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| Mar. 31, 2004. 01:00 AM |
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Battered on many fronts, the United Nations must clean up its own act before throwing stones at the United States RICHARD GWYN The attacks on coalition soldiers left 80 wounded and, among citizens, the death toll reached 28, with some 900 injured. The inter-religious and inter-ethnic riots resulted in damage to 30 mosques and churches while almost 300 houses were destroyed.All of this wasn't happening in Iraq, though. It was happening in Kosovo. And the blame for the killings and violence rests not with the United States but with those proper multilateral institutions, the United Nations and NATO.While the Americans have been trying to get Iraq turned around in the right direction for only a year, the U.N. and Atlantic alliance have been at work in the much smaller society of Kosovo for almost five years now. Kosovo's economy, though, is probably weaker than Iraq's despite the ongoing insurgency in the Middle Eastern country. Kosovo's only successful "industries" (not counting those working for one or other of the many international agencies there) are prostitution, drug smuggling, money-laundering, illegal immigrant smuggling and car theft.The only alternative to a unipolar world that revolves around the U.S. is a multipolar one revolving around the U.N., with, from time to time, international organizations such as NATO working jointly with the U.N.This multipolar world has a political legitimacy that no U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" can ever match, even remotely. It combines the efforts and talents of all kinds of national partners.That's the theory, and it's a good one. But does it actually work in practice? Can a multipolar world, in other words, actually make the world a better place?In all kinds of small and practical, and often unnoticed ways, the U.N. and its agencies often do good work. But often, far too often, they fail abysmally. And, as is really disturbing, the root cause is often the defining characteristic of multilateral projects. This is, that they involve many partners so that no one is responsible nor can be blamed— in contrast to all the contemporary never-ending barrage of criticism of the U.S. and of President George W. Bush. (Not that most of that isn't merited).For quite a while now, the U.N. has escaped criticism, not least because so many commentators were anxious to shore up its credibility as a counterweight to the overweening power of the U.S.Suddenly, the U.N. is in the spotlight. And it isn't a pretty sight.  Kosovo: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervened in Kosovo to end ethnic cleansing. Under U.N. rule, the cleansing has continued without interruption, except that yesterday's villains and victims, Serbs and Kosovo Albanians, have changed places with the Albanians now torching Serb houses and driving them out of the province. Oil scandal: Far and away the most serious of the U.N.'s present troubles. While U.N. sanctions were in effect on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, many commentators blamed the organization for the high death toll there because of the lack of goods and medicines.It turns out that the cause of many of these deaths was because the food was often bad and the drugs and medical equipment substandard. This, in turn, was because the supplier companies, most of them French and Russian, were paying Saddam a commission and reducing the quality of their goods.At least $5 billion in kickbacks was creamed off the top of the revenues Iraq received from U.N.-approved sales of its oil. The U.N. now claims it had no idea of this year-by-year scandal. One reason is that its own officials may have been involved. The program's director, Benon Sevan, has made accusations. The son of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was a senior executive of the companies active in the scheme.Insecure security: The principal cause of the terrible bomb explosion at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad last year that killed 22 and forced the U.N. to leave the country, was, it turns out, the U.N. itself.A scathing report published this week concluded that almost no security measures were implemented, not even blast-resistant film over the windows to prevent injuries caused by flying glass. Several senior U.N. officials have either resigned or been demoted.And, this week, the U.N. was reminded of the worst single failure of its history. This was the 10th anniversary of the genocidal massacre in Rwanda that took some 800,000 lives because no U.N. peacekeepers were sent in to keep order.This doesn't make the U.N. unfit to replace the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" to police the world or to push and pull and tug failed states toward reconstruction and even toward democracy.But if the U.N. and others want the U.S. to do less on its own, they are going to have to do far, far better while doing it multilaterally.Richard Gwyn's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. gwynR@sympatico.ca. Additional articles by Richard Gwyn |
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