UN-Reformable

The once-esteemed organization known as the United Nations is awash with scandal and calls for reform are increasing in number and volume. Indeed, there is a great deal of merit in those calls for reform. Now different ideas have been put forward here and there- attempt to weed out corruption, further the Oil for Food investigation, sack Kofi Annan- but few have realized the real ways to reform the organization, which includes taking in to account the organization’s biggest problems and reasons for criticism.

One of the most obvious problems with the UN is that it commands what seems to be a destructive form of the Midas touch. While whatever King Midas touched turned to gold, whatever the UN touches seems to turn to disaster. Recall such black spots on the UN’s record such as their intervention in the Bosnian Civil War, in which thousands of Croat and Bosnian Muslim civilians were massacred by Serb militias in UN “Safe Havens.” Or their present engagements in central Africa and Latin America in which UN peacekeepers and humanitarian workers are engaging in rape, sexual abuse, pedophilia, prostitution, and other acts of sexual misconduct and deviance. Or perhaps the most oft-mentioned act of corruption, the Oil for Food scandal. Liberals in the United States love talking about how the war in Iraq was for the benefit of Halliburton, an American oil company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. However, those same liberals remain mum in regards to how the Oil for Food Program was run for the benefit of Cotecna, a Swiss oil company presently headed by Annan’s son.

The best way to combat the UN’s destructive touch is to simply keep the UN from touching things. Politicians in this country and others should stop fooling themselves in to thinking that the United Nations is a humanitarian organization when they have in fact created more humanitarian catastrophes than prevented them. Whenever such a catastrophe arises, such as the crisis in the Sudan, other organizations or countries in the region should be consulted and the UN should be ignored at all costs, at least while the organization remains in its present form.

Many people have charged the United Nations is an unelected body for the world’s elites, and they would be correct. The UN thinks of itself as, among other things, the world’s legislative body. In that regard, they should act as such and be restricted to the policies and prerequisites of such. In some form or another, UN representatives should be elected to the positions which they hold. This can be done by national referendum or by act of national parliament. The election of members to the UN will bring with it credibility which for far too long has been absent in the UN and its members.

The Oil for Food scandal and its stance on issues such as the Iraq War bring up another point for reform. The United Nations is too easily influenced, and in some matters controlled, by dictatorships. Call me an imperialist, but I don’t think the Human Rights Council should be chaired by the likes of Sudan. Nor should the Council for Nuclear Disarmament be chaired by Iran. Too often, regimes like Saddam’s Iraq, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and others have been able to shape UN policy in their favor. Remember, this is the same organization that awarded Pol Pot’s “Democratic Kampuchea” government in exile with a UN seat throughout the 1980’s. Dictatorships should not be condoned or rewarded for their disregard for democracy or their oppression of their native population. These regimes are reprehensible for many reasons and do not belong in the community of nations making important decisions that could benefit or condemn entire populations.

The means for solving this problem is to simply exclude or isolate non-democratic members of the UN. Yearly audits would be performed on all member states to ensure their governments allow their citizens basic political, economic, and civil rights. Such audits would be conducted by NGO’s such as Freedom House, which perform such yearly reports anyway. That means no dictatorships on the Security Council, Human Rights Council, or any other council, for that matter. One would think common sense alone would be enough to exclude the likes of Saudi Arabia from the Council on Women’s Rights. Further more, dictatorships would not be allowed to craft or vote on UN policy to ensure such policy is not authored for a regime’s own enrichment. And we all know that’s been done before. A far more drastic but viable option would be to turn the United Nations in to a democracies-only club. This way, the world’s most important decisions would be made by democratic governments that respected freedom and human rights. Membership would depend on whether or not a government was democratic, and is at least in some ways similar to the British Commonwealth.

No matter which options are considered (and I’m reasonably confident none of mine will be), something must be done to reform this otherwise vile band of some of the world’s most villainous people who are not permanent residents of a certain nameless western European nation. In its present form, the United Nations spurns the very tenets and principles for which it was founded. Instead of standing up for freedom, human rights, and social justice, the United Nations serves the interests of totalitarian governments, friendly ideological NGO’s, and self-serving corporations who profit in violation of their own sanctions. Either credibility must be restored to this organization or the organization itself must be disbanded.