U.N. Day Blues

In the 58 years of the United Nations’ existence, marked by today’s celebration of “U.N. Day,” the self-legitimizing organization has made one fact abundantly clear: if Hitler were to rise again, neither the Security Council nor the International Criminal Court nor the Geneva Convention would do anything to stop him.

It is all too easy to recite a litany of locales (to begin: Rwanda, Chechnya, Kampuchea, Myanmar, Burundi, Uganda) where the U.N. has done nothing in the face of evil. To be fair, part of this blame falls on the individual members of the Security Council for lacking the will and resolve to commit themselves to action. In some horrific cases—notably Kampuchea of the 1970s and Chechnya today—veto-bearing Security Council members were directly complicit in massive human rights violations.

Any true humanitarian knows that a body like the U.N. does good, on occasion. But when sparse good works combine with the farcical reality that Libya leads the Human Rights Commission—largely to insulate itself from allegations—and the fact that the U.N.’s rule-by-consensus Security Council has probably done more to diplomatize, coddle and talk about human tragedy than to truly lessen it, it’s time for humanitarians to come to terms with their sacred cow.

Even when the U.N. does act, such as in Bosnia, it does so with weak resolve and with mandates so vague that terms like “safe area,” ostensibly implying the protection of said area by U.N. troops, become worthless, as happened in 1995’s terrifying massacre at Srebrenica. When shots are fired, U.N. blue helmets have a nasty habit of staying inside the barracks, a symptom of a fuzzy, multinational chain of command and bizarre diplomatic doublespeak.

Such a rejection of the U.N. does not come with any notions that could be labeled as jingoistic; indeed, accepting the U.N. as a historical failure should be uncontested by the very activists who claim to treasure human rights.

As times have changed since 1945, so have the U.N.’s constituent countries. France and Britain have waned. China remains an undemocratic state. And yet these three remain entrenched in the Security Council. Why not Japan, the second-largest economy? Why not India, the largest democracy?

Over a decade after the Soviet Union fell, the U.N. is still working within the framework best fit to ensure the same stagnation that during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s ensured a cold war and world peace. Stuck in this warp zone, with the Security Council’s veto-bearing members unwilling to vote themselves out of power, the U.N. may well be a dead end for those who would reform decision-making to be pro-active instead of inert.

It is time for a change of the way intervention is dealt with. And that change cannot be accomplished through a body that seats quasi-, non- or anti-democratic states side-by-side with the United States and other democratic nations. It cannot be done, further, within a system that absurdly treats states as equals in voting rights when they are not alike in their economies, militaries, populations, or in any other sense but their status as sovereign.

Growing up in an era where the U.N. has been made to symbolize peace, it is taboo in educated circles to reject the institution, even scoffed at as puerile or cowboy-ish. But the blind homage paid to the world body on this, the organization’s birthday, should not cloud the fact that the U.N., by virtue of its membership’s extremely divergent interests, is an impotent organization, powerless to truly halt affronts to human rights.

Dictatorships and democracies do not enjoy the same favor in the minds of the American people, and the world’s remaining sadists should likewise not be given the privilege of equatability with French, Indian or Japanese democrats in any tenet of our foreign policy.

The same logic which would render NATO’s Kosovo intervention illegal merely because it was not sanctioned by the Security Council (it was opposed by Russia and China) should not in any way bind America and its allies’ decisions to intervene abroad. When American values and interests are at stake, the United States cannot afford to be shackled by an imagined moral authority that the U.N. no longer deserves.

—Travis R. Kavulla is an editorial editor.