“Tall trees catch a lotta wind”, the saying goes. With cost of UN peace keeping operations now peaking at US$8 billion per year, no wonder the troubled UN department is front page news (again).

Deploying and supporting its record number of 113,000 staff, the blue helmets came into the press cross-fire (again) due to the most recent debacles in DRC and Darfur where they don’t seem to have any direct positive impact on the peace process.

But one should look at both sides. It is all to easy to blame it on “the UN”, as if it was some piece of soap in a bathtub: difficult to grab, and a generic nuisance. “The UN” does what its memberstates define what it should do. If member states only want a ‘token’ peace force in some country, a ‘token’ it will remain, despite best efforts on the ground.

Two pieces I recently read, at least tried, to see things in perspective. One from the New York Times:

More than a decade after United Nations peacekeepers failed to prevent massacres in Rwanda and Srebrenica, Bosnia, what many consider the organization’s flagship mission appears to be slouching toward crisis once again, diplomats and other experts say.

The most immediate cause, they say, is a sharp rise in the number of peacekeeping commitments worldwide and a type of “mission creep” that has added myriad nation-building duties to the traditional task of trying to keep enemies apart. The new demands come at a time when member states with advanced armies in particular have become more resistant to committing additional troops or even necessary equipment like helicopters.

Those challenges have only added to a deeper and longstanding problem: the continued lack of clarity about how the United Nations should intervene when its members lack either the military force or the political will — or both — to halt carnage.

“Peacekeeping has been pushed to the wall,” said Bruce Jones, the director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, which is working with the United Nations on reform efforts. “There is a sense across the system that this is a mess — overburdened, underfunded, overstretched.” (Full)

And one from the book “Blood River” by Tim Butcher (more on this book in a later post):

I have seen numerous UN missions around the world, in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and all over the Middle east. Each was castigated by the international media and commentators for being inefficient, bureaucratic and ineffective, but such criticism always misses the point.

Yes, the missions are sloppy and poorly focused, but that is precisely because the international community’s attitude to complicated problems like the collapsing Yugoslavia, or rampaging west African rebels, is sloppy and poorly focused.

When the United Nations Security Council addresses these international problems, the questions it ends up answering is not ‘What is the right thing to do?’ but ‘What is the least we can do?’. UN missions around the world evolve at the pace of the lowest common denominator between the nations of the world, and that common denominator is pretty low when nations with interests as divergent as China and America both hold prominent positions in the UN Security Council.

Picture courtesy genetologisch-onderzoek.nl

Before we start, let me make something clear: The “UN” is one “brand” consisting of several parts which have completely different goals, operational practices and funding mechanisms. In fear of over-simplifying, I would distinguish three main parts in the UN:

1. “The Political Side”, UN secretariat in New York and UN security council, are probably the UN’s most visible side. In this large forum “where world issues are debated and decided upon”, every nation has its vote and voice. The critics would say “all equal, but some have a bigger vote and a louder voice than others”.
   This side of the UN is funded through direct contributions by the UN member countries, and as such by the taxes citizens like you and me pay.
2. “The Peace Keeping Side”, codenamed “UNDPKO”, are the famous blue helmet-ed forces we see on TV. Stationed in conflict zones like Sudan, Eritrea, DRC etc… they often work hand in hand with the UN Department of Political Affairs in enforcing political and military stability in (potential) conflict zones. Just as “the Political Side”, the “Peace Keeping Side” is funded by the UN members. Once again, your tax dollar “at work” (well.. “not at work” would sometimes be more appropriate).
3. “The UN Humanitarians” are not one organisation, but a few hundred organisations. Well-known names in this branch are UNICEF, WHO, WFP, UNHCR, UNDP etc… Most of these organisations are “voluntary” funded. This means they do not receive annual funding from the UN headquarters, but they launch appeals for each of their projects, be it in the development or emergency relief sector.

The “voluntary funding” scheme the humanitarian organisations work under, is somewhat an insurance those organisations are “kept on their toes”. If you screw up a project well enough, donors will be less eager to fund your projects next time. The “humanitarian market” (as I like to call it), is a competitive market. The need for funding exceeds the “capacity of the world to donate”. So “competition” keeps the humanitarian organisations somewhat in line. “Somewhat”, is the right term though, but we will expand on this another time.

Now, what pisses me off on a regular basis, is that the “UN number 2″ from above, the “Peace Keeping Side”, often gets involved in all kinds of bad press.
You still remember the reports about UN peacekeepers unable to prevent the Rwanda genocide? Or the Srebrenica massacres where the Dutch UN peace keepers “stood by”. There were many reasons why these tragedies happened. And even more excuses.

Totally UNexcusable are, amongst others, the sex scandals (the whole works including pedophilia, rape and prostitution) by UN Peace Keepers in DRC and in Haiti. Or the gruesome stories of Belgian UN Peace Keepers “roasting” a Somali boy. (read also this this article).

Shame, deep shame, we should all have. All of us.

While most of the time, I can still tell myself, “Ok, this is not concerning the UN humanitarians, this is not ‘us’, this is the ‘other UN arm’.” Still, the criminals wore the same colour as I do: “UN Blue”. They went into a country supposedly to help the population, and not to kill people and urinating on them afterwards, sexually abusing them.

I want to be able to keep my head up high, tough. Once of the reasons I continue to work for the UN (For a number 3, a UN humanitarian organisation), is to be able to say: “I not only criticize. I actually try to make a change.”! And the best way to make a change is a “change from within”. I try to speak up when confronted with any wrongdoing. While it gave me the reputation of being “difficult” (they say “a pain in the a**”), I do need to live with my conscience. I need to be able to say “I tried my level best”. And to be honest, I feel people *do* listen. At least where *I* work!

But still, … still, there are those days, like today, where I get frustrated, pissed off, wandering if all the fighting is worth it. Those are the days, like today, where I read that the audit of the UN peace keeping mission in Sudan wasted millions of dollars: (Below is an extract but the full post is here):

It pisses me off that millions of dollars are wasted through mere miss-management or for personal gain, in a country where millions fight to survive starvation every single day.
Also today, I read how the United Nations forces failed to help East Timor’s president Jose Ramos Horta after he was shot in an assassination attempt in Dili this morning:

Those are the days I am ashamed. Ashamed to say “I work for the UN”!

Pictures Die Burger and Chad Hanning (UNinvolved), WhatReallyHappened and Gamma Liaison (Belgian Peacekeepers).
Source: The Other World News