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Assessing the UN’s Policies and Approaches

Saberi Roy - 6/14/2007

Since replacing the League of Nations in 1945 and drawing up a United Nations Charter, the UN may have attained some goals but has obviously fallen short of expectations especially in areas of global peace and security. We can provide an account of what the UN could or should have done and what it has done in all these years delineating its successes and failures. There are several issues that the UN tackles and these relate to

1. Eradicating global poverty

2. Providing universal primary education

3. Promoting gender equality

4. Reducing child mortality

5. Combating the spread of AIDS and other diseases

6. Promoting environmental sustainability

7. Promoting Human Rights

8. Addressing humanitarian issues

9. Fighting global terrorism

10. Peacekeeping and restoring security

11. Providing assistance to least developed nations

12. Promoting cultural collaboration

The UN has added several other global issues to its agenda including the problems of Iraq and Oil-for Food program and the Question of Palestine among other issues. Glaringly absent from its specific agenda are issues on Darfur, Kashmir, Tibet, Chechnya, Burma and the question of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. All these are considered within the UN’s broader human rights agenda or within the limits of peace and security issues and not given ‘specific’ attention. In the area of terrorism, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has delineated a Global Programme against terrorism and a broad global counter-terrorism strategy but these programmes and strategies seem to be existing in the form of drafts and guidelines and a ‘broad agenda’ rather than a definite or specific plan for action which the member states are required to follow. This can be tackled in a later discussion but the United Nations’ approach to terrorism lacks a specific direction and is also quite superficial. The focus is on legislative and institutional aspects and international cooperation rather than understanding the deeper roots of terrorism and specific causes of unrest in specific regions. The UN has failed to understand terrorism in its deeper forms and that is why it has also failed to curb terrorism and related problems. Terrorism is not just a crime as the UN seems to believe, there are deeper and ‘specific’ issues here.

The UN has failed to come out with specific directions in terms of terrorism or human rights situations across the world. The International Compact for Iraq still remains just that - a fact sheet and will have to deliver its promises. Unfortunately, Burma and Darfur have never been major issues for the UN and despite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN is for some strange reason very slow and inactive in attending to issues of human rights violations. One really wonders why this is a pattern within the UN and a proper analysis is necessary. Promotion of gender equality is not even in the agenda in certain Middle Eastern countries and this is again an area where the UN seems to be doing absolutely nothing. UN peacekeeping and security issues can also be criticized thoroughly considering the problems in Somalia, Rwandan genocide, abuse by peacekeepers in African countries and the continuous Israel-Palestine problem. There is very little drive to actually solve the question of Palestine and understand ‘why’ the two state solution still does not seem to be working for the Israel-Palestine case although this remains as a ‘decorative’ issue in the UN agenda. The UN has thus failed very badly in areas of human rights, peacekeeping and security, gender equality, and global terrorism. There is lack of understanding and specific approaches or directions to these global issues.

So what remains? Some of the other issues in the UN agenda are tackling of AIDS/diseases, poverty, education and development. The UNAIDS programme along with the UNICEF, WHO and other organizations may not have actually stopped the AIDS epidemic but has definitely gone a long way in spreading awareness about AIDS and these days every other celebrity talks about AIDS if not any other disease. So let’s say there is a lot of hope that AIDS will be successfully tackled especially in African countries and awareness is very strong even among the masses. So AIDS awareness has been quite a success if not the eradication of AIDS itself. As far as eradication of global poverty is concerned, the UN has set up a deadline until 2015 by which it aims to halve the number of people living in extreme conditions of poverty. This is one of the Millennium Development Goals or MDG of the UN. We have to wait to see whether the UN achieves it goal in this area, although again what has to be emphasized here is not eradication of poverty by itself but striking a balance between the world’s richest and poorest countries. Can the UN achieve this and is there such a broad agenda at all? Development is closely related to eradication of poverty and education for the very poor will never be realized unless basic food and shelter issues are tackled and nearly a billion people still remain illiterate. So these issues of tackling AIDS, promoting education for all, eradication of poverty and promoting development are long term goals for the UN for these perspectives have to be widened. These are broad, long term issues – for instance AIDS has to be tackled not just by promoting awareness but by developing medical research facilities to combat the disease, and poverty can be eradicated by striving on achieving a balance between the rich and the poor nations. Unlike terrorism or human rights, where UN agenda has to become more ‘specific’, UN focus for these long term issues of poverty, health or education will have to be ‘broadened’ and only then the goals can be achieved.

For security and peace issues, human rights or even terrorism, UN’s focus has to be more specific. These are short-term issues and it is no solution to consider terrorism as a broad ‘crime’. Every region facing problems will have to be considered as an individual/specific case as every region has its own history and specific concerns. So Israel-Palestine is a specific issue as against Kashmir which is another issue. If the UN broadly tackles these issues as ‘crime’ under UNODC, as it seems to be doing, without any specific focus, these problems will never be solved.

So, there are two approaches that the UN needs to take:

1. Specific region oriented actions for short term goals – problems within Iraq, the Israel-Palestine conflict, human rights abuse in Burma, Sudan and other places, terrorism in Kashmir, gender issues in certain countries and terrorism as it relates to specific parts of the world.
2. Broader actions for long term goals – eradication of global poverty, promoting environmental sustainability, eradication of AIDS and other diseases and promoting education, cultural cooperation and development.

At the moment, the UN seems to be doing exactly the opposite and taking broader actions for short-term goals (with no specific region oriented focus on terrorism) and specific actions for long term goals (more or less region oriented approaches to AIDS for instance). Unless the UN follows a pattern and a particular or correct philosophy in its decision making approaches, the decisions might remain directionless, flawed, and superficial and will even fail to provide substantive solutions.