Question: what do the Taleban, Serb war criminals, al-Qa’eda, Rwandan genocidaires, the Ku Klux Klan, the Kach movement, the Japanese Red Army and the Janjaweed of Darfur have in common? Answer: two things actually. The obvious one, plus the fact that — like the Spectator columnist Mark Steyn — they all passionately abhor the United Nations, see it as an obstacle to their particular agenda and call for its abolition.
The UN has always evoked violent passions, especially among its detractors. Its defenders tend to be rather calmer. For those like me, working for the UN in places such as Afghanistan, Kosovo, Gaza, Lebanon and West Africa, the usual line of attack encountered is that we are agents of Western imperialism, American lackeys, even (remarkably) Israeli stooges, or — the more moderate version — simply that we are too much under the control of the most powerful member states, especially the US, and don’t take into account the concerns of smaller, poorer countries.
In the West, the common criticism is that the UN is a slow, excessively bureaucratic talking-shop urgently in need of reform since, as it is now set up, it doesn’t have the capacity to confront the great challenges of the coming decades. For those opposed to the war in Iraq, the UN’s fault is that it couldn’t stop the invasion; for those in favour that it didn’t support it. But almost everyone, particularly those in the UN secretariat, agrees that the institution needs major reform.
This isn’t cant. Those working in the UN system can see its weaknesses even more clearly than those outside. Earlier this year the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, laid out by far the most ambitious reform programme for the organisation in its 60-year history. The fact that governments chose not to adopt it in full is their prerogative and our disappointment. But although the UN, the world’s population, indeed the planet itself, will suffer as a result, this failure can hardly be laid at the door of the UN itself.
There is another line of attack, on the far Right of the US spectrum, that is very different. In its most extreme form, it is voiced by militia groups which proclaim that the UN is seeking to impose world government over nation-states, demand that the US should leave the UN, and seem to think that the UN has fleets of black helicopters ready to invade the American heartland. Mark Steyn writes that the UN has ‘pretensions to world government’ and he drives around with a bumper-sticker saying ‘US OUT OF UN NOW’.
Steyn believes, or says he does, that the UN is a ‘fully-fledged member of the Axis of Evil’. And two years ago he penned a resignation letter to The Spectator in disgust at a leading article which said that shutting the UN out of the post-war phase in Iraq would ‘cause resentment in the Arab world’, where it was ‘seen as an antidote to alleged Western imperialism’. This is no ordinary hatred. Mr Steyn’s feeling must be very deep to consider resigning over what was hardly a very striking statement. What can explain it?
The first thing that appears to make such people see red is in fact the first principle of the UN. It is by definition a multilateral (or ‘transnational’ in Steyn’s usage) organisation, where not everybody is obliged to agree on everything. Steyn produces a breakdown of voting records by regional blocks, including the EU, and is appalled by what he finds. Other countries often don’t vote the same way as the Bush administration! For him, this is incontrovertible proof that 1) the UN is ‘institutionally anti-American’ and 2) it should be ‘destroyed’.
So yes, guilty on this charge. We work for a multilateral organisation that is supposed to represent the interests of all countries, not just the most powerful. Shocking but true. This fact, that member states often vote in regional blocks to increase their influence, is a ‘disaster’. As it was for robber-baron capitalists who used strike-breakers to take on early trade unions, collective bargaining — whereby individual workers or countries band together — is an abominable affront when you’re used to your writ being unquestioned and prefer to pick off dissenting voices one by one.
The second major gripe gleaned from Steyn’s articles concerns the composition of UN membership. For him, the UN is made up of ‘basket-case psycho states’, ‘Afro-kleptocracies’, Arab regimes which support the Palestinians (a people whose main activity is ‘celebrating the latest addition to the pile of Jew corpses’), and ‘Europoseurs’ who represent a decayed ‘Eurowimp’ culture going down the ‘Eurinal’ and who fund the ‘humanitarian Nancy boys’ and the ‘pussies at Oxfam’. Even US delegates at the UN are ‘striped-pants masochists …pining for M. Chirac to walk all over them in steel-tipped stilettos’.
