The season of the General Assembly is like no other in the timetable of the United Nations. It provides reason for the UN to spread its plumage and parade its credentials as the world’s foremost diplomatic stage, the beating heart of multilateral diplomacy.
Russia’s hostilities in the Ukraine may now sit atop the global agenda so that the issue attracts much of the attention of the 77th Session of the General Assembly (which officially concludes today) though that does not mean that the assembly’s agenda stops there. The various Heads of Government from across the world journeyed to New York with their own separate agendas. There were, as well, other pressing global issues, multilateral crises like food insecurity and what the UN itself has described as the broader need to deepen global humanitarianism.
Underdeveloped and developing countries would hardly have missed the opportunity, the only one for most of them, to vent their spleens on just about the only meaningful stage where they have some chance of being heard. Their various complex and often overlapping crises include food insecurity, climate change and what some would say is a condition of declining humanitarianism in circumstances where that virtue desperately requires deepening.
Two weeks, most will probably say, is hardly sufficient time to cover such a weighty agenda. Others will say that the period at least offers opportunity for a collective excursion into issues of key multilateral concern, never mind the fact that those who know the UN well enough understand only too well that its General Assembly is a forum intended more for ventilation of issues than for meaningful decision-making.
That said, the UNGA gathering offers a uni-que opportunity for myriad bilaterals between Heads of Government and their respective delegations. These types of engagements may even end up being more substantively profitable to some country delegations making the trip to New York than their substantive participation in the UNGA itself.
There are those who would contend, however, arguably with considerable justification, that the UN, as the world’s acknowledged home for the prosecution of multilateral diplomacy, has lost its shine. That its worthiness to serve as an arbiter in relations among nations has become compromised by its own considerable shortcomings and that its track record for delinquency now challenges what had long been regarded as its right to speak for a better world agenda.
This, it should be stated, is by no means a challenge to the relevance of a UN and what remains its importance as a forum for multilateral diplomacy. It does, however, raise the issue as to whether it has not now become decidedly infeasible to initiate a serious physician heal thyself discourse centred around the dichotomy between how we have, over the years, come to see the UN and what it actually is.
Here, the central question has to do with whether or not there does not exist considerable and irrefutable evidence of a dichotomy between what the UN is and what it really ought to be. Has the UN, over the years, not, through its own transgressions, some of them provable, demonstrated that its worthiness to effectively execute the broadest range of its designated responsibilities, has become considerably compromised? Are we, even as global circumstances continue to make a compelling case for a strong and credible United Nations, witnessing a downgrading of the UN that arises out of serious questions about the worthiness of the institution, in its present state, as a suitable forum for seriously addressing the range of challenges – both bilateral and multilateral – confronting the international community?
This concern revolves around even more profound questions, some of which have to do with whether or not, the bureaucratic machinery of the UN, no less than its operating culture, has not been afflicted by a considerable erosion of its bona fides as a worthwhile referee/arbiter in relations between and among nations. Also, whether or not the UN itself is not due, at this juncture, for some comprehensive probe aimed at fixing (if indeed this is possible) its weaknesses.
Increasingly, questions have arisen (and valid ones) as to whether some of the institutions representing the UN and assigned to execute one or another of the various facets of its mandate, have not slipped into serious decline, so that the credentials of the global body as a paragon of virtue have had to endure, over time, a devastating erosion.
Has a point been reached where, with considerable justification, the UN now ought to be confronted with a vigorous physician-heal-thyself refrain?
Truth be told, it has become increasingly difficult for the UN to continue to brandish its globally trumpeted credentials as a paragon of virtue in circumstances where it must continually fend off (for example) accusations of its aid workers’ sexual exploitation of children in Haiti; the sexual abuse of Sudanese women who remain vulnerable even as they seek shelter in UN-protected refugee camps and reported incidents at the its Headquarters in New York and elsewhere of the presence of sexual predators at influential levels who – as we say in Guyana – pursue a thriving trade in pulling rank to extract sexual favours from employees.
Not too many months have gone by since the upper echelons of the UN were frantically fending off a BBC-exposed scandal surrounding charges of sexual harassment against women employed at the UN in New York. The decidedly distasteful details of what is best described as a scandal, included allegations of diligent legwork at the top to cover up the worst excesses of well-placed functionaries in the UN system.
If few governments still dwell on the moral cloud that has settled over the United Nations arising out of the disturbing anomalies that continue to hover over aspects of its operating culture, none have persistently made an issue of this. Perhaps the fear that interference may well throw up developments which, from their perspective, may do more harm than good. They may well feel that the institution should simply be allowed to fester in its own shortcomings rather than help it to function in a manner that is in keeping with the interests of the various pockets of the global community that most depend on the UN to better their lives. Indifference to debilitating weaknesses, has been, it seems, the chosen option. That is no way for a United Nations to function.
If the UN is to be continued to be relied upon by both member states and the international community to serve as a moral rudder and a credible institution for the maintenance of a convivial environment, it follows that its own bona fides must allow, manifestly, for the body to be afforded that latitude. If there exists, at this time, nothing to suggest that the international community, as a collective is on the verge of breaking ranks with the UN on account of the diminishing credibility of its bona fides then there is every likelihood that while it may yet continue to exist, it could slip into a zone where it might become largely a white elephant keeping a façade of relations among nations intact in the most cosmetic and gratuitous of ways.
