The History Book Club discussion

This is a thread to discuss the United Nations.

About the United Nations

The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 after the Second World War by 51 countries committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights.

The UN has 4 main purposes

To keep peace throughout the world;

To develop friendly relations among nations;

To help nations work together to improve the lives of poor people, 
to conquer hunger, disease and illiteracy, and to encourage 
respect for each other’s rights and freedoms;

To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations to achieve 
these goals.

Due to its unique international character, and the powers vested in its founding Charter, the Organization can take action on a wide range of issues, and provide a forum for its 193 Member States to express their views, through the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council and other bodies and committees.

The work of the United Nations reaches every corner of the globe. Although best known for peacekeeping, peacebuilding, conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance, there are many other ways the United Nations and its System (specialized agencies, funds and programmes) affect our lives and make the world a better place. The Organization works on a broad range of fundamental issues, from sustainable development, environment and refugees protection, disaster relief, counter terrorism, disarmament and non-proliferation, to promoting democracy, human rights, gender equality and the advancement of women, governance, economic and social development and international health, clearing land mines, expanding food production, and more, in order to achieve its goals and coordinate efforts for a safer world for this and future generations.

Organization of the United Nations

History of the United Nations

US Ambassador to the United Nations: Samantha Power

Published on Sep 6, 2013
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power discusses the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians and the need for an international response.

http://youtu.be/Ez-nBLpToSQ

United Nations: The First Fifty Years

by Stanley Meisler

Synopsis:

In a lucid, colorful account, Stanley Meisler brings alive the personalities and events of the first fifty years of the United Nations. It is a story filled with action and heartbreak. "Stanley Meisler tells the story of the United Nations, its promise and its problems, with clarity and authority. He brings to life the history of the world organization and a half-century of America's hopes for and frustration with world government . . . . You will learn why China is almost by chance one of five permanent members on the Security Council, how the Council's veto power was adopted at Stalin's demand, why Adlai Stevenson left his post as U.S. ambassador in lonely despair, how Kurt Waldheim hid his past to become Secretary General, how the Bush administration maneuvered the United Nations into supporting Operation Desert Storm, and much, much more. This is the definitive account of the United Nations for a general audience, told by a master.

Thank you Bryan.

An Insider's Guide to the UN

by Linda Fasulo (no photo)

Synopsis:

This completely revised edition of Linda Fasulo’s popular guide to the United Nations surveys the world body’s programs and activities, and covers key issues including human rights, climate change, counterterrorism, nuclear proliferation, peacekeeping, and UN reform. It also offers guidelines for setting up a Model UN.

The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations

by Paul M. Kennedy

Synopsis:

The Parliament of Man is the first definitive history of the United Nations, from one of America's greatest living historians.Distinguished scholar Paul Kennedy, author of the bestselling The Rise and Fall of Great Powers gives us a thorough and timely account that explains the UN's roots and functions while also casting an objective eye on its effectiveness and its prospects for success in meeting the challenges that lie ahead. Kennedy shows the UN for what it is: fallible, human-based, often dependent on the whims of powerful national governments or the foibles of individual administrators—yet also utterly indispensable. With his insightful grasp of six decades of global history, Kennedy convincingly argues that "it is difficult to imagine how much more riven and ruinous our world of six billion people would be if there had been no UN."

Thanks Jerome - this thread needs some work and thank you for adding to it.

Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World

by David L. Bosco (no photo)

Synopsis:

From the Berlin Airlift to the Iraq War, the UN Security Council has stood at the heart of global politics. Part public theater, part smoke-filled backroom, the Council has enjoyed notable successes and suffered ignominious failures, but it has always provided a space for the five great powers to sit down together.

Five to Rule Them All tells the inside story of this remarkable diplomatic creation. Drawing on extensive research, including dozens of interviews with serving and former ambassadors on the Council, the book chronicles political battles and personality clashes as it opens the closed doors of its meeting room. What emerges here is a revealing portrait of the most powerful diplomatic body in the world.

