SPECT TH AT OR
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A TIME TO DIE
Afew weeks ago, we published an arti- cle which asked whether the United Nations was an organisation which had out- lived its usefulness Os the UN really neces- sary?', 31 July). Since then, a number of other journals have posed the same ques- tion. Corruption has been 'uncovered' in the UN Secretariat, where bureaucrats have long collected salaries for doing noth- ing; corruption has also been 'revealed' among UN troops in Yugoslavia, just as it was earlier discovered in Cambodia.
This recent wave of interest in the UN's inadequacies is hardly the first. UN-bashing becomes a popular sport whenever the UN is in the news, but it rarely has any lasting effects. Because the UN is a bureaucracy which owes allegiance to no voters, repre- sents no constituencies, and answers to no legislatures, it is impervious to press critics, whom it can always dismiss as racist or nationalist. That is why inquiries, investiga- tions and promises of reform like those made last week by the secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, leave few marks on the organisation's internal culture.
What is true of the UN is also true of its peace-keeping operations: if. the UN is an organisation under nobody's control, the same is no less true of its peace-keepers. The early responses to allegations of black- market dealing and drug smuggling among peace-keeping troops in Yugoslavia are already looking unpromising. Sylvana Foa, the spokeswoman for the UN High Com- missioner for Refugees, found it odd that anybody should be surprised that 'out of 14,000 pimply 18-year-olds a bunch of them should get up to naughty tricks'. Perhaps it makes sense that the UN, which is unpre- pared for its new, expanded role in world politics, would send unprepared troops to do its bidding, but it seems unfortunate that the organisation so happily admits it .
But the UN's callousness is part of its complacency, and its complacency is per- manent: it is part of UN culture. Everyone knows it, everyone writes about it, yet for all the hand-wringing about the failures of the UN, the finance's of the UN and the unreformability of the UN, no one asks the most important question: should the UN exist at all? If it is unreformable, why not eliminate it? This is an organisation designed and developed for another era: now that era is gone, perhaps the UN should die along with it.
True, not all of the UN's vast bureaucracy is useless. Several of the agencies, including Unicef and the UN High Commission for Refugees, do useful international charity work; UN peace negotiators are excellent value for money; the Security Council is a good negotiating forum for important countries, and it hurts no one if the Gener- al Assembly meets twice a year to give the Security Council legitimacy. During the Gulf war, the UN made a good cover for American foreign policy, but surely America could find a less wasteful way of disguising its intentions in tricky Third World coun- tries. In fact, most of the other tasks carried out by the UN — the organising of confer- ences, the keeping of statistics, the dis- tributing of aid — could be done just as well by regional or other multilateral organisations with more efficient bureau- cracies — if, that is, these tasks need to be carried out at all. Decades of UN resolu- tions devoted to Palestine did nothing but raise tempers; the recent breakthrough in the Middle East was the result of two nations working together, in secret, under Norwegian and American patronage.
As for peace-keeping, The Spectator has suggested in the past and still maintains that this delicate job should be the province of professional peace-keepers, who can rely on permanent troops, suppliers, and man- agers with experience in difficult parts of the world. Cobbling together immature sol- diers with no common language or experi- ence leads to the absurdities we have seen in Yugoslavia: commanders unable to make a move until offices open in New York, troops with different ideas about what they should eat and when they should rest. There is nothing wrong with a multi-nation- al force — the French Foreign Legion is a good example of one which works — but the various nationalities have to accept similar conditions, similar training, similar uniforms and similar equipment.
If the UN Secretariat were abolished, the savings would be tremendous: salaries for officials, travel grants, building mainte- nance in New York, all could be eliminated. Peace-keeping, peace-making, internation- al negotiations of various kinds could be carried out more effectively and more cheaply by more dedicated bodies. Com- plaints about lack of financing for such operations would disappear, as countries like America and Britain, which have been reluctant to cough up huge sums of money for a useless bureaucracy, would be happy to spend smaller amounts on a more effi- cient one.
Rather than trying to patch up an organ- isation which cannot be reformed, it is bet- ter to do away with it altogether; rather than trying to re-orient a bureaucracy cre- ated for a different purpose, it is better to cut its funds and let it wither away. Abolish the UN: it might sound a bit too simple, but then good ideas usually do.
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