I Love the U.N., but It Is Failing
I HAVE worked for the United Nations
for most of the last three decades. I was a human rights officer in
Haiti in the 1990s and served in the former Yugoslavia during the
Srebrenica genocide. I helped lead the response to the Indian Ocean
tsunami and the Haitian earthquake, planned the mission to eliminate
Syrian chemical weapons, and most recently led the Ebola mission in West Africa. I care deeply for the principles the United Nations is designed to uphold.
And that’s why I have decided to leave.
The
world faces a range of terrifying crises, from the threat of climate
change to terrorist breeding grounds in places like Syria, Iraq and
Somalia. The United Nations is uniquely placed to meet these challenges,
and it is doing invaluable work, like protecting civilians and
delivering humanitarian aid in South Sudan and elsewhere. But in terms
of its overall mission, thanks to colossal mismanagement, the United
Nations is failing.
Six
years ago, I became an assistant secretary general, posted to the
headquarters in New York. I was no stranger to red tape, but I was
unprepared for the blur of Orwellian admonitions and Carrollian logic
that govern the place. If you locked a team of evil geniuses in a
laboratory, they could not design a bureaucracy so maddeningly complex,
requiring so much effort but in the end incapable of delivering the
intended result. The system is a black hole into which disappear
countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again.
The
first major problem is a sclerotic personnel system. The United Nations
needs to be able to attract and quickly deploy the world’s best talent.
And yet, it takes on average 213 days to recruit someone. In January,
to the horror of many, the Department of Management imposed a new
recruitment system that is likely to increase the delay to over a year.
Too
often, the only way to speed things up is to break the rules. That’s
what I did in Accra when I hired an anthropologist as an independent
contractor. She turned out to be worth her weight in gold. Unsafe burial
practices were responsible for about half of new Ebola cases in some
areas. We had to understand these traditions before we could persuade
people to change them. As far as I know, no United Nations mission had
ever had an anthropologist on staff before; shortly after I left the
mission, she was let go.
The
heads of billion-dollar peace operations, with enormous
responsibilities for ending wars, are not able to hire their immediate
staff, or to reassign non-performers away from critical roles. It is a
sign of how perversely twisted the bureaucracy is that personnel
decisions are considered more dangerous than the responsibility to lead a
mission on which the fate of a country depends.
One
result of this dysfunction is minimal accountability. There is today a
chief of staff in a large peacekeeping mission who is manifestly
incompetent. Many have tried to get rid of him, but short of a serious
crime, it is virtually impossible to fire someone in the United Nations.
In the past six years, I am not aware of a single international field
staff member’s being fired, or even sanctioned, for poor performance.
The
second serious problem is that too many decisions are driven by
political expediency instead of by the values of the United Nations or
the facts on the ground.
Look
at Haiti: There has been no armed conflict for more than a decade, and
yet a United Nations force of more than 4,500 remains. Meanwhile, we are
failing at what should be our most important task: assisting in the
creation of stable, democratic institutions. Elections have been
postponed amid allegations of fraud, and the interim prime minister has
said that “the country is facing serious social and economic
difficulties.” The military deployment makes no contribution at all to
solving these problems.
Our
most grievous blunder is in Mali. In early 2013, the United Nations
decided to send 10,000 soldiers and police officers to Mali in response
to a terrorist takeover of parts of the north. Inexplicably, we sent a
force that was unprepared for counterterrorism and explicitly told not
to engage in it. More than 80 percent of the force’s resources are spent
on logistics and self-protection. Already 56 people in the United
Nations contingent have been killed, and more are certain to die. The
United Nations in Mali is day by day marching deeper into its first
quagmire.
BUT
the thing that has upset me most is what the United Nations has done in
the Central African Republic.When we took over peacekeeping
responsibilities from the African Union there in 2014, we had the choice
of which troops to accept. Without appropriate debate, and for cynical
political reasons, a decision was made to include soldiers from the
Democratic Republic of Congo and from the Republic of Congo, despite
reports of serious human rights violations by these soldiers. Since
then, troops from these countries have engaged in a persistent pattern
of rape and abuse of the people — often young girls — the United Nations was sent there to protect.
Last
year, peacekeepers from the Republic of Congo arrested a group of
civilians, with no legal basis whatsoever, and beat them so badly that
one died in custody and the other shortly after in a hospital. In
response there was hardly a murmur, and certainly no outrage, from the
responsible officials in New York.
As
the abuse cases piled up, impassioned pleas were made to send the
troops home. These were ignored, and more cases of child rape came to
light. Last month, we finally kicked out the Democratic Republic of
Congo soldiers, but the ones from the Republic of Congo remain.
In
1988, my first job with the United Nations was as a human rights
officer in Cambodian refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border,
investigating rapes and murders of the poor and helpless. Never could I
have imagined that I would one day have to deal with members of my own
organization committing the same crimes or, worse, senior officials
tolerating them for reasons of cynical expediency.
I
am hardly the first to warn that the United Nations bureaucracy is
getting in the way of its peacekeeping efforts. But too often, these
criticisms come from people who think the United Nations is doomed to
fail. I come at it from a different angle: I believe that for the
world’s sake we must make the United Nations succeed.
In
the run-up to the election of a new secretary general this year, it is
essential that governments, and especially the permanent members of the
Security Council, think carefully about what they want out of the United
Nations. The organization is a Remington typewriter in a smartphone
world. If it is going to advance the causes of peace, human rights,
development and the climate, it needs a leader genuinely committed to
reform.
The
bureaucracy needs to work for the missions; not the other way around.
The starting point should be the overhaul of our personnel system. We
need an outside panel to examine the system and recommend changes.
Second, all administrative expenses should be capped at a fixed
percentage of operations costs. Third, decisions on budget allocations
should be removed from the Department of Management and placed in the
hands of an independent controller reporting to the secretary general.
Finally, we need rigorous performance audits of all parts of
headquarters operations.
Secretary
General Ban Ki-moon is a man of great integrity, and the United Nations
is filled with smart, brave and selfless people. Unfortunately, far too
many others lack the moral aptitude and professional abilities to
serve. We need a United Nations led by people for whom “doing the right
thing” is normal and expected.
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