I Love the U.N., but It Is Failing
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
First thing’s first. You should understand the objectives of the organization you’re trying to join. There are three primary objectives of the UN system today. The first one is to pay the salaries and the perks of its employees. The second is to give them a microcosm in which they can walk around in suits, look important, use buzzwords, and basically find some, however contrived, meaning. The third one is to make it seem like there is an international political system out there, a framework of rules that everyone respects. This last one is increasingly optional in the post-Cold War geopolitical climate.
...
Your globetrotting, world-saving dream job doesn’t exist. It hasn’t existed for a while. The world has been explored – it no longer needs explorers, and especially doesn’t need faceless bureaucrats. It needs people who do things. Even if, through blackmail, magic rituals or blind luck, you land a UN job somehow, you will not be part of the world elite – far, far from it. You will push paper watching your years go by; your sole obsession will be sucking up to your neurotic supervisor in the hope of seeing your grade increase by a small notch five years down the road; you will wake up at 55 wondering where your professional life has gone. And that’s even discounting the remote possibility that the funding countries come along and say “Ok guys, the show’s been great, now pack it up and go home, you’re not needed anymore.”
https://desertqueensarah.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/dont-be-a-...
Maybe some (not all) of the people in higher positions get appointed through more political, less idealistic processes and gum up the works?
Maybe having an organization that by its very nature needs to cater to so many different world views means that it can't actually get anything done efficiently. Too many cooks in the kitchen.
I used to really believe in the United Nations. Did MUN in high school, got a degree in politics, studied how developing polities can form ideal governments, the whole nine yards. Now I write python for one of the beltway bandits. At least the problems the computer has can be solved by logic and hard work.
Considering Russia and China are casually annexing territories, its pretty obvious this framework no longer exists. The UN made sense when the security council members had some incentive to use the UN system, but when their foreign policy is to circumvent international law at any opportunity, then its easy for them to sidestep it. Autocratic states ultimately can't work with democratic ones. Its unfair to expect one group to 'follow the rules' and another to go off willy-nilly when it serves them. There's no enforcer here, they're supposed to be voluntarily enforcing themselves and obviously that's not happening.
I won't even go into how easy it is for democratic nations to game the system either. Bush's run up to Iraq had all the hallmarks of the 'legitimate' UN: a debate, an airing of evidence, a vote, etc. Ultimately, it was just as hollow as an autocratic state annexing territory and telling everyone to piss off.
I suspect the UN has long fallen into pageantry and will never recover. It probably made sense to keep the US and the USSR from nuking each other, but today it lacks purpose and any real spirit of participation. It now exists to bully smaller nations who don't have a permanent seat in the security council, and because of that, it will never go away.
A pretty big overstatement. The only cross-border war between nations I can think of is Russia and Ukraine. If perfection is our standard, then of course the UN and everything else is a failure. Otherwise, the UN is doing this job effectively.
> The UN made sense when the security council members had some incentive to use the UN system, but when their foreign policy is to circumvent international law at any opportunity, then its easy for them to sidestep it. Autocratic states ultimately can't work with democratic ones. Its unfair to expect one group to 'follow the rules' and another to go off willy-nilly when it serves them. There's no enforcer here, they're supposed to be voluntarily enforcing themselves and obviously that's not happening.
The golden age you imagine never existed. It's always been this way. This is the way the UN, and politics in general, works. I wish it were otherwise and we should work to improve it, but it does work, unless we measure it by the standards of ideals and perfection - and then what human institution (or human being) measures up?
> A pretty big overstatement. The only cross-border war between nations I can think of is Russia and Ukraine.
Russia is not at war with Ukraine. Russia is just running a covert action in Ukraine in an attempt to destabilize it's democratically elected government.
Russia has never like the fact Ukraine decided to leave the Soviet Union.
I suspect the reference to China refers to how China is unilaterally taking ownership of the South China Sea using it military strength, with total disregard to international law.
It might also be in reference to how China handles Tibet, or how they are trying to kill democracy in Hong Kong, or maybe how they have their eyes on Taiwan where they claim it is rightfully theirs.
> The golden age you imagine never existed. It's always been this way. This is the way the UN, and politics in general, works. I wish it were otherwise and we should work to improve it, but it does work
I suspect drzaiusapelord disagrees with you when you say it is working and I would say I tend to agree with him.
