Truths and myths about the UN

There is much to say about what the United Nations is and does, but most people do not understand the reasons for its limitations and shortcomings.

Most people focus on failures, corruption and inaction and seldom ask why. For the mass media the United Nations is an attractive target for speculation and innuendo. It appears as if they wanted to destroy it.

However, a few months ago more than 2000 students from every continent and culture gathered in Australia to meet at the 22nd World Model United Nations Conference, where they found a forum to debate peace, development, human rights and the UN role in securing those goals. They found that the UN can deliver but that citizens of the world have a big task of persuasion ahead of them. No one can deny that the Security Council is a major tool controlled by the five major powers who are privileged with permanent membership, that the General Assembly is a big forum of propaganda without claws or teeth, and even the UN Secretariat is an overgrown babel with too many political appointees among a large contingent of devoted but often powerless staff members and professional functionaries.

But most of these faults are the making of the member States themselves. Member States have the real power of mandate to reach decisions and achieve international sanctioned goals. After all, the UN only moves as far or as little as the member States want it to move. The UN by itself can do nothing without approval from the international community.

Nevertheless, it is important to realize how unfair are its critics when it comes to budget and waste. The fact is that the UN functioning is practically a miracle of accounting and the allegation of budgetary waste is a myth.

The UN plays many different roles that are not as visible to the general public and the mass media as the General Assembly, the Security Council or the Secretariat are. The UN deals from peace and security between and within states to human rights, health, education, poverty alleviation, disaster relief, refugee protection, trafficking of people and drugs, heritage protection, climate change and the environment, etc., etc. Much of this very successful and huge amount of work is achieved at quite a low cost-effective level. Aside from peacekeeping missions paid with a separate budget, its operations at New York, Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi, plus the five regional commissions located in different continents, employ 44,000 at a cost of around $2.5 billion dollars a year. The United States pay 22% of this regular budget. People should consider that this is less than the Tokyo Fire Department budget or the Australian Department of Human Services, not to say that is much less than the budgets (just a fraction) of large cities like New York, Paris or Mexico.

On the other hand, the UN Development Programme, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the world-wide peacekeeping operations involving 110,000 military, police and civilian personnel cost some $27 billion dollars more. That is the cost of building and maintaining three Nimitz class aircraft carriers for the first three years of service. And the US alone has 12 aircraft carriers in operation and presently building two more, while other countries have 11 more presently in service. In fact, the UN is doing a lot practically with nothing to keep-up the good work. And compared with the public service's achievements and productivity in anyone of its member States, the UN international civil servants have much more to show in levels of efficiency and excellence.

If the UN does not do more or if it does not act when it is to be expected, we, as citizens of the world, are responsible to demand from our own countries a more decisive support of UN operations and better use of its potentials. For the UN to be what we expect it to be, member States should be willing to use it in concert and with a proper and abundant support to achieve the common goals of peace, development, human rights and education. We must demand from our own governments to back the world Organization and respect the UN Charter and its Human Rights Charter.

The UN is a tool for human understanding. It is not to be used to advance rivalries or narrow national interests that divides it and destroys it. It should not be used to favor ambitious political apointees.

The General Debate at the General Assembly starts in three weeks. Presidents, Prime Ministers, Foreign Affairs Ministers, and even Kings or Queens visit the GA every year in September to present to the world their own countries' views on how to solve World problems and how to achieve those goals through the UN good offices.

It is our responsibility to listen to them and to elevate our voices in protest if whatever they say or they propose is not what we expect from their participation in the UN work.