The problems that the UN faces today it has faced before.

From a speech given to Action for UN Renewal

 in the House of Commons Monday September 13, 2004

 by Linda Melvern.

Thank you to Act-UN for allowing me to share some of my work on the United Nations.

I would like to begin by paying tribute to all those people who work for the organisation in the field and who, as we sit here in comfort, are doing what they can to ease the suffering of the world’s peoples. These UN employees are often unsung and too often unsupported in what they are trying to do.

I think particularly tonight of UN peacekeepers working in missions that are hopelessly ill-equipped and understaffed – of those soldiers in the DRC who are in the midst of violence which the world ignores. And while Iraq takes your own time and attention many thousands continue to die in Darfur, in Sudan. This tragedy, which has been classified genocide, receives intermittent press coverage.

I have been investigating UN affairs for nearly 16 years. My 1995 book on the UN, The Ultimate Crime was the result of eight years research and with much of that time spent at the Secretariat building in New York. I conducted dozens of interviews and months were spent in the UN archives, a remarkable and precious resource for historians who want to study the history of what must be humankind’s most difficult and most extraordinary experiment – international cooperation.

When it comes to the United Nations we can be certain of one thing – that what is past is certainly prologue. The problems that the UN faces today it has faced before.

“It remains surprising to me how often the press has suppressed, ignored or distorted facts about the UN, particularly when discussing what the UN could and could not do” – this phrase is not from my UN book but from a speech by U Thant in 1961. U Thant was the UN’s third Secretary General. He was subjected to a barrage of criticism from Washington and most notably from President Lyndon Johnson – “will someone get rid of that little yellow bastard at the UN”, Johnson once said. U Thant’s outspoken views about the Vietnam war outraged the Johnson administration. In a press conference U Thant had told correspondents that if the American people knew the true facts of the war in Vietnam they would agree that further bloodshed was unnecessary.

We need to be aware of UN history before any more reform suggestions are tabled. We need to remember that there have been more reform proposals for the UN than for any other organisation in history: suggestions, commissions, eminent persons groups discussing reform of the UN for almost as long as the UN has been in existence – the list is endless; millions of dollars spent and yet no real and meaningful reform has ever taken place to renew and enable the initial faith shown in its purpose.

Indeed, the UN has never become the organisation that its founders intended it to be. For instance, under the UN Charter the UN member governments are bound not to seek influence within the Secretariat, a rule that is so often ignored. From the beginning the “big five” veto powers carved up the top jobs for themselves. The “middle powers” had been outmanoeuvred at the founding conference in San Francisco. Their campaign against the great power veto had begun before the UN even existed in a much praised effort by Australia. Australia wanted the General Assembly to be able to recommend issues of peace and security to the Security Council and was supported by Canada and New Zealand. But the campaign came to nothing when it was made clear that without veto power the US would not participate.

There were early and ambitions plans for the UN -- some of the scientists on the Manhattan project wanted the atomic bomb placed under UN authority, that it should only be used with UN authority. They wanted an international agency to control the weapons to avoid a weapons race.

The first resolution of the General Assembly was to create a UN atomic energy commission – under the direction of the SC - to submit plans for eliminating atomic weapons and setting up safeguards. At the first meeting of the commission on June 14, 1946, the US submitted a plan providing for its own monopoly over ownership and production

Tonight though I want to concentrate on the role of the US and the UK.

The hostility towards the UN, expressed at the recent republican convention in New York was truly shocking. There were jeers each time the name – United Nations – was mentioned. This is nothing new. In Reagan’s America there was a concerted effort by a right-wing think tank – the Heritage Foundation – to close the UN which was described as an anti-west, anti-American lynch mob. This anti UN campaign was organised and financed by neo-isolationists.

Millions of dollars were spent on an anti-UN campaign during which favoured journalists were wined and dined to write anti-UN stories. One result was the withdrawal of the UK and the US from Unesco. Another was the consistent withholding by the US Congress of the money it owed the UN – a treaty obligation under the UN Charter. So huge did the debt to the UN by the US become that the then Peruvian Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, made plans in 1988 to cancel the annual meeting of the General Assembly. For years the UN has been in crisis management with dozens of officials juggling funds, borrowing money from agencies in order to pay the UN salary bill.

In the US, almost from the beginning there was hostility towards the UN. Two years after it was founded the UN’s stock in the US was so low that the then Secretary General warned that the organisation was going the same way as the League of Nations. By then, with the onset of the Cold War, in the US Congress internationalism was being equated with communism. John Ennals who helped to set up the World Federation of UN Associations was tailed by the CIA in 1947. The government of Clement Attlee was less than enthusiastic about the organisation and ordered a secret enquiry to find out if the UN’s expenses could be reduced.

