These are among the more trying times that the United Nations has had to face in its recent history. Arguably, this is so, less on account of the demands that attend its considerable clutch of multi-faceted responsibilities and more as a result of questions that continue to arise as to whether its present operating culture is sufficiently responsive to the mission that had been set it by member states when it was established more than eighty years ago. Indeed, when the high ideals that served to frame the perceived mission of the UN are taken account of, one might even be tempted, given the organization’s various excursions into acts of delinquency, to accuse the organization intended to be a beacon to guide relations among states in the post-war period, of having sometimes gone rogue.
That may well be, from the perspective of the UN’s admirers, something of an exaggeration, though when account is taken of occurrences like UN’s Peacekeepers operating a child prostitution ring in Haiti, the ‘forced’ 2005 resignation from the position of UN High Commissioner for Refugees by Ruud Lubbers who had previously served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands, over allegations of sexual impropriety and the more recent revelations of what, reportedly, has been occurrences of sexual harassment by male seniors, of females in the employ of the UN, including inside its New York Headquarters and the existence of an attendant official embargo on the affected females ‘going public’ on their travails, the question surely arises as to whether the UN itself ought not, now, to be pulled in for fitness. Surely, even the UN itself cannot deny that such a seemingly uproarious environment inside its operating machinery constitutes a considerable and ill-afforded distraction from its substantive agenda.
Of late, the UN has had to turn its attention to a recent BBC documentary which, reportedly “gives first-hand accounts of what happens to staff when they report allegations of wrongdoing.” The Report benefits from submissions by UN staffers who, we are told, would have engaged the BBC at the risk of serious institutional sanction. In this instance, frustration over the absence of remedial mechanisms inside the UN itself appears to have trumped fear of official reprisals. Indeed, if the BBC probe appeared to be very much a ‘field day’ for a venting of long pent up sentiments on issues that included corruption, management turning a blind eye on wrongdoings and allegations of seemingly institutionalized sexual abuse within the UN then that may well have been a reflection of the acute gravity of the condition of emergency which the UN operating machinery faces.
Significantly, staff members who spoke to the BBC reportedly related instances in which some of their colleagues had lost their jobs after having spoken out against what they saw as worrying institutional anomalies in the UN’s behavioural culture. If indeed, the reports of attempting to stifle employees’ legitimate protestations are true then such practices, surely, amount to a shocking indictment of an international organization whose operating ethos is grounded in fundamental freedoms including freedom of speech.
The UN’s ability to effectively execute the mandate afforded it by its members, depends, to an overwhelming extent, on global perceptions of its moral probity. As things stand the global image of the UN is more than a little out of sync with what we understand to be the nature of its mission. This raises the question as to whether the UN, at this time, is not the victim of a huge deficit in its moral authority, a circumstance that diminishes its capacity to adequately fulfill the requirements of its agenda. If that is so then it may well be time for a forensic overhaul of the UN’s operating machinery.
