But it’s hard.
Three days ago, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which aims to “defeat hunger” around the world, was addressed by Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, who has singlehandedly turned his country from Africa’s wealthy breadbasket into a violent, starving, terrifying place. He also built Zimbabwe’s infamous “rape camps,” routinely kills, tortures and/or imprisons political opponents and massacres people who don’t vote for him. He didn’t have much to say about food at the event, except to mysteriously blame Britain for all the world’s critical food shortages.
Among the FAO conference’s other distinguished luminaries was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who blamed “Zionists” for the food crisis. Snap, Crackle and Pop turned up too, and they swear the Keebler elves are behind the whole thing. No real food policy seems to have been discussed, and it can’t have been cheap to assemble all those heads of state in Rome. If the FAO is our best weapon against hunger, I don’t think hunger needs to worry.
Neither do warlords, despots, torturers, mass murderers or anyone else. Here’s an abbreviated list of the UN’s recent exploits:
Rwandan Genocide
UN action: They sent a few thousand ill-equipped, poorly trained troops, mainly from Ghana, Senegal and Bangladesh. Many had no food, ammunition or supplies when they arrived. Aside from Belgium’s 30 or so troops, who caused more problems than they prevented, and Canada’s small contingent of officers, including mission leader Romeo Dallaire, no other troops from the developed world were involved in any meaningful way.
Result: 800,000 Rwandans killed
Darfur Genocide
UN action: On June 3, a UN delegation “expressed its concern” about the daily massacres that have gone on unchecked for five years.
Result: 200,000 to 400,000 Sudanese killed
Myanmar — Cyclone Nargis
UN action: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon asked Myanmar officials to allow international aid and aid workers into the country. The government agreed, then promptly changed its mind.
Result: Well over 130,000 people already died, even according to wildly unreliable government stats that originally estimated just 350 people killed. OXFAM says the eventual tally could be closer to 1.5 million, including deaths from starvation and curable diseases caused by the cyclone.
Second Iraq War
UN Action: The UN Security Council refused to authorize the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Result: It happened anyway, with no consequences whatsoever for the 49 nations that supported the “pre-emptive” war. (Only five actually contributed troops to the invasion.) Approximately 150,000 Iraqis have died in the fighting so far.
Second Congo War
UN Action: 16,000 UN peacekeepers — poorly equipped and with an uncertain mandate — were sent to the Congo. Only Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa an Uruguay offered more than 1,000 troops. As for the richer nations, Belgium and Canada each sent nine non-combat “military observers,” Denmark sent two, and China sent two police officers.
Result: 5 million civilians killed
Srebrenica
UN action: 400 armed Dutch peacekeepers were dispatched to protect Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia, but were not authorized to use force to do so.
Result: With no legal right to intervene, the horrified Dutch watched as Serbs massacred 8,000 people — the largest European mass murder since World War II.
All together, the number of people killed in these select few conflicts are roughly equal to the population of Hong Kong. Or Massachusetts. Or Israel. Or Berlin and Sydney combined.
The point of all this is that the United Nations exists mainly to prevent conflict between nations. In this regard, it hasn’t been very effective. But it’s proven even worse at staving off conflicts within nations, and the massacres of the last few decades have mostly been cases of governments slaughtering their own people for political gain.
So, aside from UNICEF, what good is the United Nations? Its biggest problem is pretty fundamental: the United Nations are anything but, with each country pursuing its own agenda, interests and back-room deals. No one seems terribly interested in creating a coherent, unified approach to food, peace, human rights, trade or anything else.
Don’t get me wrong — I want to see the good. I want to believe that there’s an international organization that can do what the UN set out to do. I want to know that there’s a force waiting in the wings — one with a clear, broad mandate — that will intervene the next time some government decides to wipe out a tenth of its population, or denies the most basic of dignities to its citizens. I want someone to post a comment here that will convince me that the UN still has a role to play. I really want to believe in this organization, like Dallaire still does. I don’t know how he does it, after watching the massacre-by-machete of hundreds of thousands of people with no real mandate to intervene, but even though it drove him to question everything he knew about his life, he says he still believes in the UN’s place in the world.
This FAO conference was just the last straw in a long line of events that were slowly convincing me that the UN is doomed to irrelevance. I’m starting to think that’s how, as we put more news-watching years behind us, we move gradually from left to right on the political spectrum, from multilateralism to looking out for number one. That Winston Churchill guy may have been onto something when he said “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” I hope he’s wrong, and that I’m not just brainless. But then, I’m not quite 35 yet.