So it becomes clear. If the UN General Assembly were composed exclusively of Deep South reactionaries and settler hold-outs from Gaza, our Spectator columnist would be its foremost cheerleader. But here again we disappoint. There are 191 member states at the UN, which implies a diversity that is obviously not to everyone’s taste.
In many areas, the organisation has failed to live up to the hopes of its founders. But on these two cardinal pillars or sins — multilateralism and diversity — it has at least been consistent.
The case for reform has never been more widely accepted. At last month’s summit, almost every member state had its own set of priorities. The trouble is, there was no consensus on what direction that reform should take. We who work in Steyn’s ‘sewers of transnationalism’ would have liked the agreement to have gone much further. But our disappointment was as nothing compared with that of Steyn himself, though for the opposite reason. He had hoped that the outcome of the summit would be ‘somewhere between paralysis and meltdown’. For him, the biggest catastrophe was the possibility that the UN might reform and become more effective.
The final outcome was actually a typical UN compromise — one in which nobody got their way entirely, but where most parties were able to see the glass as half-empty or half-full. It was most assuredly not a meltdown. Substantive agreements were not reached in crucial areas of Security Council reform, disarmament and environmental protection. But in other areas, there was decided progress: advances were made on the millennium development goals; there was agreement to create a Human Rights Council (to replace the lamentable Human Rights Commission); and Annan’s proposed reforms on peacebuilding, internal management and humanitarian assistance were largely accepted. Small beer for cynics, perhaps, but these could affect the lives of millions.
Most importantly, in one of the most radical restatements of international law of the past century, the entire UN membership went along with a declaration accepting the right of the world community to take military action in the case of governments failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Prime Minister Tony Blair was right when he said, ‘For the first time at this summit we are agreed that states do not have the right to do what they will within their own borders’. No longer will governments who carry out mass butchery be able to hide behind the mantra of national sovereignty to prevent the UN interfering in their crimes. This is a reform as profound as it gets. No wonder Steyn is angry and wants the US out of the UN.
For those, like me, whom Steyn calls boulevardiers ‘impeccably coiffed and couture d but riddled with syphilis’ (in between stints as ‘peace-keeper rapists’ or ‘humanitarian money-launderers’), reform is essential to our mission. It is under way in any case. Some of my colleagues may feel that the improved UN humanitarian response after the tsunami showed us to be paragons of Prussian efficiency compared with what we saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But what it really shows — to us and, hopefully, to our critics — is that disaster management is not as easy as it may look thousands of miles away on television.
People in the UN often cite the great secretary-general of the 1950s, Dag Hammarskjöld, who pointed out that the UN was ‘created not to take humanity to heaven but to save it from hell’. Like the Santa Maria, it battles its way through storms and uncharted waters to a new world only to find that the people on shore blamed the storms on the ship itself rather than on the weather. In this respect, not much has changed in 50 years.
Many of us care to see our work in similar though more prosaic terms, acutely aware of our failures and flaws, but also of the possibility that we can, and will, do some good. Being blamed, usually by opposite sides at once, is the nature of the game. Without hand-wringing over this simple reality, our efforts continue, even when frustrated by lack of support — whether from underqualified colleagues, an unresponsive bureaucratic culture, or finger-pointing or scapegoating member states.
The fact that this is how I and most of my co-workers regard the UN’s work — whereas Mark Steyn thinks ‘practically every’ UN operation focuses instead on operating ‘child-sex rings and drug cartels’ — is, I would gently suggest, more his problem than mine. With all respect to the strength of his feelings, as well as to the ‘illicitly acquired firearm’ that he proudly says he carries during his rather fleeting visits to conflict areas, I don’t quite see (unless he uses it, of course) how he’ll stop me — or get very far with his goal of destroying the UN.
But at least Mullah Omar, General Mladic and assorted ethnic cleansers will be encouraged to know they have a Western spokesman for their common platform (delenda est UNdo), and one whose language is even more violent than theirs.
Andrew Gilmour is senior advisor in the United Nations Office for West Africa, based in Senegal. These views are his own, rather than the UN’s.
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