Bringing countries under UN rule

[Beeth]

I know, I know, the UN is evil bourgeois, but given the circumstances would it be better for certain countries to come under UN rule? Consider a nation where local govts. oppress just about everyone, brutally and without accountability. I am not talking capitalism vs communism here but basic human rights being denied to a large section of the population.

In such a context, fighting locally (whether you're communist or not) won't work because you'll outnumbered and outgunned. So seeking external help is essential, and since nations have an agenda wouldn't the UN (being a neutral international body) be of some help?

p.s.
I am not defending the UN, but it is more like making the best out of the worst situation.

[Orange Juche]

Under UN rule? So does that mean, in said country, if you committed a felony the government would send you a harshly worded letter?

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

I know, I know, the UN is evil bourgeois, but given the circumstances would it be better for certain countries to come under UN rule? Consider a nation where local govts. oppress just about everyone, brutally and without accountability. I am not talking capitalism vs communism here but basic human rights being denied to a large section of the population.

In such a context, fighting locally (whether you're communist or not) won't work because you'll outnumbered and outgunned. So seeking external help is essential, and since nations have an agenda wouldn't the UN (being a neutral international body) be of some help?

p.s.
I am not defending the UN, but it is more like making the best out of the worst situation.

The UN cannot "rule" as it is no State organ. It is a platform for States to direct global politics. States, and especially the United States of America, control the UN, they have the guns, the UN does not.

[LOLseph Stalin]

Countries being under control of the UN would essentially mean being under the control of the US, considering they basically run the show, having veto power and all that. The US is actually one of the huge reasons Palestine took so long to get recognized in there.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Well if the UN actually did something you might have a point. Bit of a shame that history proves you wrong, the UN have been nothing but cowaeds most notably in the Srebrenica massacre.

[Mackenzie_Blanc]

The U.N.? Nothing but stewards of the west; who institute "democracy", which essentially means putting in a US-Backed dictator who represses socialist and leftist dissidents, and whose sanctions on Iraq and Iran caused the death of millions of children. The U.N. hasn't done jack! :thumbdown:

[Le Socialiste]

Why don't you ask the Haitian people? The U.N.'s been occupying their country since 2004:


After the 2004 coup, the U.S., France and Canada pushed the UN to occupy Haiti on the anniversary of its emancipation in 1804. The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has bolstered neoliberalism, defended the right-wing political governments that replaced Aristide, repressed popular opposition, and sustained the rule of the country's kleptocratic ruling class.

...

The MINUSTAH occupation, which was dramatically enlarged after the quake, claims to provide peace, security and space to enable the reconstruction of the country. It has in fact aided and abetted the Haitian state's repression of the popular movements for reform in the city and countryside. Even worse, the UN brought the plague of cholera to the country in 2010.

Haiti had not suffered an outbreak of the disease in over 100 years. When cholera suddenly spread throughout the country, Haitians located its origin in a UN base near Mirebalais staffed by Nepali soldiers. They observed their latrines leaking waste into a tributary that flowed into the Artibonite River that then transmitted it to the capital and from there around the country.

...

Claiming Haiti has made "considerable strides," the UN Security Council voted to extend the occupation for yet another year. While they will reduce some of the international military and police forces, they want to make sure they keep a lid on any resurgence of a popular movement for reform and prevent an exodus of refugees from the disaster-ridden country.

Former U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson made these intentions absolutely clear in a cable from 2008 exposed by WikiLeaks. She declared, "a premature departure of MINUSTAH would leave the [Haitian] government...vulnerable to...resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces--reversing gains of the last two years."

No, it would not benefit certain countries to be brought under U.N. control. Haiti is just one of many examples as to why this is so.

http://socialistworker.org/2012/11/08/haitis-misery-before-sandy

[Red Commissar]

The UN hasn't really been the best of solutions for humanitarian causes. Yeah, a leader might be abusive but the UN is likely not going to solve it, since it's not as easy as simply removing the leader and expecting everything to go hunky dory from there. The UN won't be immune from that just because they are seen to be neutral.

