Opinion | At 75, is the United Nations still relevant or necessary?

Name: UN’s food relief agency in urgent need for funds to keep coronavirus aid flights going
Uploaded: 2020-09-20T02:45:07.000Z
Duration: 2 min 35 s
Description: UN’s food relief agency in urgent need for funds to keep coronavirus aid flights going

Legitimate criticism and lingering questions surround the UN, even as it makes important progress in areas mostly unseen and vastly under-reported

Instead of using the UN as a scapegoat for political failures, criticism should be turned on to states that overpromise and underfund humanitarian operations

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A Unicef health worker administers a vaccination to a child during an anti-polio campaign at a health centre in Sanaa, Yemen, on November 27, 2018. The UN and its agencies continue to do indispensable work around the world despite its members and donors consistently overpromising and underfunding its operations. Photo: EPA

Mark S. Cogan

Published: 10:45am, 20 Sep 2020Updated: 2:30pm, 20 Sep 2020

On September 21, the United Nations will celebrate its 75th birthday. Founded in 1945 after 50 countries met in San Francisco to draw up the UN Charter, it was conceived as an international institution that would “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”.

Since then, it has evolved into an organisation of great size and complexity that confronts a wide array of challenges. However, legitimate criticism and lingering questions remain about its future. Is it still relevant? Is it still fit for purpose? Is it still necessary?

The answers are as complex as its bureaucracy. Looking at only the “organs” of the UN, major repairs are in order. The five permanent members of the Security Council dominate the ageing security body and complicate matters of international concern.

It famously failed Rwanda in 1994, refusing on multiple occasions to recognise that a genocide against the Tutsi minority was taking place and failed to alter the peacekeeping mission to protect innocent Rwandans. Today, the Security Council has failed in Syria, where 500,000 are dead, 5.5 million are refugees and more than 6.6 million are internally displaced.

Peacekeeping interventions are poorly implemented. When the UN took control of Cambodia in 1992, it did so with a US$1.6 billion budget to oversee a transitional government and conduct free and fair elections. However, it was not enough to ensure a stable democracy, and the 35-year authoritarian reign of Hun Sen is a reminder of that failure.

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UN’s food relief agency in urgent need for funds to keep coronavirus aid flights going

Peacekeeping missions remain under-resourced, famously displayed in Rwanda where 2,548 peacekeepers were reduced to a mere 270 to protect hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Peacekeepers today often lack proper technical support, capacity and other resources.