United Nations Day nothing to celebrate
Published 9:22 pm Wednesday, October 23, 2013
If you check your calendar, you’ll see today is “United Nations Day,” a day we’re urged (by the U.N. itself) to “do more.”
“More to protect those caught up in armed conflict, to fight climate change and avert nuclear catastrophe; more to expand opportunities for women and girls, and to combat injustice and impunity; more to meet the Millennium Development Goals,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says. “Despite our problems, despite polarization and distrust, our interconnected world has opened up vast new possibilities for common progress. Let us commit to do even more to realize the great vision set out in the U.N. Charter.”
Trending
High-sounding words are not uncommon from the agency, but has the United Nations earned its self-congratulatory “Day”?
Ki-moon certainly thinks so.
“This year again, we saw the United Nations come together on armed conflict, human rights, the environment and many other issues,” he says. “We continue to show what collective action can do. We can do even more. In a world that is more connected, we must be more united. On United Nations Day, let us pledge to live up to our founding ideals and work together for peace, development and human rights.”
Let’s examine that claim. Did U.N. member nations “come together” this year? Not on Syria, Egypt, Iran, or Venezuela. Not on human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing or even genocide. And they never have.
“The U.N.’s failures, from its inability to stop ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan to widespread abuses by U.N. peacekeepers across Africa, are legion,” historian Nile Gardiner says. “Inaction, incompetence, and even abject inhumanity have all too often been the hallmarks of U.N. operations, which have frequently demonstrated a callous indifference to human suffering.”
Member nations have all too often used the body as cover for their own crimes.
Trending
But the hypocrisy is taken to another level this year, when corrupt, serial human rights abuser Saudi Arabia turned down a seat on the U.N. Security Council because of that body’s corruption.
“Allowing the ruling regime in Syria to kill its people and burn them with chemical weapons in front of the entire world, and without any deterrent or punishment, is clear proof and evidence of the UN Security Council’s inability to perform its duties and shoulder its responsibilities,” the Saudis said in a letter to the U.N.
Corruption is a U.N. hallmark. According to an Associated Press report in 2010, “the United Nations has cut back sharply on investigations into corruption and fraud within its ranks, shelving cases involving the possible theft or misuse of millions of dollars.”
The U.N. has simply become irrelevant.
“U.N. Day is a public relations effort to conjure broader popular recognition and respect for the world body, which sadly it has not garnered through its own actions,” the Heritage Foundation’s Brett Schaefer points out. “Today we should not be celebrating, but looking at the organization with clear eyes, with awareness of its limitations, and considering what can be done to overcome its obvious deficiencies.”
So let’s skip the festivities.