There's only been a few cases in the past where the UN has directly been involved in governing something. There's the case of the missions like Le Socialiste mentioned above in Haiti, but there've also been missions all over the world with similar intentions like in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast (which was particularly criticized), and of course the Rwanda mission.

For direct control by the UN, we only have two real examples, and in each it was a temporary measure for some transfer of power or system. These were the UN mission in Cambodia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Transitional_Authority_in_Cambodia) (92-93) which oversaw the transition from a one-party state to a multi-party one under the monarchy, and in East Timor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Transitional_Administration_in_East _Timor) which saw it get independent from Indonesia. There was another mission in a contested area between Serbia and Croatia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Transitional_Administration_for_Eas tern_Slavonia,_Baranja_and_Western_Sirmium) during the war.

On a side note: It's interesting how the UN factors into conspiracy theories regarding the one world government, except in the sense that the UN somehow manages to subvert and conquer the US. There's a lot more to the opposite that large nations like the US exert a lot of influence onto the UN, so the idea that somehow the UN is subverting the US is laughable.

[kashkin]

One small note is that UN forces have quite regularly been accused to bringing the sex trade/trafficking with them wherever they go.

[Red Commissar]

One small note is that UN forces have quite regularly been accused to bringing the sex trade/trafficking with them wherever they go.

And for those of you who want to read up more on that...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/world/08nations.html

Peacekeepers’ Sex Scandals Linger, On Screen and Off
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

UNITED NATIONS — On screen, two senior United Nations officials in Bosnia are arguing about firing Kathy Bolkovac, an American police officer battling to stop peacekeepers from both trafficking in young women and frequenting the brothels where they became indentured prostitutes.

“It is a point of honor for me that the U.N. is not remembered for raping the very people we must protect,” says Madeleine Rees, a spirited human rights advocate played by Vanessa Redgrave.

“Those girls are whores of war,” growls the male bureaucrat heading the United Nations mission. “It happens; I will not dictate for morality.”

Ms. Rees, the director of the human rights office in Sarajevo from 1998 to 2006, said that dispute in the movie “The Whistleblower,” recently released in the United States, was lifted almost verbatim from a running argument she had around 2001.

A decade later, a string of sex scandals from Bosnia to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Haiti involving peacekeeping missions has forced the United Nations to change the way it handles accusations of trafficking, rape and related crimes. But the issue still bedevils the institution — a point underscored by the skirmishing among senior United Nations officials over whether to embrace the movie or try to ignore it.

The issue has certainly not gone away. This week, hundreds of Haitians protested in support of an 18-year-old who said he was sexually assaulted by peacekeepers from Uruguay on a United Nations base, eliciting a furious rebuke from Haiti’s president and an apology from Uruguay.

The United Nations has focused serious attention on addressing sexual crimes among the more than 120,000 personnel it has deployed in 16 peacekeeping missions globally, including widespread training. But the question that diplomats, advocates and even some United Nations officials ask is why the efforts still lag in terms of investigating accusations and, most important, making sure those who send troops and contractors abroad hold them accountable.

Human rights experts and some member states fault the United Nations for leaving too much of the job of enforcing its “zero tolerance” policy announced in 2003 to the countries contributing troops. Individual cases and any disciplinary action are rarely made public.

“They never come up with actual facts; they never come up with actual cases,” Ms. Bolkovac said.

She won a wrongful dismissal case in 2003 against a subsidiary of Virginia-based DynCorp International, which was contracted by the State Department to provide police officers for the United Nations peacekeeping force in Bosnia. But Ms. Bolkovac says she has never been hired by another peacekeeping mission. (DynCorp issued a statement noting that “The Whistleblower” was a work of fiction and that new owners had since enacted their own zero tolerance policy.)

United Nations officials brandish the statistics published on the organization’s peacekeeping Web site as evidence of transparency. The numbers, whose source is somewhat vague, indicate that cases dropped from 108 substantiated accusations of sexual exploitation and abuse in 2007 to 85 in 2008, then to 63 in 2009, 33 last year and just 5 so far in 2011.

