A Bad Quarter for the U.N.
By Brett D. Schaefer
March 18, 2013This year, United Nations officials have spent a lot of time in
Washington meeting with administration officials and Congress, trying to
defend their funding from sequestration and the threat of other cuts.
Small wonder they are concerned: The U.N. has had a rough 2013.
On international peace and security, human rights, and issues of
management and accountability, the organization has reminded the world
just how ineffective, inept, and embarrassing it is. Let’s go through a
few of the year’s major stories.
Considering this record of embarrassment, ineffectiveness, and
mismanagement, is anyone surprised about recent revelations that U.N.
officials and delegates sometimes drink heavily during meetings?
The examples above arose in just the past few months. Far worse
examples have been exposed with depressing regularity over the years
(think the Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal). This list also leaves aside
long-standing issues such as bias against Israel in the U.N. Human
Rights Council, misconduct by U.N. peacekeepers, and reports that the
U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) supports
terrorism.
Western nations have long been frustrated over duplication,
fragmentation, and low return on investment among U.N. funds, programs,
and agencies (a May 2012 study by economists William Easterly and
Claudia Williamson assessing best and worst practices among aid agencies
ranked U.N. agencies among the worst), but few countries have
persistently sought to address these problems. That may finally be
changing, thanks to budget constraints in donor countries. In recent
months, 17 donor nations, including the U.S., have met to coordinate
efforts to reshape the U.N. system to address corruption and make it
less fragmented and more transparent and cost-effective.
Individual nations have also begun to take action. Perhaps the best
example is the Multilateral Aid Review of 43 organizations, conducted by
the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. The
review found that nine multilateral aid agencies offered “poor value for
money,” including U.N. organizations such as UNESCO. DFID decided to
stop providing core funding to four organizations and put four others on
notice that funding may be stopped unless reforms are implemented.
Alarmed by these efforts, senior officials of over 20 U.N. bodies met
in January. They acknowledged that the “U.N. Common System has been
called into question, and its governance and mechanisms challenged.”
Unfortunately, the meeting was short on specific reforms. By far, the
most detailed discussion centered on tweaking procedures for future
meetings and developing “strong communication campaigns providing
government representatives and lawmakers in our Member States with tools
to justify to their constituents support of United Nations
organizations.” Specifically mentioned is using the U.N. Foundation to
assist their efforts, which may explain their recent campaigns to
protect U.N. funding in the U.S.
PR campaigns are not going to resolve the deep-seated problems within
the U.N. and its affiliated organizations. The member states,
particularly the U.S. which is the largest contributor to the U.N.
system, need to conduct a rigorous examination and evaluation of
individual U.N. agencies, funds, and programs to determine what aspects
of the U.N. are effective and deserve continued funding and, even more
importantly, which ones do not. The U.N.’s year so far doesn’t bode well
for how such a process might go.
— Brett D. Schaefer is the Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs at the Heritage Foundation.
By Brett D. Schaefer
March 18, 2013This year, United Nations officials have spent a lot of time in
Washington meeting with administration officials and Congress, trying to
defend their funding from sequestration and the threat of other cuts.
Small wonder they are concerned: The U.N. has had a rough 2013.
On international peace and security, human rights, and issues of
management and accountability, the organization has reminded the world
just how ineffective, inept, and embarrassing it is. Let’s go through a
few of the year’s major stories.
- The organization’s inability to address the ongoing atrocities
in Syria has, by the U.N.’s own estimate, resulted in 70,000 deaths.
Russia and China have blocked the Security Council from applying
sanctions, so the U.N. has instead focused on distributing humanitarian
assistance and engaging in unsuccessful diplomatic initiatives. The U.S.
and organizations such as the Arab League have recognized the Syrian
rebels, but the U.N. continues to recognize Bashar Assad and his
representatives in Turtle Bay. - North Korea successfully tested a long-range missile in December
and a nuclear bomb in February. Both actions flouted multiple U.N.
Security Council resolutions. The Security Council responded with a
“timid squeak of U.N. indignation,” passing a fifth resolution that
slightly tightened sanctions on North Korea. Pyongyang was unimpressed.