When the five permanent members are united, David Bosco points out, the Council can wage war, impose blockades, redraw borders, unseat governments, and levy sanctions. There are almost no limits to its authority. Yet the Council exists in a world of realpolitik. Its members are, above all, powerful states with their own diverging interests. Time and again, the Council's performance has dashed the hope that its members would somehow work together to establish a more peaceful world. But if these lofty hopes have been unfulfilled, the Council has still served an invaluable purpose: to prevent conflict between the Great Powers. In this role, the Council has been an unheralded success. As Bosco reminds us, massacres in the Balkans and chaos in Iraq are human tragedies, but conflicts between the world's great powers in the nuclear age would be catastrophic.

In this lively, fast-moving, and often humorous narrative, Bosco illuminates the role of the Security Council in the postwar world, making a compelling case for the enduring importance of the five who rule them all.

Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations

by Charlene Mires (no photo)

Synopsis:

From 1944 to 1946, as the world pivoted from the Second World War to an unsteady peace, Americans in more than two hundred cities and towns mobilized to chase an implausible dream. The newly-created United Nations needed a meeting place, a central place for global diplomacy--a Capital of the World. But what would it look like, and where would it be? Without invitation, civic boosters in every region of the United States leapt at the prospect of transforming their hometowns into the Capital of the World. The idea stirred in big cities—Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, New Orleans, Denver, and more. It fired imaginations in the Black Hills of South Dakota and in small towns from coast to coast. Meanwhile, within the United Nations the search for a headquarters site became a debacle that threatened to undermine the organization in its earliest days. At times it seemed the world's diplomats could agree on only one thing: under no circumstances did they want the United Nations to be based in New York. And for its part, New York worked mightily just to stay in the race it would eventually win.

With a sweeping view of the United States' place in the world at the end of World War II, Capital of the World tells the dramatic, surprising, and at times comic story of hometown promoters in pursuit of an extraordinary prize and the diplomats who struggled with the balance of power at a pivotal moment in history.

Gee that is remarkable when the US has historically had to pay the bulk of the bill.

And this was in 2009 - when Fox News reported the big kaching.

U.N. Budget: Would You Believe $13.9 Billion?
By George RussellPublished September 17, 2009 FoxNews.com

As the United Nations General Assembly reconvenes in New York City this week, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon intends to present its members with a two-year headquarters budget that he claims will be as stingy as these recessionary times demand. It will total just $4.9 billion, a trifling 0.5 percent — or $22.4 million — more than the U.N. spent over the previously two years. The U.S. pays 22 percent of the new budget total, or about $1.08 billion.

“This level of resources,” Ban proclaims in his introduction to the 1,702-page budget document, “is the outcome of the lengthy budget formulation process, reflecting a thorough review and extensive consultations with program managers to ensure the optimal utilization of resources in order to fully, efficiently and effectively implement the objectives and mandates set by Member States.”

Ban’s claim, however, is deeply misleading. In fact, the same budget document shows that Ban is on track to maintain and surpass his previous record as the biggest spender in U.N. history.

And whatever the totals turn out to be, the cost of paying them will weigh most heavily on the United States, which in addition to paying nearly a quarter of the regular U.N. budget, pays up to 26 percent of its peacekeeping costs, and large amounts of the money for a bewildering variety of U.N. cost centers that make up the sprawling U.N. Secretariat budget. In 2007, the top 17 dues-paying countries in the U.N. paid 86.5 percent of the entire U.N. regular budget, while the 128 lowest-paying members paid only 1 percent.

Overall, Ban’s new budget document shows, the U.N. Secretariat is actually planning on an eye-popping $13.9 billion in “regular” and “extra-budgetary” spending in its 2010 and 2011 budget. That is hike of some $968 million over the spending during the previous two-year period, or a 7.5 percent increase.

The increase, however, is likely to grow much bigger as it is adjusted upward during the two year period, as it inevitably is. And the share that the U.S. will pay of that total is very difficult to determine.

