in the desolate Himalayan heights.
It ended only after both sides agreed “to withdraw” from the disputed area, situated at a trijunction where the borders of India, Bhutan and China intersect. The disputed area in Doklam was in fact a territory claimed by China and Bhutan. Last heard, the PLA has built permanent structures in the area they had occupied.
The Bhutanese side has been unwittingly caught in the middle of the conflicts between its two giant neighbours. The kingdom now seems to be on the way to resolving the border dispute with China on its own. It was after the Doklam incident that the 2018 Wuhan summit took place.
Both Modi and Xi agreed “to properly manage and control their differences” and provide “strategic guidance” to their respective militaries to strengthen institutional mechanisms to prevent tensions form escalating in the border areas. The two leaders again met in Chennai in 2019 and pledged to work together to promote regional and international cooperation.
The bonhomie of the last two years has evaporated within six months of the last meeting between the leaders of the two most populous countries in the world. After the June 15 incident which resulted in the death of 20 Indian soldiers, emotions are still running high, but both the sides have continued to talk and defuse tensions along the LAC.
The PLA has withdrawn from some of the “pressure points” it had occupied, and a buffer zone has been created to separate the two armies. In the third week of July, both sides agreed to not use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) near the friction points along the LAC. Earlier, the two armies had agreed on suspending foot patrolling for a month to reduce tensions. The corps commanders of the two armies have held four rounds of talks since the first week of June.
India is demanding the restoration of the status quo as it existed until earlier in the year. Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, on a visit to Ladakh in the third week of July, acknowledged that the negotiations could take time and ultimately might not bring the desired results.
The Indian External Affairs Ministry, in a statement issued on July 23, called on the Chinese side to work “sincerely” on the disengagement plan that the two sides had agreed upon after the discussions held between the Indian National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, and the Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, in the first week of July.
The PLA had not withdrawn from pressure points around the Pangong Tso lake which they had recently occupied. As both sides know, only a comprehensive agreement on the border, involving give and take on both sides, can bring about lasting peace.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.