UNtold: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War

By Ian Williams and Krishna

Drawing on personal experience with the UN, this combination of informative text and whimsical cartoons describes how the organization is supposed to work, how it actually behaves, and why there is a difference. UNtold lets readers in on the quirks and mysteries of international diplomacy and global decision-making. Delightfully irreverent, the message is that this vital body really can represent "We the peoples of the world." The book has something to offer everyone, from high school and college students involved in model UNs to secretaries of state and senior diplomats.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Just World Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781682570845

Ian Williams

Ian Williams was foreign correspondent for Channel 4 News, based in Russia (1992–1995) and then Asia (1995–2006). He then joined NBC News as Asia Correspondent (2006–2015), when he was based in Bangkok and Beijing. As well as reporting from China over the last 25 years, he has also covered conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East and Ukraine. He won an Emmy and BAFTA awards for his discovery and reporting on the Serb detention camps during the war in Bosnia. He is currently a doctoral student in the War Studies department at King’s College, London, focusing on cyber issues.

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PREFACE

Whatever the shortcomings of the international system, never before in human history have so few people, as a proportion of world population, died from armed conflict. It may not make headlines, but the international system, with its rules and institutions, allows states to settle most of their disputes peacefully, most of the time. Rather than disbanding it, the international system, with the United Nations at its core, needs to be strengthened.

Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan

As 2017 began, the unanimous election of former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres as the United Nations’ new secretary-general brought new hope to many supporters of the world body. It was a good sign that the Russian envoy to the UN proudly announced the election, which had been supported by all the members of the UN Security Council. Even many of those who felt that the time was long past for a female secretary-general were happy that Guterres’s distinguished record public had already shown he was the best man for the job.

The euphoria could not last long. When Guterres took office on New Year’s Day 2017, Donald Trump had just recently been elected President of the United States. Trump’s previous statements on the UN had not been hostile—after all, the UN is good for Manhattan real estate! However, his foreign policy team combined the inexperience of his nominated candidate as UN representative, Nikki Haley, with outright reflexive hostility to the UN from many of his advisors.

The United Nations might be the worst possible way to organize the world—except for all the alternatives! The UN can be slow, unresponsive, and bureaucratic, and often shoots itself in the foot. When it gets something wrong, there are lots of people who want to say so immediately. But when world politicians get into fights and find themselves up a tree, it is very often a UN ladder that lets them climb down gracefully. The UN shows how indispensable it is—but everybody else takes the credit.

People sometimes speak of the UN as if it were a world government. Far from it! In fact, it is the most governed organization in the world, bossed around by 193 national governments. Sadly, those governments often drop their insoluble problems on the UN floor and leave them to fester for decades and more while refusing to give the UN the support it needs to solve them. The UN cannot really answer back when the governments who officially own it go on to criticize its inability to solve the problems they have caused.

It makes a great scapegoat. When a diplomat parks illegally in Manhattan, it’s the UN’s fault. Or, when governments refuse to send troops to implement UN resolutions, guess who gets the blame. The UN is also the bogeyman for isolationists and nationalists who want to carry on killing or looting, untrammeled by international law. Often those scofflaws exaggerate, or even invent, tales of corruption and waste in the UN, just to get it off their backs. It’s true that, as in any large organization, there is some corruption in the UN, but there is surprisingly little of it—not least because the organization has very little money for the size of its task.

Many of the UN’s critics oppose the whole idea that underlies it: the concept of a common global interest. One such critic, John Bolton, whom President George W. Bush nominated as US Permanent Representative to the UN in 2005, had earlier said, There’s no such thing as the United Nations. If the UN secretariat building in New York lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. (That did not stop his desperate fight to get Senate confirmation as US representative. But he failed, anyway.)

Mostly, the rest of us, the peoples of the world, like the idea of the UN looking out for us, rather than following the whims of individual governments or politicians. Every year, hundreds of thousands of visitors line up to visit the UN Building in New York, almost like pilgrims. They are moved by what the organization stands for as much as by what it does.

Those ideals move people and even influence governments. They allow the UN to harness support and get results, whether it is sending peacekeepers to end a war, medical coordination to stem an epidemic, or supplies and help to populations stricken by disasters, natural or man-made.