The enormous gap between the $4.9 billion “regular” total and the $13.9 billion overall figure is a reflection of the Byzantine, esoteric and — for anyone trying to control U.N. costs — frustrating U.N. budget process, in which the world organization fudges figures, delays revelations about add-on costs, and counts only about a third of the money it spends every biennium as its “regular budget,” even while the bigger total is the real basis for its activities.

And the spending totals the Secretary General presents at the beginning of each budget cycle tend to go dramatically up as the cycle progresses. At the same point in the previous two-year U.N. budget cycle, for example, Ban Ki-moon estimated that the combination of “regular” and “extra-budgetary” spending for 2008-2009 would be $10.47 billion. Instead, the U.N. spent $12.97 billion — $2.5 billion, or nearly 24 percent, more than it originally declared.

“It’s easier to work your way through the U.S. budget — which is immensely bigger — than through the U.N. budget,” observes Brett Shaefer, a U.N. expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who has just edited a new book on U.N. reform entitled ConUNdrum: The Limits of the United Nations and the Search for Alternatives. “What you see is the U.N. doing a bit of sleight of hand.”

Nor does the sleight of hand end there. Even the $13.9 billion number does not include the cost of some of the U.N.’s biggest and most sprawling organizations, which submit their own budgets to separate panels of U.N. member states, even as their programs increasingly intertwine and overlap.

These include behemoths like the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which spends in excess of $6 billion annually — the organization has suspended consideration of its next biennial budget until early next year— or the World Food Program (WFP), which wants to spend $6.3 billion in 2010-2011, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO), which spent $4.2 billion in 2008-2009.

Yet even with those exceptions, as a result of the legerdemain of the U.N. budgeting process, the $13.9 billion spending figure in Ban’s proposed budget is a very understated presentation of U.N. spending plans — by significantly more than 100 percent.

To take just a small matter first, the inflation-adjusted total for the $4.9 billion regular budget brings it immediately to $5.06 billion — and that is only a “preliminary” adjustment.

Nor does it include the full impact of what the U.N. calls “special political missions,” which nowadays include the rapidly spiralling U.N. civilian and development deployments in Iran and Afghanistan. Ban’s introduction to the latest budget declares that these special missions are expected to cost $776.3 million. But later on, the document says the total so far is actually $867.4 million.

In fact, the number is still a moving target, that will change throughout the two year period—never in a downward direction. At the same stage in the U.N.’s budget process two years earlier, the cost of special political missions was estimated at $623.5 million. In the end, the U.N. spent $867 million, an increase of 39 percent.

The U.N.’s budgetary committee has asked Ban to prepare an “updated” estimate for the special missions the General Assembly begins its deliberations.

Nor does the budget include all the likely costs of a major overhaul of U.N. business and information technology, dubbed the Umoja project, which is tallied in Ban’s budget as costing anywhere from about $78.5 million to $186 million in 2011-2011. A recent draft report on the project obtained by FOX News, however, proposes a cost of $232.5 million for the same period — with much more to come later.

More importantly, even Ban’s biggest numbers fail to include the rapidly spirally annual cost of U.N. peacekeeping operations — which will amount to about $7.8 billion just for the period from July 2009 to June 2010.

The U.S. share of the 2009-2010 peacekeeping package is just under 26 percent of the total, or $2.01 billion — up about $120 million from the previous year. The share can grow to 27 percent before it hits a ceiling mandated by the U.S. Congress.

The $7.8 billion for peacekeeping is treated as a separate element in U.N. accounting, and approved separately by the General Assembly.

Only $586 million worth of peacekeeping operations expenses — which are over and above the $7.8 billion — are listed in Ban’s 2010-2011 headquarters budget.

There is not a great deal of likelihood that overall peacekeeping expenses — which have rocketed from a planned $5.3 billion in the 12 months ending in July 2008 to the current total, a 47 percent hike — will shrink in the years ahead.

