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-- The United Nations is a joke *POLL*
The United Nations is a joke *POLL*
Is the United Nations a joke?
I would have to say no despite its recent troubles.
It needs to undergo a major gut check but it's really the only thing we've got in terms of international law. Which we still need.
The principle of the United Nations is a sound a just one. The only problem is that in it�s self it has no real power. Nations are too scared to give away any of their sovereignty to a higher power. Just look at the fuss people kick up over here in the UK when the EU decides something. I gave the UN the benefit of the doubt and voted No, though I feel in it�s current form it�s pretty pointless, it needs to be given some real oomph to start doing it�s job properly. It also doesn�t help when nations go off on their own agenda ignoring the UN�s rulings and claiming *others* are undermining it because they wouldn�t vote how they were told to.
hmm.. i voted no too, i agree it needs more teeth. well, with 3 of us posting that we voted no, then how are there only 2 no votes up there, someone must have forgot to vote.
it needs definite revamping but its various agencies still do much good. so all in all, no
No it's still not a joke, regardless of the fact that the US currently ignored it. The fact is that every such organization relies on the good will of the major powers to function. Until recently, the UN has been supported by the US, infact, when it all began, US was probably the prime supporter of the United Nations. Sadly, the US has recently decided it doesn't want to listen to the opinion the rest of the world has, and in such situations UN is useless. That is more so because the current world is basically unipolar, meaning that when a small country goes astray, the UN can act, but when the one and only superpower does the same, the only thing the rest of the world can do is to watch, moan and complain.
Still, the fact that the US pissed off most of the world population as well as many countries by ignoring the UN means there is still hope for such an organization to be supported by the people. And I think it shows most of the people including me think that having an organization which at least tries to take care of international law and diplomacy is better than having many bilateral meetings and networks of hostile alliances with no diplomatic contacts.
Just another stage for fools and demagogues...
why does the response of "no, it's a prestigious organization" have to be tied in with the "NO" response. I don't think the UN is a joke, but at the same time i don't necessarily regard it as a "prestigious" organization either. A simple yes/no would have done the trick..
We focus too much on the failures of the organization. It may not be able to defuse all international crises, but it does a respectable job trying to co-ordinate health and quality-of-life improvement efforts.
But having a Libyan chair the Human Rights committee is a joke.
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| Originally posted by dEsidEL why does the response of "no, it's a prestigious organization" have to be tied in with the "NO" response. I don't think the UN is a joke, but at the same time i don't necessarily regard it as a "prestigious" organization either. A simple yes/no would have done the trick.. |
the UN is as good as its members.
Bad members--> bad UN.
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| Originally posted by ahlamalek the UN is as good as its members. Bad members--> bad UN. |
I think the role the U.N is trying to fill is an important one, that said it needs to be revamped. You can't have countries bulling each other around, and you can't have countries acting with there wallets not there brains either.
Iraq and Lybia are on the panel for Human Rights of the UN.
Koffi Anon got to be leader is b/c Africa has a bunch of small countries that all have a vote.
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| Originally posted by Cracka-X Iraq and Lybia are on the panel for Human Rights of the UN. Koffi Anon got to be leader is b/c Africa has a bunch of small countries that all have a vote. |
its the sum of its - overwhelmingly bad - parts. Additionally its mechanisms and legal foundation are outdated/impotent/in need to be changed baaadly: No real army, just a bunch of shrugging poker playing "neutral" observers who don't prevent any violence; The fact that its charta doesn't take the new threats of global terrorism into consideration; The very way how it functions: Just take the veto right...how's that democratic? Or the fact that the vote of a country like Samoa equals that of Argentina. I know that it would contradict the idea of equality to create a proportinal relation between one country's economical power and size of population and the "power" of its vote..but i don't see any alternative to that. Also there should be some "admission requirements" if we wanna keep the peaceful, democratic and liberal spirit of the UN as a whole. That, however, would lead to questions like: What criteria ought to be considered? Who will judge? How far back will we look when judging (will atrocities of the 70s count? 80s? last year?)? How are terms like "democracy" defined? Is a country like Egypt democratic?
In a perfect world a perfect organization. But in a perfecte world we wouldn't have needed it in the first place ...
crack-x: you fool, its the US who pushed forward the candidacy of kofi annan!!! 
