Problems At The United Nations

With scandal and speculation swirling around the U.N. in recent weeks, one Fletcher School professor says that the organization may be at a historic low point.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [01.13.05] United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has come under siege in recent weeks for his handling of humanitarian issues such as the crisis in Sudan. In addition, reports of corruption in the oil-for-food program and accusations of sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeeping troops in the Congo have added to the U.N.’s headaches. But blame for the organization’s woes, says Tufts’ Hurst Hannum, goes beyond the institution itself.

“It is a low point in the U.N.'s history,” Hannum, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School, told National Public Radio. “And I think that it's partially of the U.N.'s own making but largely of the making of the world superpower who for the last six years has essentially tried either to undermine the U.N. or to use it as a tool of its own foreign policy.”

The United States, Hannum said, has marginalized the U.N. to a level that endangers its effectiveness as an international organization.

“If its largest member state continues to thwart it and to insist that it simply follow the American lead, then frankly there's very little the U.N. can do unless it wants to be seen purely as a tool of the United States,” Hannum contended.

The conflicts with the U.S. are not beneficial to the organization dealing not only with a host of major humanitarian issues like the Asian tsunamis, but also scandals such as reported corruption in the Iraq oil-for-food program and accusations that U.N. peacekeepers in the Congo sexually abused women and children there.

“One of the things that it's important to remember is that there really are no United Nations troops,” Hannum said. “These are soldiers from Nigeria, from Bangladesh, from Fiji, from France who act as national contingents who remain accountable to their own governments and who are temporarily under UN command but over whom the UN really exercises no authority.”

Countries contributing troops to U.N. peacekeeping contingents, Hannum says, should be outraged.

“It should be a scandal equivalent to Abu Ghraib in this country that soldiers from France or Bangladesh or Fiji are engaging in these sorts of operations,” Hannum told NPR. “Pressure should be brought on those countries to prosecute these individuals, get them out of the army.”

As for the oil-for-food scandal – where the U.N. is accused of letting Saddam Hussein’s government siphon billions in money intended for aid in Iraq – Hannum suggests that openness is the best policy moving forward.

“It is essential that the U.N. act on the oil-for-food scandal and be much more forthright in dealing with the problems that do exist within its interior,” he asserted. “It is important that it do this transparently.” But the need to act does not lie solely at the feet of the U.N.

“The other changes may need to come not just from the U.N. but also from other countries,” Hannum explained to NPR. “The U.N. is a bit like a club that has the ability to pass lots of laws and lots of regulations but without any ability to enforce them. And the U.N. ultimately can do what the member states allow it to do.”

While restructuring may play a part in helping the agency become more effective, Hannum says that the bigger problem is gaining consensus on the U.N,’s role on critical global issues.

“It's a problem of political will,” he told NPR, “of trying to build a new international consensus at least around some issues such as dealing with the current tragedy that arose from the tsunami and identifying perhaps with more clarity just what the U.N. can do and allowing it to do that better and perhaps identifying areas where the U.N. should be not expected to act because it's simply too politically sensitive.”