Even assuming no change in the rate of spending, that means that in the period covered by Ban’s biennial budget, which includes 18 additional months of peacekeeping, U.N. peacekeeping outlays might run to $15 billion all by themselves — and the U.S. share could reach $3.9 billion, or even more.

So, why are the U.N. budget figures heralded by Ban at the beginning of his proposed budgets so low?

The chief reason is a definition of the “core” or “regular” U.N. budget that refers only to spending covered by mandatory payments — in effect, U.N. dues — by the U.N. member states. The “core” budget is the smaller number, and, as Ban’s introduction to this year’s budget shows, much more apparent effort goes into keeping costs down in the “core.”

But even when announcing increases in those “core” budget numbers for the new budget, Ban fudges.

To arrive at his tiny $22 million spending increase, Ban, as is customary at the U.N., compares the final version of the previous “core” biennial budget — what the U.N. actually spent, with only the first version of the next biennial plan — the most expensive version of the past, in effect, with the lowest initial estimate of the future.

For example, when Ban first introduced the budget for 2008-2009, the Secretariat used an initial figure of $4.19 billion — about $620 million less than the U.N. actually spent in that period. In other words, in the last biennium, the U.N. “core” budget actually increased by 15 percent more than what Ban initially said it would be.

As it happens, when he first presented that initial 2008-2009 budget, Ban declared that the initial estimated regular budget number was also just 0.5 percent higher than the previous two-year budget number — using exactly the same apples-to-oranges comparison that he uses this time.

Rather than the 0.5 percent increase that he heralds, Ban’s latest initial estimated “regular” or “core” budget for 2010-2011 starts out $700 million higher than his initial estimate for the 2008-2009 biennium — an increase of 17 percent before taking account of any subsequent inflation adjustment and further cost growth.

The Heritage Foundation’s Schaefer, in fact, estimates that the U.N. regular budget has been growing at an average rate of 17 percent annually since about 2002. From 2002 to 2007, Schaefer says, the U.S. budget grew by an average of only 7 percent annually.

Ban’s figure-juggling, however, is not over. He adds estimates for cost inflation, currency exchange rates and other factors that bring his low-ball initial estimate for 2010-2011 from $4.9 billion to about $5.03 billion — roughly $634 million, or 14 percent, more than his low-ball cost adjusted estimate for 2008-2009.

The biggest, and most time-honored U.N. device that Ban uses is a distinction between the organization’s “core” and “non-core” budgets. The “non-core” or “extra-budgetary” spending is supplementary spending that is provided voluntarily by contributing states rather than through a dues formula. It amounts to twice as much as the U.N. spends on “core” items.

Yet even though this “extra-budgetary” spending is voluntary, it is remarkably solid — it amounted to $8.7 billion in 2008-2009, according to Ban’s latest spending document — and comes principally from the same countries as the regular budget does.

In 2010-2011, Ban initially foresees this “extrabudgetary” spending on a rise again, to $9.44 billion, up from $8.66 billion spent in the previous two years. Ban’s office calls the 9 percent projected hike “modest,” and “using conservative estimates based on past experience” and donor undertakings. When queried by FOX News as to whether the Secretary General foresaw further growth in that number in the years ahead, Ban’s office replied that instead, they saw the amount of the increase being ratcheted downward — to $9.3 billion.

But once again, Ban’s budget for 2010-2011 is comparing the final number spent in the previous two years with the initial estimate for “extra-budgetary” spending in 2010-2011. The initial extra-budgetary number for 2008-2009 was just $6.59 billion — meaning that his new initial estimate is a huge $2.85 billion, or 43 percent, higher than its true equivalent in the previous biennium.

Continued:

Among other things, a substantial portion of the extra-budgetary increase, Ban’s report notes, has gone to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — $282.2 million — and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA) — $186.9 million.

(As it happens, Ban’s initial budget report for 2008-2009 said very similar things, noting that big increases from hikes in extra-budgetary resources went to UNHCR — $423.3 million — and UNWRA — 122.9 million.)