The modern day UN is nothing more than a very expensive bureaucracy that in reality achieves very little.
Maybe it has never worked?
This is correct, although it's not so covert. Russia has built in Eastern Ukraine a full-scale army of 40K troops with 600 tanks and thousands of APCs. It sends hundreds of railway cars with military supplies across the border. The army is better equipped and trained than many NATO countries in Europe. At this scale it simply can't be covert, and it's certainly a war.
Which is different from US involvement in its sphere of influence how, exactly? Presence of boots on the ground?
Russian troops invaded Ukraine, killed thousands (more?) Ukrainians, conquered a large part of its territory and people, and organize, supply, train, and fight along side an open rebellion.
I'm not sure what else to call that but invasion and war. The Russian and Ukrainian goernments avoid that term right now because both want a cease fire.
Ask Putin are Russia soldiers in the Ukraine he will say no.
Ask him if Russia is supporting fighters in Ukraine with weapons he will say no.
Ask him is Russia at war with Ukraine he will say no.
That is exactly why the UN is so hopeless. Everyone knows the answer to those questions is YES and Russia is effectively at war with the Ukraine, but all he has to do is deny it.
Ukraine has even gone to the UN asking for help, but nothing is done, only because the UN is such a toothless tiger.
The big world players, USA, Russia and China do as they please, regardless of what the UN or the rest of the world thinks.
The UN represents the will of the world's powers, for good or ill. As Russia has the status of one of the five leading powers and another, China, does not oppose them in this matter, the will of the world's powers is not what we would like regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In other issues, the world's powers do agree. Two examples are Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs. Another is the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
BTW, you'll note that the Europeans and the U.S. also don't refer to it as war or invasion. I"m pretty sure it's because they don't want to escalate the situation, and neither does Ukraine. If it escalates, more innocents die, more is destroyed, and Ukraine loses even more than they already have.
This is a pretty good point, with nuclear weapons as an alternative explanation.
> A pretty big overstatement. The only cross-border war between nations I can think of is Russia and Ukraine. If perfection is our standard, then of course the UN and everything else is a failure. Otherwise, the UN is doing this job effectively.
Well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War There's that 2008 skirmish. Not that I disagree with your post though.
Anyway UN is doing its work fine. Its somewhat useless, but better than nothing.
That's not a glowing review for an organization who's budget was >$12 billion in 2012. [1]
To what better use could that money have been put?
[1]: http://www.un.org/en/hq/dm/budget.shtml http://www.un.org/en/hq/dm/pdfs/oppba/Regular%20Budget.pdf
Ie. the most powerful nations at the time, without which a second League of Nations experiment would be doomed to fail.
Libya's "no fly" zone, Iraq, Kosovo, nationalistic coup against a democratically elected president.... etc etc etc
I don't even what to say when reading texts like this. It's like democracy is the racism of the 21st century. White infallible democrats versus autocratic niggers.
It makes the most deadwood-collecting US government bureaucracy (I've worked there too) seem almost startup-like by comparison.
Hah! That will never happen. World governments need a place to send embarrassing brothers-in-law, blowhards, and idiots who can't, for political reasons, simply be drowned in a tub.
Sounds like every private sector job i've had tbh.
So that's the explanation for the UN's infamous 'internet violence' report, where instead of actually trying to look at any sort of real issue, they spent hundreds of pages talking about internet trolling on behalf of a few rich kids who were having issues with Twitter. While making every possible sourcing failure in the book at the same time.
They're currently sharing pro-Trump memes on Reddit.
If everything the UN does is self-serving bureaucratic garbage designed to maintain and expand the bureaucracy itself...
And the bureaucrats behind the IPCC gain authority and money when their reports are more alarmist...
And, every year, their reports become more alarmist...
And, every year, the IPCC bureaucrats gain authority and money...
Maybe... maybe the IPCC reports aren't a shining jewel of perfect Science that has somehow arisen from the bureaucratic cesspool of UN corruption?
Personally I find it pretty hard to believe that an organization that is so shot through with politics and corruption could somehow have one perfectly uncorrupted part. And, even more, that this part is one of its highest-status sub-bureaucracies. Something to consider, anyway.
