It wouldn't be the first time. If U.N. personnel have, as alleged, been molesting children in southern Sudan, they will be following in a long tradition of abuse. Around the world, U.N. officials have run smuggling and prostitution rings, stolen and sold supplies, and traded food for sex. Sometimes, the racket becomes institutionalized, as when U.N. contractors collaborated with Ba'athists on the oil-for-food boondoggle. More often, the organization is greedy and self-serving, but stops short of outright corruption. We learnt this week, for example, that the U.N. has voted £2.5 million to refurbish the secretary-general's residence in New York (Ban Ki-moon and his wife are being put up in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria in the meantime).
The reason that the U.N. so often behaves badly is, paradoxically, because so many people wish it well. Because the organization embodies the loftiest of ideals -- peace among nations -- it tends to receive the automatic benefit of the doubt. We are so fond of the theoretical U.N. that we rarely drag our gaze down to the actual one. The U.N. has therefore fallen out of the habit of having to explain itself and, in consequence, become flabby, immobilist and often sleazy.
If that criticism sounds too harsh, consider its record since the end of the Cold War – the period in which it might have been expected to come into its own. In Bosnia, it was worse than useless. Uselessness would have meant doing nothing. Instead, the U.N. imposed an arms embargo that favoured one side over the other, herded the losers into notionally protected areas, disarmed them and then handed them over for execution. In Rwanda, when the U.N. commander on the ground informed his superiors that a mass slaughter was planned, and that he intended to forestall it by seizing the weapons caches, he was told to do no such thing...
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