Ban’s office says it has “no reason to believe that Member States would not honor their commitments” for extra-budgetary funds.

Perhaps the biggest sign of how confident the U.N. is of at least the bulk of this “extra-budgetary” spending is the number of people it employs with it: 12,153 in 2008-2009, vs. about 10,180 by means of the “regular” budget. In 2010-2011, Ban expects to keep 12,271 people employed using “extra-budgetary” resources — a remarkably stable number.

In other words, about 54 percent of Ban’s Secretariat staff is currently not on the “regular” budget books, and he expects the proportion to stay that way.

In his latest budget presentation, Ban makes much of the fact that he has cut 32 jobs, or about 0.3 percent of the “core” U.N. staff, in his initial estimate.

But on the “extra-budgetary” side, Ban has actually added an additional 118 positions. Net gain: 86. Overall, about an 0.4 percent hike.

Rather than unprecedented fiscal discipline, what Ban’s numbers actually show is that hikes in both the U.N.’s “regular” and “extra-budgetary” spending over the past four years represent a dramatic break with past efforts of major donor countries, led by the U.S., to enforce tougher fiscal discipline.

The watershed in that effort came during the last biennium — the first where Ban Ki-Moon was completely responsible for the budget process.

Led by a shock-wave of developing countries, the U.N. General Assembly abandoned a 20-year tradition of adopting its budgets only by consensus — a custom that gave major donor countries like the U.S., which enjoy only one vote, unofficial clout on budgetary matters in keeping with their financial contributions

In 2007, however, the General Assembly took an official vote on the 2008-2009 budget — and approved it, 142-1. The only No vote came from the U.S. — under the Bush administration.

That result, according to Heritage’s Schaefer, meant that “the majority of UN member states who contribute very little to the budget no longer feel the need to listen to the concerns of its largest contributor.”

For its part, Ban’s office, in reply to questions from FOX News, declared that “the Secretary General continues to exercise maximum budgetary discipline and has presented a budget proposal in line with the budget outline as approved by the General Assembly. He will be presenting a number of proposals which are either new or respond to earlier mandates of the General Assembly.

“The ultimate level of the budget,” Ban’s spokesman added, “is a decision solely within the purview of Member States.”

Will the Obama Administration, which differs greatly from its predecessor in its avowed intention to rely further on the U.N. for diplomatic purposes, find the continuing U.N. spendfest a problem?

It remains to be seen — most likely in the labyrinthine results of the U.N. budget process.

George Russell is executive editor of FOX News.

UN 101 - What the US Pays the UN

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/EYEo...

U.S. pays off much of U.N. arrears, now owes $736 million
UNITED NATIONS Tue Jan 25, 2011 5:06pm EST

Reuters) - The United States has paid off more than a third of the nearly $1.2 billion in payments it owed the United Nations at the end of last year, a U.N. spokesman said on Tuesday.

As of the end of November 2010, the United States owed $1.182 billion, accounting for just over a quarter of all the money due the world body. Washington paid nearly half a billion dollars of what it owed for peacekeeping, the regular U.N. budget and other items.

"The updated situation at the end of 2010 reflects significant payments made by the U.S. at the end of calendar year 2010," U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said.

"That leaves total outstanding assessed (mandatory) contributions of $736.2 million," he said.

As the United Nations' single biggest contributor, Washington is responsible for roughly one-quarter of the U.N. peacekeeping budget and slightly less than a quarter of the separate U.N. regular budget.

The United States has had a history of being reluctant to pay its U.N. dues, with critics of the world body charging it has a bloated and sometimes corrupt bureaucracy. U.N. supporters say the dues are cheap at the price.

===============
Why isn't the rest of the world paying its share?

Excerpt:

We know for sure, however, that the United States pays 22 percent of the organization's “regular” budget and 27 percent of peacekeeping costs in addition to millions of dollars worth of “voluntary” contributions to UN-affiliated agencies. Overall, only five nations — the U.S., Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France — finance more than 50 percent of the total U.N. budget.