Maybe the invariant in your argument shouldn't be an invariant. That's all I'm really saying. This article could refute your belief, rather than your belief refuting the article.
Now imagine a bureaucracy run by and accountable to all the national government bureaucracies in the world! And remember that the ones most HN readers live under are, despite our whining, the most efficient and least corrupt in the world - the others are often far worse.
That's the UN. If you are going to have an association of the world's governments, I think that's the way it's going to be.
Like democracy, it's horrible but better than all the alternatives. It's primary purpose, IIRC, is to prevent international war (i.e., wars between nations, as opposed to civil wars). After all the war of human history, after WWI and WWII occurring within a 31 year period (think of that: that's like 1985 until today!), international war has almost been put to an end. It's now a major exception when it happens, and that fact is really a miracle.
They also achieve many other very important things, though expensively and slowly.
Remember that the UN is no fuzzy-minded idealist's fantasy. It was built by the survivors of WWII and WWI, while the ashes were still smoldering. Those people knew far more of war and the realities of man's inhumanity than we can imagine.
The real question is, does the UN or anything like the UN have role going forward, or must we suffer further degradations till we may arrive to some Pax Sino.
I've often speculated in my head about the desirabilty of closing down the UN to replace it with a "United Democracies" based as much on the carrot of trade as much as on any cudgels, but I think that's just a fantasy, you're always going to run into problems like "should Turkey be in or out of the EU and/or NATO, which way are they headed", and when do you ever let Russia or China in.
One of which you highlighted regarding what constitutes a democracy - some could even argue that the Electoral College in the USA means it isn't a true democracy!
Others are what legitimacy it would have in relation to countries that aren't members. Why should those countries care or co-operate with the organisation? Likely it would end up with UD trying to impose its will by force, which is a backwards step.
Furthermore, just because a country is a democracy doesn't mean it is automatically superior to every respect and entitled to adopt the high ground. Many democratic countries around the world have engaged in human rights abuses, started wars and interfered with other sovereign countries to install leaders who push their interests over that of the citizens. There is the danger that said countries in the UD would end up turning a blind eye to each other abuses because they, by definition, "wouldn't do that sort of thing".
Well, it is a republic, not a democracy anyways.
You still need the UN as a mechanism by which international diplomacy can get done as much as is possible, including with non-democracies. Every time a decision has to be made (e.g., North Korea, Libya, etc. or worse a war between major powers), we don't want to have to create a new framework and mechanism with new rules.
> I've often speculated in my head about the desirabilty of closing down the UN to replace it with a "United Democracies"
I think that's made much more possible and relevant by the spread of democracy. 30 years ago, it would have been almost exclusively the West. Now there are democracies all over the world; the old world order mechanisms (the UN Security Council, World Bank, etc.) don't include them, and the number and diversity of nations makes the old U.S.-led consensus much harder to achieve. Also, morally, the people in those nations deserve just as much of a vote in world affairs as Americans do - that's democracy.
While these empires had powerful militaries, firepower alone did not make them powerful. Trade and culture were far more potent long term instruments of power. In modern terms, NATO is only one part of the equation of the Pax Americana - you also have Hollywood/English language/the internet and a global mesh of free trade agreements and shipping networks.
For all its downsides (and there are many, such as massive environmental damage and inequality) globalization is also a huge factor in the peace (although not necessarily an infallible one: the globalization in the 1900s wasn't enough to stop WW1).
Sexual abuse by it's peacekeepers (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2016/02/27/peacekeepe...). "Child sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers" even has its own wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse_by_UN_peace...)
Bribes are abound, even a story earlier today (http://www.seattletimes.com/business/humanitarian-worker-cha..., http://nypost.com/2015/10/06/former-general-assembly-preside...).
Saudi Arabia is on the human rights council (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/22/why-is-saud...). Not exactly a "scandal" but in the same vein.
It's ever-increasingly hard to take the organization seriously.
I have that feeling as well. It's a truly horrible thought.
* Stand up for the sovereignty of the world's nations.
* Defend human rights throughout the world.
These missions are in direct conflict. It's impossible to force states to play nice with human rights, while at the same time respect the sovereignty of these states.
