Written by: Beck

Wretchard of the Belmont Club writes a novella addressing institutional blindness and policy impotence at the United Nations & how its reflexive anti-Americanism isn't helping things.

He starts by illustrating how the pathetic showing of UN peace keepers in the Congo (MONUC) reflects the rot endemic throughout the UN institution. His focus isn't even the recent scandals regarding sexual assault in the Congo (though he does mention it); rather, Wretchard highlights in case after case how the MONUC fails to protect civilians (even when its mandate would allow for direct action), how local armed bands treat peace keepers with overt scorn, and how the local population despise MONUC for helping nothing and harming much. Quoting from The Economist:

In May this year, they sat back as an unsavoury rebel chief seized control of Bukavu, Congo's fourth city, despite the presence of a large and well-armed MONUC garrison on the outskirts of town. The blue helmets could easily have scattered the rebels, but the only shots they fired in anger that week were at civilians demonstrating against their inaction. Three of the protesters died. ...

Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the UN's unpopularity. Some Congolese shake their fists or throw clumps of mud at passing UN patrols. Three months ago, militiamen burned 17 people to death while a detachment of MONUC troops 200 metres away, whose mandate authorised them to use force to prevent such massacres, did nothing. "Is MONUC here to do anything apart from count the bodies?" asked a Congolese witness.

After mocking the recommendations for UN reform put forward by the International Crisis Group, Wretchard goes on to conclude:

The key problem facing the United Nations is lack of accountability not to its constituent institutions, though it lacks that, but to the individual inhabitants of the world. Its inefficiency, corruption and fantasy policies are the result and not the cause of its problems. Nowhere is that failure more evident on a macro scale than in Kofi Annan himself and his management of the Oil-For-Food Programme. That difference shows up at all levels, even in the micro scale.