Losing faith in the UN?

The Volcker Commission, the internal inquiry into the United Nation’s running of the $64 billion Iraqi ‘oil-for-food’ programme, has published its interim report.

In this report Chairman Paul Volcker claimed to have evidence of the corruption of UN officials, whom he accuses of having ‘seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations’.

But it is not just the UN’s scandalous complicity with the biggest financial fraud in history which has some calling for the UN’s dissolution. It is also the almost total irrelevance of the UN in the immediate aftermath of one of the world’s great natural disasters, the tsunami, following on from a string of failures on the international stage.

UN corruption & irrelevance

The Volcker Commission has reported that it has evidence to show how Bev Sevan, the UN official directly responsible for the Iraqi oil-for-food programme, solicited deals with foreign companies and pocketed at least $160,000 for his trouble. Some $20+ billion still remains unaccounted for, including unknown billions siphoned off by Saddam himself.

No less than five US Congressional Committees are currently investigating the mismanagement of the programme, though without the help of the UN. Kofi Annan, in a letter to the US Senate subcommittee investigating the scandal, has refused the investigative committee access to 55 UN audit reports that provide details of relevant transactions. The UN has also advised companies in-volved with the UN in its oil-for-food programme not to release any documents to independent investigators or to the media.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes reports that, in recent years, the USA has regularly paid its UN dues, where at the end of the last century these had been withheld (in a forlorn attempt to press for UN reforms). Today over 25% of the entire UN budget, over one billon dollars, is stumped up by Americans alone. Not surprisingly, Americans feel it is not unreasonable to know what the UN is doing with its money. The suggestion at present is that UN oil-for-food programme money, re-directed into Saddam’s pocket, was subsequently used to fund the post-war insurgency. But even today, the UN’s own internal investigation into the scandal, headed by Paul Volcker, has no power to subpoena witnesses nor to demand key documentation to reveal what really happened to the money. A recent internal survey of UN staff found 46% were unwilling to speak about UN administrative abuses for fear of losing their jobs and their pensions (World magazine report, July 24 2004).

To put the enormity of the fraud here into a fuller financial context, the amount involved is more than the amounts involved in all recent corporate frauds put together, including Enron, Worldcom and others. Paul Volcker’s report looks set to implicate other UN officials and close associates, including former Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan’s own son, whose Dutch firm made allegedly excessive profits.

Post-tsunami ‘invisibility’

The question of the UN’s relevance was graphically illustrated in the aftermath of the tsunami which hit on Boxing Day 2004. As an international debate sprang up over who should take charge of the aid and reconstruction programme, former international development secretary Clare Short claimed that the UN alone had the ‘unique moral authority’. But the truth is that not only did national governments respond and do an excellent job, they were able to do it efficiently without the authority of, or indeed any assistance from, the UN.

In the wake of the tsunami, it was American, Australian, Indian and Malayan planes and ships which were on the scene, before the UN mustered ‘observers’ to ‘assess the situation’. Voluntary groups and missionary agencies did their job too. Working directly with churches on the ground they proved proficient in getting aid to where it was urgently needed. Later it was the treasury departments of the G7 group of nations that made all the significant decisions over further aid for reconstruction and debt relief in affected nations. In short, in respect of one of the world’s greatest modern human catastrophes, there was simply no role for the UN.

String of failures

Government, in the form of God-ordained, sovereign nation states, is how God set the nation-states in place. Time and again, it is national governments working together for specific ends that have proven their worth over the UN on the world stage. This is because national governments are empowered by God to take critical decisions that proto-federal government administrative structures, such as the UN and the EU, cannot. They too easily lend themselves to ideological, lowest common denominator political-correctness and, ultimately, wastefulness and inaction.

Because of these attributes, the UN has long been referred to in US government circles as ‘the Asylum’ because of the perversity of its operational structures and decision-making process. None of this should, however, surprise Bible-believing Christians. The catastrophic event on the Plains of Shinar (Genesis 11) should remind each of us just how perverse ‘world councils’ can be in their honouring of man and dishonouring of God.

As international newspaper columnist Mark Steyn puts it: ‘Big government tends to be remote, and remote government is unaccountable, and, as a wannabe world government, the UN is the remotest and most unaccountable of all.’ We can see easily enough how this works in practice when the UN gives an equal voice and vote to every member, including non-accountable, non-democratic, despotic, often terrorist-sponsoring governments. What happens next is all too predictable. In 2003, the UN found itself in the absurd position of offering the chair of its commission on human rights to Mummar Gaddafi’s (then) terrorist-sponsoring Libya.

The UN has in recent years been under attack over turning a ‘blind eye’ to child sex abuse in the Congo, sex trafficking in the Balkans and terrorist activity in Lebanon and other countries.

When the people of Sierra Leone were being massacred in their tens of thousands five years ago, its government specifically refused to have UN peacekeepers ‘protecting’ them. They knew well enough how UN peacekeeping policies had worked in Bosnia where Dutch troops acting in accord with UN policy stood idly by as 7,000 Muslims were slaughtered in the world’s first designated ‘United Nations Safe Area’. The Sierra Leone government asked for the help of the British army, which, in the event, did an excellent and lasting job.

But perhaps the most recent blatant UN failure has been its inability to prevent a murderous Sudanese Islamic militant regime in Khartoum from massacring tens of thousands of Christians and Africans in Darfur. Fearing it must act if what was happening in Sudan was classed as ‘genocide’ (under its own charter, act it must to prevent genocide) it sent observers on a fact-finding mission. UN observers duly reported that ‘genocide’ was not taking place in Darfur and the UN returned to applying yet more ‘diplomatic pressure’. One wonders what the UN would describe as ‘genocide’ if not 70,000 corpses.

‘Unique moral authority?’

In 1996, US Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, sounded an urgent warning about the UN: ‘The international elites running the United Nations look at the idea of the nation-state with disdain; they consider it a discredited notion of the past that has been superseded by the idea of the UN. In this view, the interests of the nation-states are parochial and should give way to the global interests. Nation-states, they believe, should recognise the primacy of these global interests and accede to the United Nations’ sovereignty to pursue them.’

If Helms is right then the UN itself casts a shadow over the whole biblical notion of the importance of national sovereignty under God. And this at the very time that many in the UK already have a deep and growing concern over the handing over of British sovereignty to another national sovereignty-deposing government, this time in Brussels.

What is the alternative?

The alternative requires first that we have a reality check concerning the nature and constant failure of the United Nations. As we have seen, the nation-states themselves are more than capable of working together even in the face of the greatest human tragedy. And international co-operation can come in many forums — forums which do not need to be formalised into unaccountable, unwieldly, costly and ineffective proto-world governments.

As former US presidential speechwriter David Frum says: ‘If the UN keeps failing, the answer is not to ignore its faults, but to reform or replace it. There is a growing interest in some American quarters in the idea of a new international association, open to all countries that elect their leaders democratically. At a minimum…(we) could expect transparency, accountability, and some greater approach to even-handedness in the Middle East. But the real challenge to all of us, in all the democracies, is this: to be guided by realities, not fantasies — and especially not such uniquely unconvincing fantasies as the allegedly unique moral authority of the United Nations.’

Peter C. Glover

For further reading see: Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think by former US Deputy Secretary of Defence Jed Babbin. Hardback copies are available from Word21, PO Box 5058, Colchester, Essex CO7 7JY at £15.50 (incl. p&p).