What we're left with is just like the conflict in 2001's HAL-9000. Given two conflicting goals, bad things happen. Neither objective is fulfilled, and the system fails in all kinds of other ways too.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29, section 3: "These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." [1]
[1]: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng...
It breaks its own rules by refusing entry to a country with a vibrant democracy and a roughly comparable population and GDP as Australia—Taiwan. Why? Because China has a veto. Consequently, not only will the UN continue breaking its own guidelines and refusing Taiwan entry but it will also never condemn China's repeated threats of invasion.
Similar dynamics play out interests concerning other veto wielding countries such as the US or Russia.
Veto power is one of the big design successes of the UN. It guarantees major global powers, the ones you actually want to participate, actually participate and not ignore, or worse, pull-out and delegitimize the UN.
But for those who aren't familiar with the situation, I'll lay it out.
Taiwan was formed when a bunch of Chinese aristocrats fled the mainland.
Their big mistake was, at the time, not declaring themselves a new country, but instead declaring they were the rightful rulers of all of China, and that they were, in fact, part of China.
At some point, a few years later, it became obvious that wasn't going to happen, and that China was going to be its own place. So Taiwan finally realized they really needed to give up this "we are part of China and the rightful rulers" and just become their own country.
However, at this point, they were a fairly prosperous state, so China found it politically-expedient to turn it around and say: "Actually, Taiwan is part of China as they've been saying all these years. We will pull them back into the fold."
All sorts of political shit-storm went down at this point, and hasn't really cooled off ever since.
People who frame Taiwan as being part of China (as parent did) are on the side of Mainland China. People who frame Taiwan as being an independent country (as many UN members do) are on the other side from Mainland China.
The debate is very much not settled.
SOURCE: was married to TW citizen for >10yr, have lived in TW for >1yr of my life. Have way more details on intricacies than I've laid out here.
My understanding was that the US, for example, doesn't recognize Taiwan because it would mean losing trade with China; and that if a country recognizes Taiwan, it loses the ability to trade with mainland China, but gets various benefits from Taiwan as well as easier trade terms.
Of course, it's likely that this has changed; my information is probably a few years out of date, maybe a decade or two.
This sounds like something out of Chinese Communist Party propaganda - aristocrats? The last Emperor was deposed almost 40 years before, and the Nationalists had nothing to do with them.
The history:
Taiwan, a large island the size of ~Maryland off the SE China coast, had been a somewhat primitive frontier of China for much of its history. Sometimes the Chinese government controlled it, sometimes not. It was a refuge for fugitives at times. Japan controlled it from 1895 until (IIRC) they lost it in WWII.
Before and after WWII there was a civil war for control of China between the right-wing Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-chek, and the left-wing Communists, led by Mao Tse-tung. Both were brutal authoritarian dictators; there were no white knights here. Not surprisingly, the U.S. favored Chiang, the Soviets favored Mao.
In 1949 the Communists won. The Nationalists fled to Taiwan and the Communists lacked the capacity to attack them there, so they remained. Both parties claimed to be the legitimate government of China and I'm pretty sure the Nationalists even retained China's UN seat.
In 1972, a falling out between the Communists and Soviet Union created an opportunity that the U.S. exploited. Nixon famously went to mainland China, normalized relations, and the U.S. backed away from Taiwan. The Communists got the UN seat, and all three parties agreed that Taiwan was part of China, not a separate nation, but temporarily with a separate government. Also, the issue would not be resolved by force and the U.S. has an agreement with Taiwan to defend it if necessary.
That arrangement persists until today. Defending Taiwan wasn't a big deal through the 1990s, when China's military was so weak. Now it is a much more serious risk to the U.S.
To further clarify, the Taiwan Relations Act requires the US to give Taiwan the ability to defend itself; whether this would bind the US to directly intervene in a conflict on Taiwan's behalf is somewhat unclear, and that ambiguity is a not-insignificant part of the truce.
Mixing the two terms might seem pedantic, but it is not, it's the whole reason for the status quo. The PRC is satisfied that the ROC says they're a part of China. The ROC is satisfied that they're not saying they're a part of the PRC.
Taiwan was formed through various geological processes, inhabited by aboriginals, later colonized by China during the Ming Dynasty, reclaimed by China during the Qing dynasty, conquered by Japan, claimed by the ROC after Japan was defeated in WW2, and established as the new center of the ROC government after the KMT lost the mainland in the Chinese Civil War.
