The next time someone says that the United Nations is the
“international source” of anything ““ let alone
legitimacy ““ you should laugh.
And then you should cry. For if the United Nations does sanction
legitimacy, then our world is in a truly pathetic state.
In reality, the United Nations is totally irrelevant at best and
horribly divisive at worse. No number of hortatory speeches can
quell the quiet echo of the desperate cries of those exterminated
under the careful watch of the United Nations.
Corrupt to its very core, the United Nations has a stupendously
horrid track record over the past several decades. This bona fide
“Tower of Babble” has systematically done too little,
too late in nearly every crisis and war since its inception. The
problem certainly lies not in the organization’s noble
founding ideals, but rather in its everyday practices. Time and
again, they have completely failed to differentiate between victim
and aggressor. Sadly, many fail to recognize that this obfuscation
is a detrimental force to international peace and order.
In the wake of the embarrassing Oil-for-Food scandal, in which
Saddam Hussein funneled billions of dollars into his personal
accounts, the United Nations has proposed several modifications to
its flawed system. One such current proposal, to increase the
number of seats on the U.N. Security Council from 15 to 24, totally
misses the point. What benefit will the addition of another few
oppressive potentates provide? Indeed, the problem is far deeper
than mere cosmetics.
From Cambodia to Sierra Leone to Kurdistan, the U.N. story line
remains exactly the same. In the face of naked aggression and
unmitigated genocide, the United Nations stands neutral. As one
former ambassador to the United Nations astutely observed,
neutrality to genocide is not amoral ““ it is immoral.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan does not even attempt to hide this
shamefully skewed moral compass. Speaking of his experiences as the
head of the peacekeeping department, Annan admitted that the United
Nations had “an institutional ideology of impartiality even
when confronted with attempted genocide.” Is it any surprise
then that the United Nations stood silent while 800,000 Rwandans
were massacred?
Suddenly it becomes patently clear why Annan’s office did
not allow U.N. forces to seize known weapons caches of the Hutu
militia before the genocide started, despite persistent warnings of
the impending atrocities.
Annan’s sanctimonious “impartiality”
apparently superceded the lives of nearly 1 million Rwandans.
Tutsis paid an average of $32 to be shot instead of hacked to death
by machete-wielding Hutu militias. Yet Annan preferred not to take
sides.
In Iraq, the story is much the same. In a display of unbridled
fecklessness, the United Nations utterly failed to enforce 17 of
its own Chapter VII resolutions demanding Iraq’s disarmament
of prohibited weapons for over 12 years.
Iraq’s defiance, however, was hardly surprising given that
approximately two decades prior the United Nations could not even
muster the courage to condemn Saddam Hussein’s clear-cut
aggression when he launched war against Iran. Similarly, the United
Nations sat on the sidelines while as many as 200,000 Kurds were
mowed down by Hussein’s helicopter gun ships and chemical
weapons alike.
Luckily, some see the ineptness that lurks beyond the United
Nations’ facade. “The United Nations as an organization
failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny
that lasted over 35 years, and today we are unearthing thousands of
victims in horrifying testament to that failure,” said
Iraq’s humbled new foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, in his
peroration before the U.N. Security Council only days after Saddam
was captured.
Sadly, these could easily be the words of representatives of any
one of dozens of countries who have similarly been victim to the
United Nation’s institutional “impartiality.”
Instead of condemning despotic regimes, the United Nations gives
them a platform atop the world stage to spew hatred and
rhetoric.
For example, the United Nations allowed a representative of the
Hutu-dominated government to sit on the Security Council in 1994,
even though international peacekeepers were simultaneously
dispatched to Rwanda. Not surprisingly, the Rwandan ambassador
repeatedly denied the genocide was even occurring in his
country.
How in the world can one take seriously an organization that
allowed Syria, one of the world’s worst tyrannical
terrorist-sponsoring nations to sit atop its most prized council,
as it did just weeks after Sept. 11, 2001?
Similarly, in 2003 Libya should have been investigated by the
Human Rights Commission ““ not allowed to chair it! That Iraq
chaired the United Nations’ Conference on Disarmament with
Iran as its co-chair gives new meaning to the word
“absurdity.”
Students, professors, diplomats and world leaders all too often
proclaim the United Nations as some sort of beacon for sanctioning
legitimate international action. Primarily, however, all the United
Nations has sanctioned is perverse inaction and a supreme inability
to distinguish victim from aggressor.
By any objective standard the United Nations has aided
dictators, legitimized terror, abjured responsibility in times of
genocide, and wholly marred any semblance of morality.
The United Nations can legitimize nothing until it looks itself
in the mirror and fundamentally changes its genocidal impartiality.
The memories of the millions murdered while the United Nations sat
idly by, mired in self-righteous neutrality, demands nothing
less.
Keyes is a third-year Middle Eastern studies student. E-mail
him at dkeyes@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.