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In the Margins...

Comments on the passing political and cultural scenes.

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Location: United States

Monday, March 21, 2005

The Un-United Nations

A short time ago on the recent anniversary of the liberation of the death camps at Auschwitz, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan made the statement: “Such an evil must never be allowed to happen again.” Even as he spoke, he surely was aware that Sudanese Muslim warlords with the benign blessing of the Sudeanese government were slaughtering black Sudanese farmers and Christians in Sudan's Darfur area. Today the United Nations announced it has withdrawn all international staff in parts of the western Darfur region to a regional capital after Arab militias said they would target foreigners and U.N. convoys in the area, the top U.N. envoy in Sudan confirmed.

Annan's words ring false, however, given the UN's atrocious record in responding to the outright decimation of groups of people, including the massacres in Sudan. Estimates vary, but the numbers of slaughtered in Sudan easily surpasses 100,000, and unless the UN comes to terms with a clear determination as to whether the killings there are 'war crimes' or a 'genocide' in progress, the numbers of dead could rival that which piled up in the Rwanda catastrophe of the 1990's.

Nor is the butchery of peoples reserved only to the Sudan. The United Nations emergency relief coordinator in eastern Congo, reports that bloodshed there is a worst humanitarian crisis than the suffering in Darfur. The toll in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has amounted to “one tsunami every six months,” or nearly 300,000 people if compared to the Asian tsunami of December 2004.

From its inception, the United Nations has shown itself to be a weak institution, unwilling to take clear, decisive action even in sharply focused situations from the Berlin Airlift of the late 1940's to the outright violations against humanity in Sudan and Congo, to name the most notorious recent cruelties. Usually the call in the United States to disband the organization has been dismissed as the wild child of extreme right-wing conservatives. An objective look at the UN’s record, however, shows the organization has dismally failed to carry out its mandates to protect human rights and to prevent war.

The UN has in some cases made the situations worse where the original intent was to provide relief and security. Its peacekeepers in the Congo have for years been using badly needed food supplies to bribe women and girls for sex. In the Middle East, terrorists have been aided by UN personnel in smuggling weapons and assisting in kidnappings. And, of recent note, the UN sponsored Oil-for-Food programs did little to provide food and medicine to the Iraqis suffering under Saddam Hussein’s oppression; instead, billions of dollars were siphoned from the programs to finance the continuance of the Saddam regime and to line the pockets of UN officers and field representatives.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, the UN has no real moral objection to ending Saddam’s pursuit of dangerous weapons or liberating the Iraqi people. The UN dragged its feet for no other reasons than France and Russia sit on the Security Council, and both had massive financial interests in Saddam’s Iraq.

Most atrociously, the UN failed to intervene in the massacres of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, and the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, and failed to deliver food to starving Somalis. This isn’t the sum of UN failures over the past 60 years; all these evil deeds happened in just the last decade or so.

Defenders of the UN claim it just needs to be reformed. But how can an institution that is structurally flawed be reformed? Its very structure, in which small, totalitarian countries and large, democratic countries like the United States or Great Britain have equal influence on decision-making, subjects the world to the rule of a corrupt majority. And pretending that the UN is a legitimate body for international arbitration when it really isn’t, is exactly why crises like the one in the Sudan persist. Far from being a site where nations work together to solve world problems, the UN has become a vacuum where governments conveniently forward foreign policy concerns, never to be properly addressed.

In light of the corrupt lackluster performance, Secretary Gerneal Annan has proposed the most wide-ranging overhaul of the world body since its creation in 1945. His recommendations contain a series of reforms - the expansion of the U.N. Security Council, a radical program to combat poverty, a new human rights body, a condemnation of all forms of terrorism and a series of management and watchdog reforms. The world body is to begin considering these reforms this week, and according to one observer, the reforms must be taken as 'a package,' not piecemeal.

In the U.S., there’s growing impatience with UN reform. A February poll shows just 37 per cent of Americans have a favourable view of the world body. Democrats and Republicans are finally questioning if they wouldn’t do better to leave humanitarian and peacekeeping operations to more reliable bodies, such as NATO, and abandon the UN altogether. It may be the proposed reforms will engender more debate than substance because the same old leadership and subordinates will be in the positions of power within the organizations. The proposals may be superficial, not systemic, and the United States would do well to use its considerable weight to push for real, change, or abandon the ill-fated institution to its own corrupt mismanagement.