Taiwan did not spring into existence, fully formed, at the end of the Chinese Civil War. And calling the current government "a bunch of Chinese aristocrats" obscures that they were Jiang Jieshi, leader of the Republic of China, and his motley band of KMT officials.
I don't say this to be pedantic, but to establish important context to what the situation in Taiwan actually is.
> However, at this point, they were a fairly prosperous state, so China found it politically-expedient to turn it around and say: "Actually, Taiwan is part of China as they've been saying all these years. We will pull them back into the fold."
The PRC did not "turn around". During the Chinese Civil War, they were in the process of finishing the job and taking Taiwan, but their lack of a real navy and the US eventually coming to Taiwan's defense made it difficult to complete.
Officially, the PRC and ROC are still at war for control of China (no ceasefires have been signed), and the PRC occupies the mainland and the ROC occupies Taiwan.
In other words, reunification has been both the PRC and the ROC's official stance since the start of the Chinese Civil War.
> So Taiwan finally realized they really needed to give up this "we are part of China and the rightful rulers" and just become their own country.
> People who frame Taiwan as being part of China (as parent did) are on the side of Mainland China. People who frame Taiwan as being an independent country (as many UN members do) are on the other side from Mainland China.
Taiwan is not a very homogenous country. Taiwan is also a representative democracy, so its government is not very homogenous, either.
Some Taiwanese people want things to stay the status quo, some Taiwanese people want reunification, and some Taiwanese people want other more complicated things.
Some Taiwanese people love the KMT, some Taiwanese people were jailed and executed by the hundreds of thousands during the KMT's White Terror because they were suspected of disagreeing with the KMT's rule or being sympathetic to communism.
Some Taiwanese people are aboriginals who hate that they've been dragged into this spat between Chinese people, some Taiwanese people want Japanese rule (Taiwan generally hates Japan the least out of all the territories occupied by Japan, because they were Japan's "model colony" and were treated well, e.g. they didn't have their women forced into sex slavery)...
Mainland China is kind of homogenous in its support for reunification (well, even in the mainland there are plenty of people who don't care or prefer the status quo to war), but Taiwan can't really be said to have one opinion here.
SOURCE: I'm Chinese
Think of the UN as a mechnism for de facto powers to resolve conflicts and come to agreements peacefully; that's the UN's purpose, to prevent another major war.
Justice would be great, but at least the catastrophe of war is prevented. Remember of the incredible destruction of WWII and now imagine what modern technology would do - even without nuclear weapons.
Also, Taiwan's official policy is that they are not a separate country but a part of China, with a separate government. That is the agreement worked out between the US, China and Taiwan.
This may seem overly pedantic, but it is not. This wording is the entire backbone of the delicate geopolitical dance that underlies the status quo we have today.
The League of Nations had that as it's primary function [1]. Aside from some initial (heaveily criticized and somewhat dubious) successes, it failed. Spectacularly. The UN was created by reassembling the shattered bits of the LN ...
One reason it failed and the UN has succeeded is that one of the most powerful countries, the United States, didn't participate in the LoN.
Now ... it's not just that the UN has stopped such advances, a good case can be made that it's actively working to turn them back.
Do you have evidence of your other statements? I'm not familiar with any of it; what I see today is what I see in every political institution.
I think that most UN staffers share this opinion. They are there because of connections, and they are there to do nothing at all.
Anyway I wish for a "UP", United People, to arise from the ashes of the "UN". Yes, a people movement.
And.. How flawed it's implementations until now may have been, I still believe in democracy as the best possible option. The "ledger tech" you mention is what could be used to keep the democracy direct (instead of representative). The thought of a world wide digital referendum on some issue, with proper cryptographic underpinnings, this makes sense to me.
I think the UN is somehow a step towards a one-world-gov't as OK'ed by the "most powerful"; they like the nations as that where they have their power vested, so the UN will protect their interests in the end.
The "United People", as I proposed, should actually reduce their power and put in the hands of the people.
God, the horror stories - even if they're only partially true, there's no reason whatsoever for the United States (or any other country) to be funding such a broken organization.
