So the UN, which is exempted formally by its international status from having to deal directly with individual parliaments except through the intermediary of national governments, now finds that it has to try to explain itself to six congressional committees in Washington. And what might have begun as a right-wing grudge to settle scores over the UN’s attitude towards the war in Iraq has ballooned into much more. The UN’s own investigation into the oil for food programme — an independent inquiry led by Paul Volcker — has, in its initial report, found real wrongdoing — although not as much as critics had hoped for.
Other failings have come to light at the same time. Flagrant breaches of UN codes of behaviour in peacekeeping operations, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo where minors and women have been sexually exploited, have raised fundamental questions about an organisation whose authority stems from core values of integrity and trust.
For many, all this is enough to condemn us to irrelevance or even closure. Yet even as the obituaries are being written, the indispensable UN is being called out of the fire station for the crises of the day: the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean, where the UN has co-ordinated the international response and is delivering almost $1 billion in donors’ resources; Darfur in Sudan, where we are engaged in a high-wire effort to help the victims, make the peace, organise the prosecution of war criminals and combat worsening insecurity; and Iraq, where UN support was critical to the election’s success and will be equally important in drawing into the political process the disaffected Sunnis and others who will not deal directly with the US- UK coalition; and now Lebanon, where the security council has turned to Kofi Annan to investigate the causes and consequences of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister.
We are everywhere, but if scandal consumes all before it we might be nowhere. The League of Nations’ high pretensions were fatally undermined from the outset by America’s absence, which over time encouraged others to disregard it, so that it slid rapidly down the path to irrelevance and then extinction. More recently the 1990s American estrangement, set off and aggravated by US-UN setbacks in Somalia, Bosnia and elsewhere, led the US to begin to disengage, to not pay its way and to block the deployment of new UN peacekeeping missions.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the then secretary-general, fell as a result of that widening Washington-New York rift. Incomparably more important a whole country, Rwanda, was allowed to plunge into genocide. When the alarm sounded, the line between New York and Washington was not working. The breakdown cost some 800,000 lives.
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But the rise and fall in the standing of the UN does not happen in a vacuum. Wars, assassinations, disease, natural disasters and refugee outflows are no respecter of such timetables. Sudan is a case in point. While one small group of US senators and congressmen is calling for Annan to resign because of the oil for food programme, a larger group is calling for him to threaten to resign if the security council does not follow a tougher course of action against the Khartoum government.
Indispensability gets you only so far as a defence for organisational failure: ask a weary rail commuter or a frustrated National Health Service patient. The UN has to address its weaknesses — and quickly — if it is to retain its effectiveness. Annan recognises that the issues that have come to light as a result of the investigation into oil for food and the inquiries into sexual exploitation demonstrate that there must be real change: stronger, more independent audit arrangements; improved transparency in procurement and zero tolerance of lapses in professional and personal behaviour.
The UN needs to outgrow its roots as a diplomatic deal maker and build a management culture that allows us to escape the busy hands of too many governments seeking to micro-manage what we do, and instead lays out transparent goals and benchmarks by which our performance can be judged. This would be a change that does not leave peacekeeping and other field operations stuck in an archaic military culture, but forces them to reflect modern standards of behaviour between human beings, whatever their economic status.
Beyond this lies the broader challenge of aligning a too-often sprawling, unfocused UN system around today’s priorities. A consequence of globalisation that has crept up on all of us is that our security is shared. Poverty in one corner of the world can contribute to terrorism in another. From health pandemics to migration and global warming, today’s problems do not respect borders. A new multilateral compact is needed urgently but it will be effective only if it makes all of us — rich and poor — feel safer.
With that precise object the high-level panel set up by Annan to examine today’s threats and challenges has recommended reforming the membership of the security council, adopting a uniform definition of terrorism, strengthening the non-proliferation regime for weapons old and new, a mechanism for ensuring that the world does not lose sight of post-conflict countries and let them slip back into chaos, and acceptance that there is an international responsibility to intervene and protect when countries descend into internal fratricidal conflict.
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A second group, the UN’s Millennium Project, has boldly laid out a plan showing that we really can halve poverty by 2015 and reach the other “millennium development goals” agreed by all UN member states in 2000. (These include achieving primary education for all boys and girls and turning the tide against HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases.)
How can this be achieved? First by the efforts of developing countries who must prioritise their own spending, build accountable democratic government and promote a vigorous private sector to create jobs. But these efforts must be supported by much more ambitious levels of international development investments — a quick doubling of current official aid levels and fairer trade between poor and rich nations; a deeper deal on debt relief; and encouraging more foreign investment in poor countries.
All this will come together, we hope, in a deal at a UN summit in September: a bargain with something in it for everybody, just as was the UN’s founding in 1945 in San Francisco. It is a deal that is a lot more practical and achievable than it seems at first blush. For instance, the world as a whole is likely to halve poverty by 2015 based just on current trends in Asia. The critical challenge is Africa’s stubborn poverty. But this deal on security and aid will not be struck — let alone put into practice — without the UN at the centre of the web.
Getting from where we are now, in the depths of congressional investigations and daily media assaults, to where we need to be — coaxing world leaders into a new world bargain in September to renew the legitimacy and authority of the UN to fight poverty and terrorism equally and to stop human rights abuses in Darfur or wherever they occur — is no small task.
To climb from these depths to those heights will require Annan to recover the leadership and authority that lifted the UN so high before Iraq. And the way for him to do it — as he recognises — will be through reform and renewal; through deeds, not words.