Some of the reasons why I think Kofi Annan and the UN is largely ineffective:
The recent events in Iraq have brought the United Nations into the spotlight more than ever before. However, if we look back at previous failures, we should not be surprised by the current display of ineffectiveness. The United Nations did little to stop the genocide in Cambodia or the actions of China in Tieneman Square. The genocide in Rwanda was ruthlessly carried out under the nose of the United Nations. In fact, Kofi Annan was the head of U.N. peacekeeping at the time and did nothing. A cable sent to Annan in January 1994 advising of the likelihood of a campaign of genocide in Rwanda got a response advising that the United Nations should "avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions." The use of force, at least by the U.N., was avoided and there were no "unanticipated repercussions." There were, however, the anticipated repercussions of a systematic campaign of murder and terror in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda. More recently, the civil war in the Congo has resulted in claims just last month of cannibalism, rape, torture and kidnapping by the rebel forces, apparently supported by Uganda. Estimates are that approximately 2 million people have died in this fighting since 1998. Uganda and the Congo are both member nations of the U.N. But Kofi Annan, rather than proposing swift action against clear and widespread atrocities, is reserving his harshest criticism for the United States.
And now the much-celebrated International Tribunal for Rwanda has become yet another UN bureaucratic disaster. Repeated UN investigations have found widespread mismanagement, wastage, incompetence, and corruption. The Tribunal has prosecuted a fraction of the Rwandan genocide suspects it holds in custody. It has even been criticized by its own Appeal Court of prosecutorial incompetence and failing to observe elementary due process considerations. Sadly, the Tribunal, which should have brought justice to the region, has instead become another multi-million dollar UN boondoggle. Srebrenica, a name now associated with one of the worst crimes in Europe since WWII or as Judge Riad of the ICTY described it, ``..... a place where thousands of men were executed, hundreds buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mother's eyes, and a grandfather was forced to eat the liver of his own grandson.'' These are truly scenes from hell written on the darkest pages of human history. The UN created a safe haven in Srebrenica and encouraged civilians to enter en masse so as to be under UN military protection. Only one condition applied--entry into the UN safe haven required Muslim fighters to surrender their weapons. This they did, hoping that if ever the need arose they would get them back. They were to be sorely disappointed on that score.
When it became apparent that General Mladic was separating the men from the women and then killing them in the nearby fields, the Dutch UN troops began pleading for UN military support. But, just like Rwanda, the UN leadership once again became paralyzed and failed. They dithered over air strikes, they refused to send in troops to help the beleaguered Dutch and in the end, just as with Rwanda, the UN withdrew their troops. This permitted General Mladic to remove an estimated 5,000-8,000 Muslims from in and around the UN compound in Potocari and slaughter them.
To this day the United Nations and no UN official has ever been held criminally or civilly liable, let alone even publicly admonished, for their massive failures in Srebrenica. All the families of the thousands of victims can do now is pick up the pieces of their broken families and attempt to restart their lives.
East Timor. In late August 1999, the UN and now Secretary General Annan, called for elections on the small island country of East Timor despite disturbing evidence that hard line elements in the Indonesian military were preparing to cause wide spread public disorder so as to disrupt the elections. The UN failed to provide adequate protection for the civilian population. Dili was burnt to the ground and East Timor was engulfed in violence. After weeks of killing and millions of dollars of damage, the Australian government sent in ground troops to restore order to East Timor; but by then, it was too late to save East Timor from UN bungling.
Sierra Leone. So bad was the UN's conduct in Sierra Leone in June 2000 that their long time supporter and friend, Medicins Sans Frontieres, felt compelled to speak out and complain. MSF complained bitterly that the UN troops fled a RUF attack on the Sierra Leonean town of Kabala.
In so doing MSF said that the UN had failed its mandate to protect civilian populations, many of whom were sick women and malnourished children in the MSF hospital.
Cambodia. There is now mounting evidence that UN Peacekeeping troops actually caused an explosion of AIDS in Cambodia in 1992. In January of last year Richard Holbrooke, the then US Ambassador to the UN, launched an unprecedented attack upon the UN during his last UTN address saying ``..... it would be the cruelest of ironies if people who had come to end war ..... were spreading the most deadly of diseases ..... it will kill more people and undermine more societies than even the most critical conflicts we discuss here.'' And despite Ambassador Holbrooke's warnings there are concerns that right now in East Timor UN staff could be causing yet another AIDS epidemic. Some things just never seem to change.
I am insanley drunk right now, so this will be quite short.
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| What criteria ought to be considered? Who will judge? How far back will we look when judging (will atrocities of the 70s count? 80s? last year?)? |
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| Originally posted by Renegade I am insanley drunk right now, so this will be quite short. That is the most important idea I have heard on this forum. No seriously, allow me to elucidate: It all comes back to Faulcult and his "discontinuation" of history ideas. For instance, it is part of our nature to identiry patterns in history but we are assuming that things are so continuous. For exapmle, we presume that a nation holds tbe same or similar ideas - as a whole - for a period of time. Therefore, a histroy of a nation and the way in whcih we accept it into the the UN is subject to change. Therefore, at which point can we say that this nation has been eligable for acceptance into ther UN in complete |
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