Yet because of those ideals, many supporters treat the UN as if it’s too sacred to criticize. Such piety often makes the UN seem boring, so it’s no wonder the UN bashers get a lot more public attention!

The best supporters of the UN combine their support for its principles with a healthy sense of realism and take comfort from the evidence that, bad as the state of world is, it could have been far worse! After all, without much fanfare, the UN and its agencies between them have started to create a genuinely cooperative world order.

For example, UN agencies such as the Universal Postal Union, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, the World Meteorological Organization, and the Intergovernmental Maritime Organization are responsible for allowing global communications on a scale that would be impossible without their coordination. We expect to pick up a telephone and talk to the other side of the world via satellites in space, or to stick a stamp on an envelope and have it delivered ten thousand miles away.

When a country belches pollution and greenhouse gases, it does so into everybody’s air, and it pollutes everybody’s seas. Toxic smog and radioactivity do not halt at border fences, so a series of UN Conventions have set international law on the use of space, Antarctica, and the oceans, and have started to deal with the effects—and causes—of climate change. The UN-sponsored Vienna Convention of 1985 that banned the use of CFCs actually saved the whole world’s ozone layer!

Plagues do not need passports or visas, and so organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, with its vaccination programs, have helped stop deadly diseases spreading.

UN conventions on refugees, land mines, human rights, and the rights of women, children, and indigenous peoples set standards by which governments know they will be judged. The International Criminal Court is slowly establishing that governments that commit crimes cannot hide behind their sovereignty.

Most people around the world today are delighted that we’ve missed World War III so far. UN-led disarmament initiatives such as the Nuclear Test Ban treaty, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or the ban on land mines might not all be complete successes, but they are much better than the unrestricted access to mega-lethal weaponry that existed beforehand. The UN has also done a lot to provide countries in conflict with ways to resolve them using methods other than war.

The UN has improved the world in more ways than we can recount in a short book like this.

We can all (and we will) point to the failures of the UN, but on the whole it has to be said that the UN is good for the world, indeed indispensable. But it could be much better!

We want this book to be fun and to be scrupulously honest. We want to explain not only how the UN should work, but also how it does work.

We like the idea of a world organization, and we have serious reasons to doubt that national governments—even, or especially, in Washington—really always know best. So that’s why we dedicate this book to the peoples of the world, whose United Nations it should really be.

SECTION 1:

Simple Facts about a Complicated Organization!

While simple questions and answers are appealing, the real world is not so simple, so we’ll have to expand.

WHEN?

On June 26, 1945, in San Francisco, California, representatives of fifty-one countries who had allied to fight Germany and Japan adopted the UN Charter. They already called themselves the United Nations, but now they were setting up the UN Organization. The document was so precious that when it was flown to Washington, it had its own parachute, unlike Alger Hiss, the American official who carried it.

The preamble to the UN Charter is a stirring document on par with the US Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta as a symbol of human aspiration. The lofty sentiments are not always honored, but the fact that the Charter exists, and that 193 countries have signed it, boosts all who struggle for a better life—often against the member governments who have signed it.

U Thant, the first non-European secretary general, said that the Charter is the first, most daring code of behavior addressed to the most powerful of all institutions of the planet—armed nations.

The UN Charter opens with this:

"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD, DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which peace and justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of the life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS to practice tolerance, and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.

HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS.

Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations, and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

The United States’s first African-American diplomat, Ralph Bunche, played a big role in negotiating the text of the Charter. He confided to his diary during the drafting, There is practically no inspiration out here—every nation is dead set on looking out for its own national self-interest. Nonetheless, he soon after wrote: The United Nations is our one great hope for a peaceful and free world.

The UN is, above all, an organization of governments, not people. Some of those governments are democratic, some aren’t, some are humanitarian and some viciously inhumane. Most of them resent the idea of their peoples bypassing them to speak to the rest of the world. Lord Caradon, the British Ambassador to the UN who engineered resolution 242 on Middle East peace after the 1967 War, commented, There is nothing wrong with the United Nations—except its governments.

WHY? 1945 AND ALL THAT

Originally, the victorious