By contrast, “developing” nations with booming economies like Brazil, China and India pay much less. For example, China, which has become our banker, pays a whopping two percent of the U.N. budget – less than 10 percent of the U.S. contribution. Go figure!

================

How much does Russia pay? And China pays only 2% - something seems wrong with this picture.

Kosovo: A Case Study for the Future of the United Nations in the 21st Century

by Kenneth R. Tingman (no photo)

Synopsis:

As an Air Force officer, working on the United Nations staff administering the interim government of Kosovo for six months was Kenneth Tingman's first exposure to a completely civilian-managed contingency operation. According to Tingman, political, not military, solutions are the only real, long term solutions to situations like Kosovo; however, the political solutions in this case were much more expedient rather than truthful. It seems to him that the general ethos of the United Nations would prevent developing and executing long term, viable answers to very difficult problems, not only in Kosovo, but around the world. Unless this ethos is changed drastically, United Nations solutions may be hollow well into the twenty-first century. Kenneth feels that the world has changed and the United Nations needs to grow and adapt in order to become relevant. About the Author: Kenneth R. Tingman is a 1983 graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and served on active duty for twenty-four years. He served as a member of the senior United Nations staff administering the government of Kosovo where he was the Military Assistant to the Principal Deputy Special Representative to the Secretary General of the United Nations. Mr. Tingman is a veteran of numerous overseas assignments and contingencies, having served in Germany, Korea, Turkey, the Balkans, and as a squadron commander in Saudi Arabia on September 11, 2001. He has been awarded numerous awards and decorations, including the Bronze Star Medal. Mr. Tingman is currently a Federal Coordinating Officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The United Nations and Changing World Politics

by Thomas G. Weiss (no photo)

Synopsis:

With updates throughout, this newly revised fifth edition serves as the definitive text for courses dealing with the United Nations. Built around three critical themes in international relations-international peace and security, human rights and humanitarian affairs, and building peace through sustainable development-The United Nations and Changing World Politics, fifth edition, guides students through the complexity of politics and history of the UN. Students of all levels will learn what the UN is, how it operates, and what its relationships are with the universe of external actors and institutions, from sovereign states to the plethora of nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations now playing important roles in world politics. This new edition is fully revised to take into account recent events, including the aftermath of September 11th and the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq, the first deliberations of the International Criminal Court, and the largest-ever world summit on the occasion of the UN’s sixtieth anniversary.

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

by Roméo Dallaire

Synopsis:

On the 10th anniversary of when UN peacekeepers landed in Rwanda, Random House Canada proudly publishes the unforgettable 1st-hand account of the genocide by the leader of the mission. Digging deep into shattering memories, Dallaire has written a powerful story of betrayal, naïveté, racism & international politics. His message is simple, undeniable: Never again.

When Lt-Gen. Roméo Dallaire was called to serve as force commander of the UN intervention in Rwanda in '93, he thought he was heading off on a straightforward peacekeeping mission. Thirteen months later he flew home from Africa, broken, disillusioned & suicidal, having witnessed the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in 100 days.

In Shake Hands with the Devil, he takes readers with him on a return voyage into hell, vividly recreating the events the international community turned its back on. This book is an unsparing eyewitness account of the failure by humanity to stop the genocide, despite timely warnings. Woven thru the story of this disastrous mission is his own journey from confident Cold Warrior, to devastated UN commander, to retired general engaged in a painful struggle to find a measure of peace, hope & reconciliation.

This book is a personal account of his conversion from a man certain of his worth & secure in his assumptions to one conscious of his own weaknesses & failures & critical of the institutions he'd relied on. It might not sit easily with standard ideas of military leadership, but understanding what happened to him & his mission to Rwanda is crucial to understanding the moral minefields peacekeepers are forced to negotiate when we ask them to step into dirty wars.

