UN Day Special Feature: The proud story of Nepali Army in UN Peacekeeping Mission

By Birat Anupam, Kathmandu - Today marks the 75th Anniversary of the United Nations (UN), a global organization founded in the aftermath of the Second World War. Owing to its inception to establish peace, the first sentence of the preamble of the UN charter, which contains 111 articles in 19 chapters, says, ''We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime brought untold sorrow to mankind.'' The representatives of 50 countries assembled at San Francisco of United States had signed on the UN charter on 24 October 1945. Now, UN has 193 member states. According to the official UN website, UN Day celebration was started from 1948.

The website says, ''In 1971, the United Nations General Assembly recommended that the day be observed by Member States as a public holiday.'' Nepal and UN Nepal, despite being the oldest sovereign nation in South Asia, got its membership only after a decade of the UN's establishment. Nepal obtained UN membership only in 1955 together with Sri Lanka from South Asia. Before Nepal, India (1945), Afghanistan (1946) and Pakistan (1947) were UN members from the subcontinent.