UN is literally just a forum for countries to meet and discuss matters. Nothing more nothing less. I have no idea why people expect UN to take action, when UN is explicitly not an organisation for taking any actions.
They have an active duty peacekeeping force of approximately 81K people. While that's similar in size to the active duty forces from a nation like a Peru or Chile, the Blue Helmets have had a de facto quasi-blanket immunity when committing war crimes, and have some pretty horrifying history in places like Central Africa. For example:
"Consider a small sample of heinous cases: in April 2016 Foreign Policy reported that, in the Central African Republic, a French commander tied up four girls and forced them to have sex with a dog. Soldiers from France, Gabon, and Burundi sexually abused at least 108 women and children in a single province. In July 2015, The Washington Post reported that peacekeepers in Haiti engaged in ‘transactional sex’ with over 229 women and girls in exchange for food, medicine, or other necessities.
"Most recently, it was published in the The Washington Post in February 2016 that ‘four peacekeepers had allegedly paid girls as young as 13 as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex in a different camp for the internally displaced’ and ‘as many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomised six boys ages nine to 15’."
https://www.ibanet.org/article/CEBC5F69-A238-49BB-B85A-5E8D8...
I'm guessing if one lived in any of the areas mentioned above, the UN would feel about as much like an invading force as just about anything.
The UN as a peacekeeping force was a great concept, but it's had a very mixed history when put into practice.
But it exists, so many people expect it to be a solution to their problems.
The original point to which I was replying is that they don't understand why people call on a mere forum to solve their problems. Some regions repeatedly look to UN peacekeepers to solve their problems and so the forum designation is insufficient to describe it.
But the UN is oddly violent for a mere forum, some would say immorally so. War crimes are as old as war, but war is war. The UN is this bizarrely unaccountable keeper of peace and rape. And many people really don't understand the UN's modest peacekeeping capabilities and the collateral damage they often bring to a conflict, and often wrongly believe the UN is a silver bullet when it's far from it. I believe that's why people repeatedly think the UN is a solution to problems it mostly isn't.
That's the scope of what I was trying to address. My added detail about its structural and fundamental flaw of having no real mechanism for recourse when its troops commit war crimes was just to properly frame what an inherently deficient entity it really is.
While it was a particularly poor showing for a UN mission, and badly handled at every possible level, I don't think it's comparable raping children. It wasn't the UN soldiers who murdered the civilians, they were just completely unable to prevent it, and provided only an illusion of defense.
Maybe it depends if you're a UN member with a veto or not. It's possible that having a veto changes how one would perceive and interact with the UN.
I used to be in the 82nd Airborne and the inevitable problems when they got sent on peacekeeping missions in the 90s was no big surprise at all.
I can cite henious cases committed by London Police force. Just a couple months ago we've convicted 'bastard dave'. He was a cop and used his position to become a serial rapist and a murderer, and he had a nickname, which strongly suggests some of his colleagues knew something.
You have to assess three points to understand if the entire organisation is responsoble.
Have they commited significantly more warcrimes, than comparable situation suggests is, dreadfull to say, normal? Say during occupation of Iraq? For blue helmets I mean, I hope London police do not think of themselves that way.
Can these acts be traced back to some higher level of command, that is either turning a blind eye or is actively encouraging them?
When these acts become known, are the perpetrators punished, or are these acts tolerated?
I have not studied history of blue helmets, but these are the kind of questions you should be seeking to answer.
The rest is a different conversation.
In fairness to the UN, it's not an easy problem to solve: who's going to volunteer to act as a peacekeeper in a place where if the wrong faction ultimately prevails, you will be subject to the local jurisdiction and all of the corruption that may entail? Unlike military service, UN peacekeepers do not have the same degree of national backing to rely on when things go south.
Nuclear powers play by whatever rules they choose to play by.
First, I don't think calling them "blue helmets" has the negative connotation you think it does.
Second. What's the difference between the UN peacekeepers and any other army? All have a mixed history and I'm pretty sure have let's say a high amount of immunity.
People do bad things, especially soldiers who have power and the cover of war. This will never change. Of course crimes should be prosecuted as well but I don't know much about the details of the UN peacekeepers.
Their Rules of Engagement are also significantly different from those of a conventional military force.
The International Court of Justice (the IJC–not the ICC) is part of the United Nations System. At that body, at least, UN peacekeepers enjoy blanket immunity. To oversimplify it, it's another case of, "we have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."
The UN nominally expects host countries to prosecute the war crimes of their peacekeepers, but in reality the nature of deploying to somewhere needing peacekeepers is that the rule of law on the ground is already minimal, at best. So there's no real enforcement mechanism to prosecute these crimes.