9 responses so far ↓
1 B // Jun 6, 2008 at 2:04 am
Sadly, this is a conclusion I drew a LONG time ago. You’ve probably heard me refer to the UN as the UPS. I’ve often joked that it’s sole function is to deliver packages where UPS won’t go, but now it seems that it won’t even fulfill that purpose. Unfortunately, it’s a necessary evil. We need to have a table the world can come to discuss issues. The fact that it has no will and no capacity to act in any meaningful way is REALLY sad, because that means that it is more of a negative force than a good one. By serving the forum role in theory, it allows for global apathy. If the UN exists then it absolves others of having to take responsibility and action, because “the UN is there.” Member nations can pass non-binding resolutions to settle their consciences, so that issues have been “addressed.” And any meaningful resolutions are not followed up with action. It has effectively become a place where the world can pay lip service and allow those who need the UN’s help to die by the wayside.
A few years back Prime Minister Martin proposed starting another institution that would be composed of 20 leading democratic nations. I don’t remember all the details, but I recall it sounding quite ambitious and promising. I believe democracy was a prerequisite for membership.
Perhaps “UN” is an apt name. It’s about as UN- as you get.
Very, VERY, SAD…
2 Rawda // Jun 6, 2008 at 2:53 pm
My earliest memory of the UN was in 1996, when I was a 15 year-old watching the news with my dad. I was starting to be extremely curious about the world and desiring to be informed and to have my own opinions, but all I achieved were feelings of fear, anger and confusion.
Every night on the evening news during the Israeli attack on Lebanon, images of casualties and destruction of a beautiful country were the first thing I saw and would constantly think of. It was the first inhuman thing I had ever seen… and many followed, unfortunately. “The worst attack of the operation came on 18 April when Israel pounded a UN base at Qana and killed more than 100 refugees. About 1,100 civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee from their homes. UN-brokered ceasefire came into force on 14 August 2006.”* Four months after a UN building was destroyed, they decide to enforce a cease-fire. (???!!!)
Growing up, I have never had any hope in the UN. I still watch the news every night and pray that something or someone will stop all the killing. I’d rather remain a hopeless idealist or “be the change I want to see in the world” than ever believe in the UN.
*http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/11/newsid_4828000/4828386.stm
*http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5228392.stm
3 Theo // Jun 7, 2008 at 11:39 am
There are two basic problems. One is what Mark highlights: independent agendas. The UN is, to an important extent, the creature of its members. I find it an effective, if depressing, exercise to deploy the lower case. For example: “The United Nations can’t seem to do anything” to “The united nations can’t seem to do anything”.
But any international organization has a life of its own. To the exten that the UN does, however, it was never designed to manage internal conflicts. Remember that it was founded at the close of the world’s worst (international) war; and let’s be under no illusions that the founders of the UN saw the internal horrors of Germany and Japan as the compelling, overriding international interest. At the same time, with the awareness that one of the major problems in the 1920s and 30s was the League’s enshrining of “national” self-determination–i.e. there are meaningful, essential, identity criteria that you can use to judge the existence of a state–helped to enshrine a rather inflexible sovereignty. The remnants of international legalism, I think, ossified that concept of sovereignty.
Fast forward to the end of the Cold War, and the considered belief by most that internal war, not international, was the prevailing world problem (notwithstanding that internal wars had experienced a steady rise since 1945, not some sort of sudden unleashing with the collapse of the USSR). People have wanted to do something about them; the UN seems like the chief possibility. What helps this transition is what I think is a critical moment in 1991: the UN, having endorsed an international response to a clearly international conflict (Iraq-Kuwait), extends that mandate to cover protection of Iraqi civilians, specifically Kurds and Shias. This transition from international to internal, I think, eases (at the same time as it reflects) a broader shift in perceived mandate. The expectation is there.
The tools are not. The UN is still the same basic organization it once was in its principles, upholding sovereignty at the expense of lots of things. In part, the failure of the UN is the failure of it to meet what are basically unreasonable expectations. There is no way for an international organization to manage internal conflicts in an acceptable fashion if it is rooted in an inflexible state sovereignty at every level. The only way that anyone did anything about Kosovo was precisely not to respect Serbia’s sovereignty. (It is also indicative of the slow but somewhat perceptable shift in the UN’s approach that the Security Council gave its tacit blessing, after the fact, to NATO’s mission there.)
(I actually think that inflexible state sovereignty has been a key ingredient in the shift from international to internal war as the prevailing form in which humans kill each other over the last hundred years, for a basic reason: internal wars could accumulate without self-interested states being able to take advantage of them to force a change in boundaries; they just took advantage in other ways.)
You could try to reconstitute the world’s supreme organization. I don’t think it’s that possible: who would reconstitute it? Answer: sovereign states.
One other thing. Pessimism is not the same as looking out for number one. It may mean bypassing the UN instead.
