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The United Nations: Guarantor of Peace and Stability?

Michael Washburn

    My disillusionment with the United Nations set in during my undergraduate days in the early 1990s. The catalyst, I suppose, was the agency’s failures in Cambodia, and, in particular, an event that touched me personally. Atsuhito Nakata, a young Japanese man whom I met when we were students at Grinnell College in Iowa, died in an attack in Kampong Thom, Cambodia, in the spring of 1993 while serving as an electoral supervisor under U.N. auspices. I wondered whether the U.N. could have taken greater precautions and kept my friend safer. But the U.N.’s failures went far beyond this incident, and went back many years.
    In the decades following the French decolonization of Southeast Asia in the 1950s, civil war plagued Cambodia, and in the early 1990s, it looked poised to do so again. The Khmer Rouge were refusing to cooperate with U.N. peacekeeping forces by disarming and ceasing to plant land mines. This was bad news for ordinary Cambodians, many of whom had lost a limb in a mine blast. Travelers, and election observers, weren’t safe from the guerillas.
    Maybe it was foolish to expect that the Khmer Rouge, who killed some 2,000,000 people from 1975 to 1978 before being driven back into the jungle by Vietnamese invaders, would cheerfully agree to behave sociably. Even so, it was a shock to all of us to hear that a car in which Atsuhito was traveling had come under ambush and that he’d been killed. We could hardly believe that the U.N. was unaware of how dangerous the situation was over there, and that any of those who volunteered to help supervise elections would have gone around without proper protection. To this day, I remember Atsuhito as one of the kindest, smartest people I met in college. He was bright, outgoing, and a lot more mature than many of us. What an incredible loss.
    Even without the bloody Khmer Rouge record, the U.N.’s moral authority was at such a level that its efforts to arbitrate tended to lapse quickly into farce.
    The U.N. came into being in 1945 amid much cant about a new era of peace, brotherhood, and cooperation. Now, it was happily expected, problems could be solved without another descent into madness and bloodshed. But, as it turned out, the U.N. proved willing to criticize mainly the nations of what liberal intellectuals called the global “North.” A French expression comes to mind here: pas d’ennemis à gauche.
    In a later chapter of his magisterial History of the World, A.J.P. Taylor relates how the U.N. tended to scold flawed western nations, such as Israel, Chile, and South Africa, while ignoring the moral enormities of Third World countries, like Uganda.
    While quick to condemn apartheid in South Africa, military rule in Chile, and the denial of rights to Arabs in Israel, the U.N. was willing to overlook the cartoon-level violence in Uganda, where Idi Amin was eating political rivals and shooting intellectuals. When asked later by a journalist how the country was going to be run with all the intellectuals shot, Amin replied “If they were so smart how come they’re all dead?”—displaying that morbid wit with which some petty tyrants seem to be blessed.
    While readily denouncing extreme French nationalists and Afrikaaner terrorists, the U.N. went out of its way to accommodate the P.L.O., giving it a seat on its General Council. In his book Modern Times, the British historian Paul Johnson argues that the effect of this was to legitimize left-wing terrorism.
    But if this was irresponsible, and if the U.N.’s spasms of abuse were hypocritical and silly, they were as nothing compared to the U.N.’s bloody blunders in the Congo. Unable to defeat anticolonialist black rebels, Belgium withdrew in 1960 from the Congo, as ecstatic leftists chanted the familiar mantras of democracy and self-determination.
    Neither ensued, however. After assuming dictatorial powers on a scale Tito would envied, Patrice Lumumba, the legendary nationalist from whom a Soviet university took its name, ordered the Congolese army to crush the Katangan independence forces led by Moise Tshombe. But the Katangans proved brave and cunning fighters, and it quickly became clear that Lumumba’s troops were not up to the task assigned them, whereupon he sought help from the U.N. In mid-July, the blue-helmeted troops began to arrive en masse in Leopoldville. Not long afterwards the Katangans were crushed and Tshombe captured and shot.
    In addition to showing that the U.N. has not always espoused anti-imperialism, this episode raises a sensitive issue: imperialism practiced by Africans to the detriment of other Africans. One of the U.N.’s many moral failings has been its reluctance to address this issue. It seems to believe that only Europeans are capable of racism, sexism, and imperialism.
    In another brilliant if politically incorrect book, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830, Paul Johnson duly explodes this lie. In Johnson’s book, we learn about some of the practices and beliefs of non-western societies: beliefs and practices that would disgust western liberals, who are precisely the people who clamor so passionately for multiculturalism. We learn that these societies were every bit as violent and racist and imperialist as the West could be.
    We learn, for example, that in the early nineteenth century, under King Bodawpaya, Burmese forces carried out attacks on their neighbors, the Indians and Thais, in the course of which entire villages, women and babies included, were wiped out. They massacred thousands of peasants who had opposed him, and, just for good measure, slaughtered their animals, burned their villages and uprooted nearby trees, making large parts of the empire uninhabitable. After Bodawpaya’s death, a general named Bandula assumed control of the forces and started chasing guerrilla bands into British territory.
    Here is an adumbration of present-day Asian imperialism, which subjugates Tibet to China, East Timor to Indonesia, South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to North Vietnam. Such crimes are commonplace in the Third World.
    The United Nations, however, has been devoted for much of its history to the defense of non-western nations, regardless of their moral character, and to bitter invective against the global North.

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