It seems easy from our present-day vantage point to foresee that a huge bureaucracy made up of disparate countries, each with their own ethical outlook on the world - and many with internal standards and values that were at odds with - or, even, polar opposites to - the standards and values of the organisation to which they belonged - would struggle to be a coherent, dynamic force for good.
Hindsight, though, is a great thing while idealism can be a noble one; allowances, therefore, should perhaps be made for the fact that the UN (starting life as the League of Nations) was a traumatised world’s reaction to the surreal horrors of the Second World War and its emphatic desire never to see its like again. But, nevertheless, an organisation that concerns itself with human rights on the one hand but boasts members such as Iran, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Indonesia - and many, many others like them - on the other is always going to have a bit of a credibility problem.
The lack of dynamism and effectiveness is a crucial lacking in a ‘beaurocrats-in-suits’ run operation which sees UN peacekeepers standing by while 7,500 defenceless Muslims are massacred in Srebrenica and UN tsunami aid arriving weeks after the Americans and Australian militaries - plus others - had already got the show well and truly on the road.
As with any bureaucracy, corruption is to be expected and the UN is no exception. From despotism to the rape and child abuse of refugees the UN has seen it all while accountability - with the accompanying, probing media pressure to come clean that would accompany stories of, say, British or American wrong-doing missing - is a little thinner on the ground than we might like.
One of the stories that won’t go away though is the UN’s ‘oil for food’ programme which has resulted in, amongst other things, widespread accusations of profiteering and corruption on a grand scale and at the highest levels. The programme was designed to give Iraq a way of selling oil - which was the subject of trade sanctions following their invasion of Kuwait in 1990 - in order to buy necessities such as food and medicine for Iraqi civilians. It’s been the subject of ongoing investigation into corruption for years.
One of the most serious allegations is that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is himself directly involved in corruption. Mr Annan’s son, Kojo, apparently received payments from a Swiss company, Cotecna, who were employed to actually monitor the food for oil programme. The New York Times has evidence that Cotecna officials met with Kofi Annan a week before the contract was actually granted to Cotecna - and Kofi Annan’s son’s subsequent payment. Various enquiries are underway into this whole affair.
The latest casualty in the whole oil-for-food scandal is the programme’s own former director, Benon Sevan. The UN’s investigative panel believes he took $150,000 in bribes.
Meanwhile, a UN procurement officer, Alexander Yakovlev, pleaded guilty to charges of accepting bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars plus conspiracy and laundering.
I’ve always felt that when an organisation involves itself in large-scale, international operations, often in difficult circumstances, then its victories and its failures will be on a similar scale. And I don’t believe the UN is especially corrupt and inefficient - in a way that, say, a brand new international organisation set up from scratch might not be.
The nature of human beings and the fundamental weakness of any large organisation that requires consensus amongst highly diverse elements and then relies on beaurocrats - process-driven pen-pushers - to achieve very tricky ends is doomed to failure from the start. The opportunities for wrong-doing in operations that take place in a host of different countries with varied levels of checks and constraints amongst layers of officials will be legion. In countries where corruption is a way of life or where the abuse of powerless civilians is part of the fabric of their society there is almost not external restraint on criminal or cruel behaviour.
Unlike the diversity fanatics I believe that uniformity - people who think and speak similarly, whose values are the same, whose understandings and cultures are very similar and who act in accordance with straight-forward, practical goals - coupled with single mindedness of purpose will achieve a huge amount more than organisations like the UN. Almost any single western country - France, Spain, Canada, the US - would be able to provide a coherent, disciplined and focussed task force into a disaster hit area. It’s most likely the force would not be perfect or 100% free from wrong-doing - and the lack of financial resources would be a definite issue for many - but its management will be simpler, its response speedier and its approach to changing conditions more flexible than it would be if it were run by an organisation with committees, charters and teams of inexperienced, office-bound officials making - in their own time - vital policy decisions.
And I think many of us recognise that the worthy aims of an international organisation like the UN become submerged in the need to achieve consensus, to carry out work according to protocols and directives and to observe processes and rules in the execution of efforts to achieve those aims. Bureacracies do not move quickly and sometimes speed - not nicities or adherence to the rules contained within a manual - is a necessity. To illustrate my point a simple thought experiment would suffice:
Your country is about to be devastated by a natural disaster. You’re going to survive but there’ll be little in the way of food, water or medicine afterwards. You have, at best, a couple of weeks to live once the disaster has struck before thirst, hunger and disease kills you and your loved ones.
You have three choices of potential saviour:
A. The American military (or, if you’re American, the British or Canadian or Australian)
B. The United Nations
C. The European Union
Pick one.
If you wouldn’t pick A I would love to read your reasons why not…
