UN plagued by member nations' reluctance to act
Date August 20, 2014
Nick Bryant
Normally a man of such steady-state emotion, Ban Ki-moon became unusually demonstrative when, facing questions from reporters in New York last week, he was pressed about the ineffectiveness of the UN in dealing with multiple crises in the Middle East. “It’s not the question of effectiveness or efficiency of the United Nations or international community as a whole,” protested the Secretary General, in a voice of rising exasperation. “It’s the lack of the will of the parties concerned.”
Not only is the mild-mannered South Korean struggling to deal with the bloodiest confluence of global crises in recent memory – Gaza, Iraq, Ukraine, Syria, South Sudan, Central African Republic and even an outbreak of Ebola. He is also fending off persistent criticisms that the UN is failing in one of its most elemental duties, to protect civilians caught in the crossfire of war, not to mention preventing those conflicts from erupting in the first place.
Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish diplomat widely viewed to be the UN’s greatest Secretary General, once said that the world body “was not created to take mankind to heaven but to save mankind from hell”, an avowal that has become something of a mission statement. In Gaza, however, even civilians who sheltered at UN schools, a supposed safe haven, ended up being killed by Israeli shells.
Rarely has there been such a mood of diplomatic despondency at the UN’s tombstone-like headquarters on the banks of the East River in New York. No headway has been made towards ending the three-year war in Syria, despite the UN deploying two of its most seasoned problem-solvers, Kofi Annan and the veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi (Kevin Rudd lobbied unsuccessfully to become the UN’s latest Syrian envoy).
The divided UN Security Council has been deadlocked not just on Syria, but also Ukraine and the Gaza conflict. Though the 15-member council, which includes Australia, has gathered around its famed horseshoe table in emergency session after emergency session, it has little to show for its efforts. It is routine now for the chamber to revert to its Cold War default setting, a forum to trade accusations and barbs rather than to engage in constructive diplomacy. So severe has been the global slide that senior UN diplomats have even talked about convening an extraordinary world summit to take stock.
Yet for all the criticisms levelled against him personally and the UN institutionally, Ban Ki-moon is right. Unfashionable though this view has become, it is not the United Nations that is at fault, but rather the nations and parties. When the international community is divided, as it has been with Syria, Ukraine and Gaza, UN diplomats are impeded in their work. As Richard Holbrooke, a former US ambassador to the UN once memorably put it, ‘blaming the United Nations when things go wrong is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the Knicks play badly.”
Blanket condemnations ignore or downplay the work of UN agencies that remain true to the Hammarskjold doctrine of preventing the descent into hell. In Iraq and Syria, its humanitarian arm, OCHA, has coordinated the relief effort. The UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, has cared for more than 600,000 refugees who have flooded over the border into Jordan. Its tented encampment at Zaatari in northern Jordan is the home to 81,000 refugees, a population not that much smaller than Bendigo’s. The World Health Organisation has led the effort to contain the Ebola outbreak. UN peacekeepers are stationed in 16 countries, from dormant conflict zones like Kosovo to Haiti, to hot wars like South Sudan.
Most recently in Gaza, the UN sheltered more than 200,000 people on the ever-shifting frontlines of the conflict. Try telling the families of the 11 UN staff members killed during the most recent conflict that the world body is a bystander.
Because their work is often shrouded by a haze of acronyms – OCHA, UNHCR, WHO, UNICEF, UNRWA to name but a few - it is easy to overlook that these agencies operate beneath the UN’s flag or its sky-blue helmets. Many of them also operate under the radar. Earlier this month, the UN successfully repatriated 120,000 people into the Democratic Republic of Congo, but this massive population movement went virtually unreported.
In a scalding putdown, the former US UN ambassador and leading neoconservative John Bolton once remarked that its 38-storey headquarters building in New York would not suffer from losing 10 floors. But the skyscraper houses some of its most effective agencies with “far more expertise and experience than other organisations in the world”, in the view of the eminent American economist Jeffrey Sachs.
Yet these very agencies are often thwarted by the inaction of member nations. This year already the UN has requested $17.3 billion for humanitarian causes, a record figure, but only about 40 per cent of that amount has been pledged by donor nations. In delivering humanitarian aid to Syria, the UN has also been hamstrung by gridlock in the Security Council, for which Russian obstructionism is often to blame.
The UN is a large and easy target, but it is often intellectually lazy to fix it in the crosshairs. Those seeking the causes of the present global malaise might be better off looking elsewhere: in Washington, where President Obama has proved a reluctant interventionist; in Moscow, where Vladmir Putin has flouted international laws; in Brussels, where the European Union has struggled to forge a common foreign policy; or any number of capitals in the Middle East or Africa. More deep-rooted causes are to be found in the continuing aftershocks of this century’s three major global convulsions, the destruction of the Twin Towers, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the toppling, or attempted toppling, of authoritarian leaders during the Arab spring.
Unquestionably, the UN can be a frustrating and dysfunctional organisation. It can take months, for instance, to insert peacekeepers into troublespots, even as blood continues to be shed. Its figurehead Ban Ki-moon, though well-intentioned, is hardly a thrusting presence on the global stage. Ultimately, however, the UN is the sum of its parts, its member nations. They, alas, are often far from united.
Nick Bryant is the BBC’s UN and New York correspondent, and the author of The Rise and Fall of Australia.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/un-pla ... z3AuYGIBS6" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
boxy 