Put another way, it's YOUR government. When was the last time you engaged with it constructively as a citizen? Especially at the local and state levels where individuals can make a constructive difference without becoming full-time activists, lobbyists or politicians?
One of the reasons the UN was created or transformed out of the league of nations was to prevent world war by providing an avenue of negotiation. By its founding purpose I think it has not done too badly.
There's a moral duty the UN seems to have, but this is an extra purpose to the UN. There are organisations that don't need the echo chambers of other nations that can do the same things, such as doctors without borders.
Are you getting this from another source because it doesn't seem to be mentioned in the article. It mentions taking several weeks to process the forms of a medical worker they needed to see at headquarters. The recruitment system that may take a year to hire someone seems to be a separate issue. I wish the author had went into more detail on that because it's very vague. What is the hiring process? Are two or three interview spread over a year? Do you have to interview several hundred people for a position? It's hard to place any importance on the statistic without more information.
I am sure that most of the personnel policies that the author alludes to are well-meaning and intuitive. What is out of scope in such rule-making is the empirical outcome. The cost of delay (213 days to hire) is apparently not a factor in the rules.
They lose a lot of good people in a presumed attempt to ensure they hire good people. Such an outcome is only recognized a posteriori.
The United States, and it's media arm (NYT being part of it), have been visibly anti-UN pretty much since Clinton left office. Take it from an expatriate: The UN is pretty awesome, once you're out of the confines of the Lower 48.
0. http://idpc.net/events/2016/02/ipu-un-parliamentary-event-ac...
1. http://idpc.net/policy-advocacy/the-un-general-assembly-spec...
It's a system without any enforcement.
† http://www.petersmap.com/ (the Mercartor Projection makes the political north look way larger than it actually is, the Peters Projection is an area accurate map. Specifically, Africa and Brazil are waaaay bigger than you'd think folks!)
Link to UN Declaration on Human Rights. Let's all be a little bit more idealistic :) http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
The UN doesn't focus on every other country in the world because no other country in the world is occupying a territory it has no claim to and randomly destroys the infrastructure of the occupied territory and uses lethal force against its people.
source: I heard an ex-Israeli soldier who is proud of his country speak about this at length. http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/
UN fixation on Israel is just another symptom of the rotten nature of UN, a mix of antisemitism and autocratic governments and UN bureaucrats.
The most trivial comparable criteria is probably the number of casualties in the conflict. If you look at the number of the Palestinian casualties during the Israeli-Arab conflict, and compare it with the number of casualties in any other conflict in the world (such as US's war in Iraq, NATO's war in Kosovo, The war in Syria, The massacre in Sudan, and sadly many other places), you'll see that the Israeli-Arab conflict is far less deadly than those any other conflicts. If only the UN would have given all the other conflicts in the world as much attention as it gives the Israeli-Arab conflict, many people's lives would have been saved. But the UN doesn't. That's probably because the UN's committee of human rights is controlled by states that, let's just say, don't care too much about human rights.
By the way, the organization you linked to is considered biased and unreliable in Israel. This organization "collects" evidences about supposed crimes that Israeli soldiers supposedly committed, but mysteriously refuses to share those evidences with any authority in Israel, despite requests from the legal authorities for such evidences in order to open an investigation and put the soldiers to trial. This organization claims that it has evidences for supposed crimes, but instead of passing those evidences to enable the trial of those who committed the crime, the people of the organization prefer touring around the world telling fishy horror stories, while trying to generalize and present all the Israeli soldiers as criminals. Reasonably, this raises an eyebrow or two about the reliability of those stories.
Created after WWI to prevent another WW it was disbanded after failing to prevent WWII
So, is anyone here implying we go for WWIII ?
Let me guess.... Milgram experiment is about the submission to authority.... The biggest problems right now is about the impoverishment of the workers and the "rich getting richer", but at the opposite of the time between WWI and WWII no one is proposing to prevent what generated WWII. (Mussolini and Hitler were elected notably to break the unions to help the companies stop losing values on paying these greedy workers diminishing the dividends)
So .... you really want people to go in the streets and ask that one hour worked should be payed, that tax are equally applied and demand that government do what the people ask?
You want the revolution in China, Europa, USA, Canada, Africa .... everywhere except Buthan maybe?
Seriously. This world is fine. With a 300$ phone in your pocket and the right app you can solve everything.