It proceeded to abandon the 1953 armistice (again) and threaten a
nuclear strike on the U.S. - While U.N. secretary general Ban Ki Moon was on stage at the
fifth Global Forum of the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations in March,
Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated, “Just like Zionism,
anti-Semitism, and fascism, it becomes unavoidable that Islamophobia
must be regarded as a crime against humanity.” Only after extensive,
critical commentary led by U.N. Watch did the U.N. finally issue a
belated condemnation. The event rekindled unwelcome reminders of the
U.N.’s famous and odious “Zionism is racism” resolution. - At a closed-door meeting of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, Iran accused Israel of “genocide,” forcing Australia, Canada,
and the U.S. to walk out. - Following Hugo Chávez’s death earlier this week, the U.N.’s
Human Rights Council honored the Venezuelan autocrat with a moment of
silence. The U.N. flag flew at half mast in Turtle Bay on March 8 “in
respect of the death of His Excellency Mr. Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías,
President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” — who spent years
persecuting and intimidating judges, journalists, and human-rights
activists. - The U.N. rejected claims for compensation over the outbreak of
cholera it caused in Haiti. U.N. officials tried to cover up their
responsibility for the situation, which has killed over 8,000 Haitians
and sickened hundreds of thousands more. Subsequent scientific analysis
confirmed that the cholera strain originated in southern Asia and was
likely introduced by U.N. peacekeepers. - The U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services issued a report
in January revealing that the U.N. vastly overspent on its travel budget
in 2010 and 2011. As U.S. ambassador Joseph Torsella observed, “The
2010–11 budget included $72.5 million for travel. . . . [Yet] the U.N.
spent a total of $575 million in travel-related expenses in the 2010-–11
biennium.” Torsella attributes much of the overrun to unjustified
upgrades to business- and first-class airline travel and “direct
payments to travelers of, on average, nearly twice the actual cost of
travel.” - The United Nations Dispute Tribunal concluded that U.N.
officials in Zimbabwe allowed “humanitarian considerations [to play]
second fiddle to political issues.” It found them guilty of “not only
managerial ineptitude and highhanded conduct but also bad faith” in the
removal of the head of a U.N. humanitarian office in order to stifle
reports of political intimidation by Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF and to
prevent exposure of the Zimbabwe government’s lack of preparedness for a
cholera epidemic that eventually claimed thousands of lives. - The U.N. Development Program (the organization’s global
development agency) commissioned a report on its development efforts
that was leaked to Fox News earlier this year. Among its conclusions:
“Many of [UNDP’s] activities have only remote connections with poverty,
if at all” and “on the whole” UNDP “performs poorly in providing support
to its national partners to extract and utilize knowledge based on the
lessons that can be potentially learned from its interventions.”
Considering this record of embarrassment, ineffectiveness, and
mismanagement, is anyone surprised about recent revelations that U.N.
officials and delegates sometimes drink heavily during meetings?
The examples above arose in just the past few months. Far worse
examples have been exposed with depressing regularity over the years
(think the Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal). This list also leaves aside
long-standing issues such as bias against Israel in the U.N. Human
Rights Council, misconduct by U.N. peacekeepers, and reports that the
U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) supports
terrorism.
Western nations have long been frustrated over duplication,
fragmentation, and low return on investment among U.N. funds, programs,
and agencies (a May 2012 study by economists William Easterly and
Claudia Williamson assessing best and worst practices among aid agencies
ranked U.N. agencies among the worst), but few countries have
persistently sought to address these problems. That may finally be
changing, thanks to budget constraints in donor countries. In recent
months, 17 donor nations, including the U.S., have met to coordinate
efforts to reshape the U.N. system to address corruption and make it
less fragmented and more transparent and cost-effective.
Individual nations have also begun to take action. Perhaps the best
example is the Multilateral Aid Review of 43 organizations, conducted by
the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. The
review found that nine multilateral aid agencies offered “poor value for
money,” including U.N. organizations such as UNESCO. DFID decided to
stop providing core funding to four organizations and put four others on
notice that funding may be stopped unless reforms are implemented.
Alarmed by these efforts, senior officials of over 20 U.N. bodies met
in January. They acknowledged that the “U.N. Common System has been
called into question, and its governance and mechanisms challenged.”
Unfortunately, the meeting was short on specific reforms. By far, the
most detailed discussion centered on tweaking procedures for future
meetings and developing “strong communication campaigns providing
government representatives and lawmakers in our Member States with tools
to justify to their constituents support of United Nations
organizations.” Specifically mentioned is using the U.N. Foundation to
assist their efforts, which may explain their recent campaigns to
protect U.N. funding in the U.S.
PR campaigns are not going to resolve the deep-seated problems within
the U.N. and its affiliated organizations. The member states,
particularly the U.S. which is the largest contributor to the U.N.
system, need to conduct a rigorous examination and evaluation of
individual U.N. agencies, funds, and programs to determine what aspects
of the U.N. are effective and deserve continued funding and, even more
importantly, which ones do not. The U.N.’s year so far doesn’t bode well
for how such a process might go.
— Brett D. Schaefer is the Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs at the Heritage Foundation.