It is not a trivial distinction. One can debate their virtue and utility value one way or the other, but the distinction is real and significant. They operate under a unique set of circumstances and saying war is hell and victors typically enjoy their own brand of immunity is true enough, but not entirely applicable here.
The UN courts can issue judgements…
Human Rights Courts: e.g. Slobodan Milosovic, Radavan Kardzich etc
A lot of the global treaties are kicked around there
They also enforce peace zones (poorly) like Lebanon, Israel demilitarised zone.
They coordinate aid programs UNRWA etc
It's all to appease the major powers to not use their nukes.
To a degree, it also gives the lesser players a voice to feel heard so that they continue to participate in the economic system that benefits the big players. Again, this keeps the big players from acting unilaterally, imperialistically, etc. in a way that threatens the use of nukes.
A side benefit is that this lets the bigger players test their geopolitical strategies without dangerous surprises. If tensions can be expressed and gently eased into a final state, that prevents a flash bang.
It's kept us from having another world war. Or nuclear exchange. Here's hoping we keep it up.
UN decisions are more like a veil or facade of moral Authority
Ignorant, cynical claims on the the Internet do a lot of harm to real people, by tearing down valuable things that people need.
Not so; "veil" or "facade" implies fakeness or concealment. The U.N. does not hide its mission or its position on human rights.
> One of the great achievements of the United Nations is the creation of a comprehensive body of human rights law—a universal and internationally protected code to which all nations can subscribe and all people aspire. The United Nations has defined a broad range of internationally accepted rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. It has also established mechanisms to promote and protect these rights and to assist states in carrying out their responsibilities. [1]
The lack of consensus and consistency is an ongoing challenge, sure, but it doesn't make the goals fake. Countries are flawed and have competing interests, but it is important to nudge the world in a better direction.
"Americans could envision the Soviet Union joining the United States in policing the peace in the brighter new world that would arise from the carnage [of WW2]" (page 2)
"The Soviet ambassador... was even stronger than the others in pleading for a security council with teeth" (page 9)
"Chopping the air with his hands to emphasize his words, Truman said the new UN must keep the world 'free from the fear of war'." (page 19)
More generally the ongoing theme of the book is the extent to which the UN has been successful, and unsuccessful, at ensuring world peace in various conflicts that have flared since its founding.
I did get the impression that not a lot of thought was put into the design of the UN, and there is the possibility that it could've been much more successful with a radically different design.
[Edit: To be more concrete -- Google tells me that global military spending was $2.1 trillion in 2021. You'd think it would be worth putting a mere 1% of that $2.1 trillion, something like $21 billion, into essay competitions, agent-based simulations, online diplomacy games, academic literature reviews, etc. in order to design an optimal UN structure that minimizes the risk of war. But the actual structure of the UN was designed using far, far less than $21 billion worth of analysis, based on what I recall from the Meisler book.]
That's not to say that the UN being a forum is bad or unnecessary. But it's interesting to me how everyone seems to have forgotten its original eutopian aspiration to create a world free from war. Maybe has something to do with the fact that people who lived through WW2 are mostly dead now, and few living people understand at a visceral level how horrifying war between great powers really is.
It's worth thinking about this context when considering the Korean War when it was UNC (UN Command) that was the primary defense force: https://www.unc.mil/History/1950-1953-Korean-War-Active-Conf...
I think it is maybe only after the Iraq War that people stopped thinking of the UN as an alternative to conventional war politics. IIRC, Bush acted unilaterally without UN approval, and now it kinda seems like the "you should get UN approval before making war" norm has been lost? I don't remember anyone even discussing the possibility of UN approval for any more recent US military actions like in Libya. And the UN hasn't played a large role in Ukraine either -- I suppose that might be because Russia is on the security council?
Article 43 of the UN Charter would, if it were ever implemented, create a military force under the control of the UN Security Council.
>The potential of the United Nations and its Charter remained a dominant subject in schools and communities into the 1950s, focused especially on those Charter promises to protect member states "against violators of the peace." Chapter VII dealt with enforcement action: Article 39 first authorized the Security Council to "determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression"; Article 42 was designed to respond with "air, sea or land forces as may be necessary"; and Article 43 committed all UN member states "to make available to the Security Council, on its call, armed forces, assistance, facilities, including rights of passage necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security." Although much hope for the future was placed in the ratification of Article 43, it was never implemented.
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA514849456&sid=sitemap...
The UN also handles much more than military missions, including health, technical coordination, and much more.
