Jack D.

July 27, 2023 marks the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Korean people in their heroic war of resistance against the genocidal onslaught of U.S. imperialism.

In the United States, an episode in the popular narrative of the war goes as follows. In mid-1950, the Soviet Union was boycotting the United Nations Security Council over its refusal to grant China’s seat to the recently established People’s Republic of China. It was thanks to the Soviet Union’s ill-considered absence that the Security Council was able to initiate an armed U.N. intervention in Korea without facing obstruction by a Soviet veto.

Some academics have even gone so far as to take the Soviet Union’s boycott as evidence that it did not have advance knowledge of the Korean People’s Army’s offensive across the 38th parallel, or at least of its timing. Had the USSR known, they argue, it would have made more sense for it to attend the proceedings so that it could have vetoed Resolution 84, which authorized “a unified command under the United States of America” “to use the United Nations flag in the course of operations against North Korean forces …”

What is virtually unknown today is that the Soviet Union actually did veto Security Council Resolution 84. As a deliberate act in defiance of the Soviet veto, the “passing” of Resolution 84 was a flagrant violation by the United States and its lackeys of the agreements made between the great powers at the Yalta and San Francisco Conferences in 1945.

In other words, the “U.N. intervention” in Korea was no U.N. intervention at all. Instead, it was an illegal act of aggression undertaken by the United States and its lapdogs. This should not be a controversial statement. The illegality of Resolution 84 was recognized at the time even by honest bourgeois legal scholars, who lamented that the fundamental principles of the U.N. Charter had necessitated a choice between paralytic inaction and such an extralegal maneuver.

Though in common parlance we speak of the five permanent members of the Security Council having a “veto,” the U.N. Charter does not express this concept in negative terms.  In 1950, Article 27, paragraph 3 of the Charter stated:

Decisions of the Security Council on all other [i.e., non-procedural] matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of seven [later changed to nine with the expansion of the Security Council] members including the concurring votes of the permanent members; provided that, in decisions under Chapter VI, and under paragraph 3 of Article 52, a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting.

The French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese texts of the paragraph, which are equally authentic, are even clearer, explicitly saying “all the permanent members.”

However, the Big Five, by collective agreement, deviated in practice from the letter of the Charter and regarded resolutions passed with the abstention of one or more of their number as being valid so long as none of them cast a negative vote. This allowed any permanent member that objected to a resolution to make its objection clear while still granting the tacit approval required by the spirit of Article 27 to pass and implement the resolution.

Article 27 of the U.N. Charter was intended as an expression of the principle of unanimity of the great powers, also known as the Yalta voting formula. This principle was the cornerstone of the United Nations Organization, which would never have been established without it. So, in practice, an abstention was treated as equivalent to a concurring vote.

In announcing its boycott of Security Council proceedings in January 1950, the USSR stated unambiguously that it would regard as unlawful any resolutions “passed” by that body in the absence of a representative of the People’s Republic of China. In mid-1950, it left no doubt as to its opposition to the U.S.’ maneuvers relative to the Korean question. As such, the Soviet Union’s absence from the vote on Resolution 84 can in no way be construed as an expression of tacit consent. In point of fact, it constituted a veto.

Far from illustrating a diplomatic blunder on the part of Moscow, the events of June and July 1950 in the U.N. Security Council demonstrate the sincerity of the USSR’s adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter. Furthermore, they lay bare the U.S.’ bad faith in its dealings with the socialist countries as well as its shameless plot to subvert the purpose of the United Nations and convert the organization into yet another boarder in America’s house of puppets.