The Justin Trudeau-led Liberal government has made it clear that re-engaging with the United Nations, and returning to a multi-lateral approach more generally, will be a key aspect of its foreign policy. Canadians were reminded of this last week, when the Prime Minister, on a visit to the UN building in New York City, announced that Canada would make a bid for a seat on the UN Security Council for a two-year term, beginning in 2021.
“We are determined to help the UN make even greater strides in support of its goals for all humanity,” the Prime Minister said during his visit. “My friends, it’s time. It’s time for Canada to step up once again.”
Canada’s back, as it were. No surprise here. Ask any even moderately attuned political observer what a Liberal government is likely to do, and spend a lot of time thinking about and working with the United Nations would probably make their top-10 lists. Just days after the Prime Minister made his visit and his pledge, however, a senior UN official took to the opinion pages of The New York Times to tear into the organization he’s spent his life serving … and that Canada is about “step up” to once again.
The official is Anthony Banbury. Up until recent weeks, he was an assistant UN secretary general. In his oped, Banbury lays out the many failings of the United Nations. He loves the organization, he says, and supports its ideals. He’s proud of a lot of the work it has done, and some of the work it continues to do. But as to the institution itself, Banbury says, “in terms of its overall mission, thanks to colossal mismanagement, the United Nations is failing.”
A senior official has slammed the United Nations for its disgraceful conduct and incompetence, just as Canada recommits itself to playing a role
Strong stuff from a 30-year UN veteran. Banbury spends the rest of his oped proving his point. “If you locked a team of evil geniuses in a laboratory,” he writes, “they could not design a bureaucracy so maddeningly complex, requiring so much effort but in the end incapable of delivering the intended result.” It takes, for instance, seven months to process a new employee through the UN personnel system, and Banbury fears recent changes could push that wait time to over a year. Mission commanders, tasked with leading billion-dollar forces of thousands of personnel into the world’s hot spots, don’t even have the authority to select their own command staff or shuffle dead weight out of key positions. The missions themselves often have no coherent strategy and tend to just stretch on forever in a form of bureaucratic purgatory — they have too much institutional prestige invested in them to cancel, but no clear metric of when success can be declared and the mission wrapped up. In many cases, the missions are so badly realized that they are only capable of supplying their own forces and defending their own bases.
But Banbury saves his most damning criticism for the stories that we’ve been hearing of late about UN peacekeeping forces essentially displacing one brutal occupying force only to become one itself. Writing of the UN’s mission in the Central African Republic, Banbury writes, “(The UN peacekeepers) 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 (…) 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.”
Summing it up succinctly, Banbury says of the UN’s structure: “The system is a black hole into which disappear countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again.”
Yikes. A damning indictment, especially, again, considering the source. Of course the UN means well, and yes, it does some good work delivering food and aid and providing long-term support to struggling nations. But when it comes to life and death situations, whether wars or the Ebola epidemic (Banbury has some stories about mismanagement on that front, too), the UN behaves exactly like you’d expect an organization designed by and for diplomats and bureaucrats to work. Process is celebrated, communiques counted as progress, and if the humanitarian disaster in question grinds on as before, that’s OK, so long as all the international niceties are observed. Who needs results when you can have non-binding resolutions?
It’s great that Banbury is now seeing the UN for what it is, but let’s at least acknowledge that he’s a bit late to the party. The UN has value as a place to foster dialogue and to do important but non-urgent development work. It’s a terrible place to actually seek rapid action on global issues, and has been designed in a way that makes reform, even the modest ones Banbury proposes, almost impossible. How can an institution that can barely hire staff inside 12 months give itself the top-to-bottom overhaul that even a career-type like Banbury says it needs?
It won’t. The UN should be blown up and started from scratch, but that’ll never happen. So it’ll grind on as is forever, probably, while millions of people the world over die and starve waiting for help from an institution that’s incapable of providing it. If the Prime Minister hopes to use a Canadian Security Council seat to improve this disaster, it may be worth the effort. But if he simply hopes to get Canada back inside the organization without any changes, as a symbol of Canada’s return to old glories, that’s a worrying sign of what our new/old foreign policy will look like.