I would like instead to share a brighter view, based on my working experience in various parts of the organization (including the Secretariat and other UN agencies)both at the Headquarters and in the field.
The UN is an immense political machinery, controlled by Members States, tasked with the most noble and difficult missions that an organization was ever mandated in the history. The UN is also comprised of myriads of different agencies, funds and programme with very different mandates, administrative capacities and organizational culture. It is too simplistic to lump together what is different.
Huge organizations, such as the UN, require rules and procedures to ensure transparency to its constituents. Bureaucracy creates these additional, more often cumbersome, layers. Bureaucracy is indeed a pain and, of course, processes can be simplified and streamlined. However, such changes do not come overnight as they require change of mind among the organization's staff, especially the “old guard”.This does not mean that the work of the organization should stop or colleagues should quit. In fact there are ways to "play along with the "administrative vortexes”; for example, a deep knowledge of the rules and regulations, advance planning and proactive actions can accelerate processes. A staff member will not get frustrated or get his/her submission rejected if he/she knew exactly what are the steps required, what documents to submit etc. Yes, we should focus more on the substantive/programmatic work which we are responsible to deliver, but as we are all very knowledgeable and quick to process our salary reimbursement claims, we could also do the same for the required administrative processes that are being mentioned in the article.
Once I was asked during an interview how I would overcome bottlenecks caused by bureaucracy. I responded, knowing the procedures, acting on time, using the right templates, following up with the right people, being motivated and having a good dose of patience can help in accelerating the process, at least the part of it I am in control, and will eventually lead to faster results. I did get that job.
Recruitment processes take forever. Most of the time this is true and it takes even more time and efforts to deploy competent staff during an emergency. Again, some UN organizations do better than others. For example, some organizations such as UNICEF has "fast track" recruitment procedures for emergency recruitments allowing staff deployment within weeks. UNFPA maintains rosters of pre-vetted candidates that successfully passed 2 days intensive screening. DPKO also keeps roster of pre-screened candidates which enables the organization to deploy staff in 3 months rather than taking 9-12 months as per regular recruitment. It is possible, I have witnesses once my successor being deployed within 3 months from my transfer notification. Indeed there are ways for improvement, especially by learning from where things works better.
There is nothing more atrocious than peacekeepers committing abusive acts to the same people they are supposed to protect. This is a major challenge for the UN, as it casts discredits to the entire organization as a whole, including those that are risking their lives daily to create a better world. Therefore, there should be zero tolerance for such abuses and the perpetrators should be properly condemned. At the same time, it is disappointing that most of the media coverage focuses on UN misconduct, committed by a few, rather than on what we do right.
However I wish to point out that most of these abuses are carried out by military personnel serving in peacekeeping missions. The UN does not have a standing military force and depends on the willing of countries to deploy their national troops temporary (normally 6-12 months) to serve under the UN flag (and their own flag), and fight someone else's wars. Consequently, these soldiers are national citizens, who bring their own training and culture to the UN, and when they commit these abuses they should be considered as such too. I have witnessed cases when abuses committed by just one or two soldiers resulted in the entire company (hundred soldiers) repatriating.
The majority of peacekeepers perform a tremendous job by ensuring peace in war-torns parts of this planet, far from their families, risking their life daily to defend peace but still too often unnoticed. This is what I would like to emphasize.
In conclusion, the UN needs constant improvement. It is up to its staff. Those who have served for long can help taking stock of the best practices of the organization's legacy with an eye to future challenges. It is also up to the organization’s newcomers, preferably more from the -outside- such as private sector, government secondment, to bring innovative ideas, enthusiasm and help the UN to keep up with the pace of a fast evolving world.
I believe this brighter view of the UN would be more beneficial to bring the necessary change to the United Nations.
http://politics.co.uk/blogs/2016/03/15/the-un-fades-into-irr...
We'll see just how strong those treaties are. When the US led the drug war this was how we forced the rest of the world along. Can Russia, China, etc. do the same?
I hope that more organization like Watsi [1] or ONE [2] emerge and take donations away from more traditional and established non-profits, but I won't be holding my breath for it.
At the end of the day, the private sector probably yields more positive impact.
[1]: https://watsi.org/
[2]: http://one.org
please i need an answer
please i need an answer