By Brett D. Schaefer
Monday, March 18, 2013
This year, United Nations officials have spent a lot of
time in Washington meeting with administration officials and Congress, trying
to defend their funding from sequestration and the threat of other cuts. Small
wonder they are concerned: The U.N. has had a rough 2013.
On international peace and security, human rights, and
issues of management and accountability, the organization has reminded the
world just how ineffective, inept, and embarrassing it is. Let’s go through a
few of the year’s major stories.
• The
organization’s inability to address the ongoing atrocities in Syria has, by the
U.N.’s own estimate, resulted in 70,000 deaths. Russia and China have blocked
the Security Council from applying sanctions, so the U.N. has instead focused
on distributing humanitarian assistance and engaging in unsuccessful diplomatic
initiatives. The U.S. and organizations such as the Arab League have recognized
the Syrian rebels, but the U.N. continues to recognize Bashar Assad and his
representatives in Turtle Bay.
• North Korea
successfully tested a long-range missile in December and a nuclear bomb in
February. Both actions flouted multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. The
Security Council responded with a “timid squeak of U.N. indignation,” passing a
fifth resolution that slightly tightened sanctions on North Korea. Pyongyang
was unimpressed. It proceeded to abandon the 1953 armistice (again) and
threaten a nuclear strike on the U.S.
• While U.N.
secretary general Ban Ki Moon was on stage at the fifth Global Forum of the
U.N. Alliance of Civilizations in March, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan stated, “Just like Zionism, anti-Semitism, and fascism, it becomes
unavoidable that Islamophobia must be regarded as a crime against humanity.”
Only after extensive, critical commentary led by U.N. Watch did the U.N.
finally issue a belated condemnation. The event rekindled unwelcome reminders
of the U.N.’s famous and odious “Zionism is racism” resolution.
• At a
closed-door meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran accused
Israel of “genocide,” forcing Australia, Canada, and the U.S. to walk out.
• Following Hugo
Chávez’s death earlier this week, the U.N.’s Human Rights Council honored the
Venezuelan autocrat with a moment of silence. The U.N. flag flew at half mast
in Turtle Bay on March 8 “in respect of the death of His Excellency Mr. Hugo
Rafael Chávez Frías, President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” — who
spent years persecuting and intimidating judges, journalists, and human-rights
activists.
• The U.N.
rejected claims for compensation over the outbreak of cholera it caused in Haiti.
U.N. officials tried to cover up their responsibility for the situation, which
has killed over 8,000 Haitians and sickened hundreds of thousands more.
Subsequent scientific analysis confirmed that the cholera strain originated in
southern Asia and was likely introduced by U.N. peacekeepers.
• The U.N. Office
of Internal Oversight Services issued a report in January revealing that the
U.N. vastly overspent on its travel budget in 2010 and 2011. As U.S. ambassador
Joseph Torsella observed, “The 2010–11 budget included $72.5 million for
travel. . . . [Yet] the U.N. spent a total of $575 million in travel-related
expenses in the 2010-–11 biennium.” Torsella attributes much of the overrun to
unjustified upgrades to business- and first-class airline travel and “direct
payments to travelers of, on average, nearly twice the actual cost of travel.”
• The United
Nations Dispute Tribunal concluded that U.N. officials in Zimbabwe allowed
“humanitarian considerations [to play] second fiddle to political issues.” It
found them guilty of “not only managerial ineptitude and highhanded conduct but
also bad faith” in the removal of the head of a U.N. humanitarian office in
order to stifle reports of political intimidation by Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF
and to prevent exposure of the Zimbabwe government’s lack of preparedness for a
cholera epidemic that eventually claimed thousands of lives.
• The U.N.
Development Program (the organization’s global development agency) commissioned
a report on its development efforts that was leaked to Fox News earlier this
year. Among its conclusions: “Many of [UNDP’s] activities have only remote
connections with poverty, if at all” and “on the whole” UNDP “performs poorly
in providing support to its national partners to extract and utilize knowledge
based on the lessons that can be potentially learned from its interventions.”
Considering this record of embarrassment,
ineffectiveness, and mismanagement, is anyone surprised about recent
revelations that U.N. officials and delegates sometimes drink heavily during
meetings?
The examples above arose in just the past few months. Far
worse examples have been exposed with depressing regularity over the years
(think the Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal). This list also leaves aside
long-standing issues such as bias against Israel in the U.N. Human Rights
Council, misconduct by U.N. peacekeepers, and reports that the U.N. Relief and
Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) supports terrorism.
Western nations have long been frustrated over duplication,
fragmentation, and low return on investment among U.N. funds, programs, and
agencies (a May 2012 study by economists William Easterly and Claudia
Williamson assessing best and worst practices among aid agencies ranked U.N.
agencies among the worst), but few countries have persistently sought to
address these problems. That may finally be changing, thanks to budget
constraints in donor countries. In recent months, 17 donor nations, including
the U.S., have met to coordinate efforts to reshape the U.N. system to address
corruption and make it less fragmented and more transparent and cost-effective.
Individual nations have also begun to take action.
Perhaps the best example is the Multilateral Aid Review of 43 organizations,
conducted by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. The
review found that nine multilateral aid agencies offered “poor value for
money,” including U.N. organizations such as UNESCO. DFID decided to stop
providing core funding to four organizations and put four others on notice that
funding may be stopped unless reforms are implemented.
Alarmed by these efforts, senior officials of over 20
U.N. bodies met in January. They acknowledged that the “U.N. Common System has
been called into question, and its governance and mechanisms challenged.”
Unfortunately, the meeting was short on specific reforms.
By far, the most detailed discussion centered on tweaking procedures for future
meetings and developing “strong communication campaigns providing government
representatives and lawmakers in our Member States with tools to justify to
their constituents support of United Nations organizations.” Specifically
mentioned is using the U.N. Foundation to assist their efforts, which may
explain their recent campaigns to protect U.N. funding in the U.S.
PR campaigns are not going to resolve the deep-seated
problems within the U.N. and its affiliated organizations. The member states,
particularly the U.S. which is the largest contributor to the U.N. system, need
to conduct a rigorous examination and evaluation of individual U.N. agencies,
funds, and programs to determine what aspects of the U.N. are effective and
deserve continued funding and, even more importantly, which ones do not. The
U.N.’s year so far doesn’t bode well for how such a process might go.
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