Let’s look at the work of an American economist, David Weintraub, a man who had stood at the heart of Roosevelt’s New Deal and who subsequently went to work for the UN. Weintraub was responsible for a series of UN reports on world economic conditions. In the early fifties several states – India and Indonesia among them -- were lobbying for a programme for the world’s poor paid for through compulsory contributions charged on the industrialised states. At the time the US national income was half the world's. Along with many others who worked for the UN who were radical and idealistic he was named a communist and fired from the UN.

Sir Brian Urquhart once told me that he thought the UN Secretariat never really recovered from the onslaught of Mcarthyism during these years. When Dag Hammarskjold became the Secretary General he was horrified at the magnitude of his task. But he went to gain a world-wide reputation – a secular pope, upholding UN values and playing an increasing role as world statesman.

Secretly the British were against him. He was too independent and a search began to find a more pliable successor. Dag Hammarksjold had believed that the development of Africa was the greatest test of the UN and he wanted international aid to be given to Africa through the UN believing that this would stop the great powers using African countries as pawns in the Cold War. He had believed that the principles of justice had to be considered applicable in international matters -- the same standard was valid for the strong as well as for the weak.

UK government archives tell us that in London the news department of the FCO was given a brief that the British public be taught the “limitations” of the UN. “We must avoid using the UN as a forum to discuss maters of serious concern to us”.. an FCO minute records.

The UK’s policy towards the UN was increasingly dismissive. At a summit between the US and the UK in 1957 it was agreed that serious problems be kept away from the UN and that major international disputes should be dealt with between the US and the UK. Does this sound familiar ? I found an FCO minute, post Suez, that recorded: “far from being able to pull the levers which direct the UN, we do not always know how they are being pulled by others”.

Today UK government policy towards the UN remains a secret. This was no better explained than by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when asked how on earth the UK government had voted in the Security Council for Kurt Waldheim as UN Secretary General, a man who was accused of war crimes in the second world war:

“It has been the practice of successive governments not to reveal how they voted in secret ballots in the UN or why they voted as they did”.

When the time comes to replace Kofi Annan we will not be allowed to know the UK government candidate.

“We are perilously near to a new international anarchy” the Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar had warned in 1981. In his first annual report he blamed governments for failing to come to terms with the harsh reality in the developing world.

“We have a poverty of vast proportions…. a deprivation inexplicable in terms either of available resources or the ingenuity spent on armament and war”. He continued: “Institutions like this are not built in a day.. they require constant constructive work and fidelity to the principles on which they are based”. He spelled out his ambition – agreement among the five permanent members of the Security Council. This was his core belief. He was scorned by many who saw it as an impossible dream.

It was not. As the Cold War ended the Soviet Union rediscovered international cooperation. The withdrawal of 100,000 soviet troops from Afghanistan could not have happened without UN help -- and in 1986 the Soviets had turned to the International Atomic Authority in Vienna for help in recouping some of the early damage caused by delay in reporting the melt-down. It is astonishing to remember that in 1989 a general assembly resolution co-sponsored by the US and the Soviets called on all members to cooperate in the spirit of the Charter

But the milestone moment did not come until 1992 when a first meeting at summit level was held by the Council -- the inspiration of Prime Minister John Major who announced that this was an “unprecedented commitment” to the UN. There were inspired speeches. Douglas Hurd said that at last the UN was working as its founders intended. John Major – amazing as it seems now – told the Council that it was time to equip the UN to lead in crisis prevention. But perhaps the FCO did not understand the size of the problem – that the UN had been under crisis management for years. No practical help came at all from these politicians.

The UN went on to shoulder the problems of a post cold war world with no extra help with the tragic results too familiar with three great tragedies that shamed the world – former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda. The UN would lose respect around the world while the lack of real will to make the organisation work was obvious. This was a time when UN peacekeeping was brought to chaos. The various military commanders involved wondered how diplomats who clearly did not understand the basic rules of peacekeeping were qualified to produce a haystack of resolutions in the Security Council leading to death and danger on the ground – all the decisions taken in secret session -- and no one held accountable.

The soldiers came to believe that the politicians never intended them to fulfil the mandates and concluded that the peacekeeping exercise was a charade. The soldiers were blamed for failing to do things for which they were never mandated, staffed, financed equipped or deployed to do.

We do not need a campaign of spin to promote the UN – nor do we need to try to cover up its faults and weaknesses. We need to know the facts. In 1994 in Rwanda up to one million people were killed in three months – every day for three months the equivalent of three 9/11 tragedies. The people of Rwanda were left to their fate at a time when it would have been possible to have saved hundreds of thousands of people. This fact is one of the great scandals of the last century.