But more than 200 such accusations remain unresolved, and the United Nations annual report on such crimes for 2010 noted that sexual activity with minors and nonconsensual sex represented more than half of reported accusations, little changed since 2008. Cases have come to light where peacekeepers paid children $1 or with candy to make a rape seem like prostitution.

Finally, efforts to gather information from troop contributors about legal or disciplinary action are often ignored. The United Nations got answers roughly a quarter of the time, or 88 responses from 333 queries sent, since 2007, according to its figures.

Senior officials defend the numbers as improving, and argue that publicly shaming member states would make finding peacekeeping troops more difficult. “Going into a blame and shame approach is counterproductive because this requires a mind-set change,” said Susanna Malcorra, head of the logistics end of peacekeeping.

Activists and some diplomats condemn the United Nations as timid, with internal policing particularly weak under Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Mr. Ban waged an extended feud over hiring with the head of internal oversight before she left in 2010, leaving dozens of investigator jobs empty. Senior officials admit that its investigators have the mandate to do more to track sexual abuse cases.

The United Nations pays $1,024 a month per soldier, making peacekeeping a profitable venture for many poorer nations. In June, member states voted themselves a bonus of roughly $100 per soldier per month, costing $85 million, for the coming year. The United Nations lost an opportunity by not hinging the bonuses on better cooperation, advocates contend.

“Member states are not reliable enough to do a good job on their own, especially in the early stages of a military investigation,” said Prince Zeid Raad Zeid al-Hussein, the Jordanian ambassador and the author of a damning study of sexual exploitation in peacekeeping in 2005 as special adviser on the issue under the previous secretary general. Mr. Ban never filled the post.

Member states rejected the study’s recommendations to establish a coordinated, nimble investigation and discipline process. Soldiers serving the United Nations are subject to their own countries’ military justice. The only wrist slap often faced by contractors is being sent home, because they enjoy immunity as United Nations employees.

Soldiers linked to crimes are often repatriated. In April, 16 peacekeepers from Benin were sent home from Ivory Coast — more than a year after Save the Children U.K. found that the soldiers traded food for sex with poor, underage girls. More than 100 troops from Sri Lanka were sent home from Haiti in 2007 because of widespread accusations of sex with minors.

In many cases, however, the final outcome remains a mystery.

“The U.N. is not even a player in the investigation, doesn’t know the evidence and has no way to follow up with the way the military decides to deal with this issue,” Prince Zeid said. “We, the member states, have by and large failed to do what I had hoped we would do.”

The State Department’s 2010 report on human trafficking criticized the United Nations, saying, “No comprehensive information is available on the number of cases of disciplinary action.”

A leaked memo from the United Nations human rights office in New York reflected the divisions over openness. In a lengthy discussion about how to address “The Whistleblower,” Kiyotaka Akasaka, the head of public information, and Patricia O’Brien, the top lawyer, argued for playing down the movie and certainly not screening it at the United Nations headquarters, the memo said.

But the executive director of the newly created agency U.N. Women, Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile, argued for a more open approach, it said, along with several others.

Mr. Ban wrote to the film’s director, Larysa Kondracki, saying he had watched the movie with his senior advisers and was “pained” by it. “Your film points to one area where our work left questions behind,” he said.

A public screening will be held at the United Nations soon, he told her.

(copy pasted it because NYT is paywalled)

http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2006/08/2008410145024767535.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/02/15/the-rules-of-imperial-/

[Crabbensmasher]

Alright, I was reading something awhile ago about the UN peacekeeping forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It got me thinking a bit, if you have a country as poor as the DRC, is it beneficial to have a heavy foreign troop presence providing security? I don't know the whole background there, but the DRC has some very extensive problems with rebels, especially in the east, and they just can't afford to maintain a well equipped army. Wouldn't it be better to have the government be able to focus primarily on things like healthcare, education and sanitation? The idea itself seems very pragmatic.

But you can also say that it's almost bridging on imperialist, what the UN is doing. They're providing an essential amount of security to the DRC, something which it becomes dependent on. If you don't have your own troops to represent your people, then are you even your own country? It raises a lot of questions about freedom and ethics. The whole idea of a foreign force operating in your country, that is.