generalspeaking

A Horribly Failed Global Enterprise

"In terms of its overall mission, thanks to colossal mismanagement, the United Nations is failing."
"If you locked a team of evil geniuses in a laboratory, they could not design a bureaucracy so maddeningly complex, requiring so much effort but in the end incapable of delivering the intended result."
"[The UN peacekeepers] have engaged in a persistent pattern of rape and abuse of the people -- often young girls -- the United Nations was sent there to protect. Last year, peacekeepers from the Republic of Congo arrested a group of civilians [ ... ] and beat them so badly that one died in custody and the other shortly after in a hospital. In response there was hardly a murmur, and certainly no outrage, from the responsible officials in New York."
"The system is a black hole into which disappear countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again."
"Many have tried to get rid of him, [the] manifestly incompetent [chief of a peacekeeping mission] but short of a serious crime, it is virtually impossible to fire someone in the United Nations. In the past six years, I am not aware of a single international field staff member being fired, or even sanctioned, for poor performance."
Anthony Banbury, (former) assistant UN secretary general

The former senior UN official, Anthony Banbury (third from right), described the organisation as having ‘minimal accountability’. Photograph: HANDOUT/REUTERS

Well then, these are the agonized words of a man who loves the ideal behind the United Nations, its purpose and its place in the world community. But its obvious failings, coupled with those he is intimately aware of as an insider, as a huge bureaucracy accountable to no higher order, representing a vast clique of politically-allied interests many of which are inimical to the purpose of the UN itself, has disheartened him completely.

At least he didn't serve under the former Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim, who had a Nazi past. And nor did he serve under the Secretary General previous to the incumbent Ban ki-Moon, whose son was implicated in financial corruption, undermining Kofi Annan's legacy and the sanctions imposed by the UN on Iraq in the oil-for-food program.

The frustration with which Mr. Banbury outlines his disappointment in the abysmal role that the world body plays is more than evident. At least this is an honest man. He is fed up with the organization he is familiar with and which  he expected so much more from. It is an institution that was bred of necessity in an imperfect world, and it  had a noble calling, one which it pledged to uphold in the greater interests of peace and stability in an unstable world.

The trouble is the many arms of the United Nations, though beautifully titled in an expression of their purpose, have been hijacked by linked groups whose interests are their own mendacious and troubled agendas, so that the most egregious human-rights-abusing states are regularly elected to sit in judgement of their peers whose record on the human rights scale is as nasty as their own, but never mentioned, by mutual agreement.

There is more than ample measure of slanderous accusations levelled against one country whom the linked abusers view as an enemy, politically, socially and religiously. Forever more is Israel singled out for condemnation when it is a nation that respects human rights, where though it is a Jewish state, Christians, Muslims and ethnic minorities can all find a place for themselves without dread of maltreatment.

While the presence in the cradle of Christianity sees an ever-shrinking Christian presence as a result of bitter relations between Muslims and Christians and dreadful persecution heaped on Christian communities leading to a huge diminishment of their presence in the Middle East, the Christian population of Israel continues to grow. Yet non-aligned states and Islamic coalitions heap condemnation after condemnation on Israel as an 'apartheid' state.

Countries where women are considered inferior to men in patriarchal societies that will not recognize equality for women under their system of laws, are elected to sit on UN boards whose mandate is to promote female equality in society. The sham of the United Nations in countenancing and supporting such hypocritical positions have bankrupted it morally, and makes of it a hollow shell of absurd dimensions.

UN peacekeeping has distinguished itself with its failure to accomplish what its mandate directs it to. The brutality of some of those missions promoted as human rights defenses runs contrary to reality. Not only are the peacekeeping groups incapable of maintaining peace, becoming silent witness to grotesque conflicts, but they prey themselves on the vulnerable whose safety has been entrusted to them.

The United Nations has become a sad and sinister parody of what its universal declaration of human rights had promised the world. It is a huge bureaucracy invested in pursuing its own interests as a global-scale social corporation capable of talking up a storm yet incapable of producing quantifiable results of any real value, with the exception of some successful delivery portions of its mandate.

It it too cumbersome a beast, with too well-entrenched interests to salvage.

Labels: Corruption, United Nations

posted by Pieface @ Monday, March 21, 2016