4 mark // Jun 9, 2008 at 10:21 am
Theo said:
And there it is. Maybe I’m expecting too much of an organization that isn’t doing important things it was never meant to do.
Some say that smaller NATO-type groups are the answer. But what kind of nation would agree to join an international organization that reserves the right to interfere in its domestic affairs? Only the kind that isn’t planning to massacre its own citizens. So what’s the use of a NATO-type group that only has authority in NATO countries, while the Zimbabwes, Myanmars and Sudans of the world sit outside their control?
Sadly, I’m starting to believe that the only way atrocities on the Rwandan scale can be avoided is if countries unilaterally decide to intervene, with only moral — not necessarily legal — justification for doing so. As much as I’m reluctant to trust the moral judgment of the world’s military powers, I’m even more reluctant to see the massacres and flagrant human rights abuses continue, while the rest of the world remains reluctant to interfere in “internal disputes.”
5 Mik // Jun 10, 2008 at 11:03 am
Fortunately, the Security Council is not the only body of the UN.
You’re referring to the international security aspects of the United Nations, as voted upon by the Security Council. As for the FAO, while there may be speeches by crazed dictators, they work on an extremely wide variety of projects across the globe. It’s important to understand that in reality, the UN is far more than a bunch of countries that sit around while atrocities go unchecked. From the World Health Organization, that fights a huge number of diseases worldwide through R&D and advocacy, to food programs that feed millions every year, most of the UN’s committees do good work that is largely unsung and overshadowed by the “failings” of the Security Council.
It’s thus important not to paint the entire organization with one brush. The UN is only as good as the will of its constituent countries; the only role it can serve is to represent this will, and where the preservation of sovereignty remains a key value, so will the UN find it difficult to unilaterally intervene in internal conflicts, as Theo mentioned.
6 Mik // Jun 10, 2008 at 11:04 am
Furthermore, the UN was not created with the idea that it would represent a global government that would have authority over all nations.
The fact that people think otherwise, and expect the Security Council to act as a supranational government which has the power to protect and preserve the rights of all citizens, is strange to me; considering that the SC has not been given anything even close to such power by its member nations, why does it have that reputation?
7 Leah // Jun 10, 2008 at 11:19 am
Didn’t read through all the previous comments, but i think you may find a talk by Paul Collier (a British economist) very interesting. In fact, for information junkies Tedtalks in general is a great source of interesting facts and ideas.
Check out: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/270
and http://www.ted.com/index.php/
8 mark // Jun 10, 2008 at 11:45 am
It’s true that the UN does more than security work, and that it wasn’t created with a centralized global police force in mind. This is a good thing, and I don’t think many people are calling for this.
But the UN can and should be a powerful tool for diplomacy and consensus-building, through which motivated nations can organize broad-based interventions in response to humanitarian crises. Their continued failure to do so is a failure of the international community and a failure of the UN’s peacekeeping roles.
It’s not the United Nations as a body that was responsible for permitting the Rwandan genocide, but rather the nations that elected not to unite to stand in the way of 800,000 killings. It was a failure of Belgium, Canada and other nations who declined to provide any substantial assistance to the peacekeeping effort. And it was a shining moment for countries like Ghana and Senegal, developing countries that nonetheless sent strong, committed contingents.
It’s unfortunately true that the UN’s General Assembly is only as good as its member states, and the states that sit on their hands while humanitarian nightmares explode bear greater responsibility, as far as I’m concerned, than a toothless international organization that at the end of the day is nothing more than the room they meet in. I’m not criticizing the UN as one cohesive whole, but rather as a collection of countries that have nominally elected to pool their forces in the pursuit of peace, and that have often failed miserably to take a meaningful shot at that goal.
9 Leah // Jun 10, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Okay, so I’ve read through most of the comments. And I am going to be devil’s advocate for a second and create an ethical debate.
To quote : “The point of all this is that the United Nations exists mainly to prevent conflict between nations. In this regard, it hasn’t been very effective.”
I see the purpose of having and international organization to discuss issues between nations. But where does anyone 1 nation stand in dictating what another should do, or how it should run? Here too is where the U.N. is failing miserably. However, under what circumstances does it have the right to tell Mugabe how to utilize his power?
What political/financial incentive does Mugabe have to not do what he is doing?
And what can the U.N. realistically do about it without occupying every defunct african nation. Or any nation that commits atrocities?
I am not suggesting that there is no solution. But, Would the nation with no human rights violation please throw the first stone in dictating how other countries run their business?
Ultimately, the initiatives need to come from within the nations themselves and for that there needs to be leadership in Africa that has those goals. Can this happen?
watch this: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/156
I think there are solutions.
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