The invasion of Iraq has been hugely damaging of the UN and the war is a huge public issue. Other tragedies with which the UN is intimately involved are given less attention. Does Iraq achieve its prominence because the UN was by-passed and the Charter ignored ? This has happened numerous times in the past to little or no outrage at all. It is Was it because the government misled parliament -- yet parliament was misled in May 1994 about what was really happening in Rwanda.

Indeed the UK role in devising UN policy towards Rwanda must surely rank with one of the most shameful episodes in British diplomatic history. It is one of the most serious flaws in the UN system – the deceitful manipulation of governments and the lack of accountability. When it came to Rwanda the UN Charter and the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide were both ignored by the UK with hardly a flicker of interest.

I believe that this is why Darfur happens today – no lessons have been learned, no one has been held accountable for no enquiry has ever taken place into how the UK government got it so terribly wrong. The genocide in Rwanda happened after the promise of Never Again, a promise that is enshrined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention was the first truly universal comprehensive and codified protection of human rights and it stood for a very important principle – and a principle that is also in the UN Charter: that whatever evil may befall any group, nation or people, it is of concern not just of that group but for the whole of humanity.

The challenge for those working in human rights, universities and the media is to mobilize public opinion into a new moral and practical commitment to the promotion and enforcement of human rights all over the world. We need to guarantee international intervention when it is required. We need to heighten awareness on the part of state leaders that they will be held accountable if they decide not to act to save those who are threatened because of their enthnicity.

Here are the words of the Force Commander of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, Lt.-General Romeo Dallaire, who with 470 volunteer soldiers – mostly from Ghana -- stayed on during the genocide. He said earlier this year:

“The Rwandan genocide and the reaction to it were expressions of the immaturity of the human race to recognise that every human is human”.

Rwanda was a warning to us all; it is what happens if we continue to ignore human rights, and abject poverty. An absence of human rights – economic collapse, brutal dictatorship, environmental degradation – all these problems need international solutions. We urgently need revitalised and reformed international institutions.

The founders believed that UN success depended on public support – enlightened public opinion would be key – the better informed about its aims and the realities with which it had to cope – the more likely the UN to succeed. How can this happen when the realities are hidden from view?

Linda Melvern: BIOGRAPHY

Linda Melvern is a British investigative journalist. For several years she worked for the Sunday Times, including on the Insight Team. She has since written six books. Linda Melvern is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in the Department of International Politics.

A book on the secret history of UN was published for the organisation’s fiftieth birthday. It was at the UN Secretariat in New York in April 1994, whilst completing this book, that she began to investigate the circumstances of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

“A People Betrayed. The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide", her fifth book, was published in September 2000 to critical acclaim. It was chosen book of the year in 2001 in The Observer by Geoffrey Robertson, QC. Linda Melvern was the runner-up in the 2001 Martha Gellhorn journalism award. A People Betrayed is in its fourth impression. It was recently published in Sweden, “Att Förråda Ett Fol. Västmakterna Och Folkmordet I Rwanda”, (Ordfront 2003)

In April 2004 she published, “Conspiracy to Murder. The Rwandan Genocide”. (Verso), a detailed account of the planning of the genocide, who was responsible for it and how it was perpetrated.

Linda Melvern has published numerous articles, essays and papers related to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. She has visited a wide variety of institutions in the UK and abroad in order to give presentations on the subject. These include the Centre for Social Theory and Comparative History, UCLA, The Press Union, Athens, Greece, The Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, Life After Death Conference, Kigali, 2001. The Genocide Prevention Conference, FCO and Aegis, Nottinghamshire, 2002, and Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. For the tenth commemoration of the genocide she presented two papers: at a conference at the Imperial War Museum, London and at the conference in Kigali to commemorative the tenth anniversary of the genocide. An archive of the documents used in the research for her book on the genocide is in a special collection at the Hugh Owen Library, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. The archive is to be copied and lodged at the National University of Rwanda, Butare.

Linda Melvern was a consultant to the Military One prosecution team at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, (ICTR) and is to appear as an expert witness in the trial. The documents she obtained on the planning of the genocide form a significant part of the documentary evidence used by the prosecution in the trial.

Other books: "Techno-Bandits", (Co-authored. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1983) was an account of the campaign by the US Defence Department to stop the illicit Soviet efforts to acquire American technology. "The End of the Street", was published in London, in 1986, (Methuen) and it exposed the secret planning by Rupert Murdoch to destroy the British print unions and move his newspapers to a modern printing plant at Wapping. "The Ultimate Crime", (Allison and Busby, 1995) was a secret history of the UN’s first fifty years and this book was the basis of a Channel Four three-part television series, "UN Blues" broadcast in January 1995. In 2001 she wrote a book, United Nations, in the World Organisations Series, (Franklin Watts) to explain the UN to children.

Visit Linda Melvern's website at www.melvern.co.uk