A Life in Peace and War (A Kofi Annan choice and recommended by Edward Mortimer - Former Director of Communications to Kofi Annan talks about need for reform, Camp David talks breaking down "the whole atmosphere in the organization became poison", and his boss. He picks the best five books on the UN)

by Brian Urquhart (no photo)

Synopsis:

Let’s start with A Life in Peace and War. Why is that your first choice on the United Nations?

I read this book long before I joined the UN. It came out in 1987 and it’s the autobiography of Brian Urquhart, whose life for the first 40 years of the United Nations was more or less synonymous with that of the organization.

He joined it before it really existed, in 1945, as a very young British soldier who had fought through the Second World War. And he was recruited to the team that was setting up the new international organization.

So he was there right from the beginning, and he rose to the rank of Under-Secretary-General by the time he left in 1985. He was particularly involved in the creation and running of UN peacekeeping, which was a brilliant improvisation of the 1950s, because peacekeeping is not something that is prescribed in the United Nations Charter at all.

He’s a delightful man, he’s now 90, and he’s still very much alive and writing brilliant articles in The New York Review of Books.

“The art of making the United Nations work is working out ways of getting governments to co-operate.”

But in this book, Brian describes first of all his early life: he was at Westminster School when Ribbentrop, who was then the German ambassador to London, tried to send his son to that school and Brian punched the boy, putting a fairly prompt end to that attempt at Nazi infiltration of a great British institution.

He then spent six years in the army – he was a parachutist and was actually involved in the disastrous landing at Arnhem in 1944. Also, at the end of war, in April 1945, he was part of the group that arrived at Bergen-Belsen and saw the horrific sight of the inmates of that camp. So nobody could understand better what the cost of war was, and the importance of finding a different way of managing human affairs. So he had a very strong sense of the raison d’être of the United Nations.

But he was also an extremely practical man. He helped to come up with this idea of having lightly armed, neutral, United Nations forces between the combatants as a sort of confidence-building measure when there’s a ceasefire. It started at Sinai in 1956 – it was basically him, with Dag Hammarskjold and Lester Pearson, the then Canadian foreign minister, who invented this and it of course became perhaps the thing the UN is most famous for.

But the thing about Brian Urquhart is, he is a very important man, but he is also a delightful man, he has a wonderful sense of humour and the story is really worth reading; it’s extremely funny. There are wonderful episodes – of how he went as still quite a young junior official, with Trygve Lie, the first UN Secretary-General, to Geneva in the early 1950s and the Swiss police came to see him and said: “Do you know that your boss is visiting the cinema with a lady friend incognito?” And, apparently, Trygve Lie was using the pseudonym Rodney Witherspoon as a cover, and the police were worried that for the Secretary-General of the United Nations to be doing this might expose him to blackmail or be compromising in some way. And there’s another wonderful account, much, much later, in 1960, when Brian was in the Congo and he describes being in the office of Patrice Lumumba, the ill-fated Congolese prime minister, just after independence, and there was an office full of telephones, and when the telephone rang, Lumumba was never quite sure which of them it was that was ringing. And he’d rush around picking up one after the other, and saying “A qui ai-je l’honneur?” until his nine-year-old son, who was in the room, pointed to the phone that was actually ringing.

And then a bit later, he describes how he went to Katanga, which was a part of the Congo that had seceded under the leadership of a dreadful man called Moise Tshombe, and Brian actually got beaten up by this man’s thugs. But then he was sent for when Tshombe was having a meeting with an American senator, Dodd, (I think the father of the present Senator Dodd) and so he was brought from the police station or prison or wherever he was, and he writes something like: “I had the pleasure of bleeding profusely all over the white leather seats of Tshombe’s Mercedes.” And then he was brought in this bloody state into the presence of Senator Dodd, who was a great supporter of Tshombe, and believed he was a great force for civilization, for holding back communism in Africa – and here was this by then quite senior official of the United Nations, who’d been beaten to a pulp. It must have been a horrible experience at the time, but he makes it sound incredibly funny.

So I think almost anybody would enjoy reading this book, and certainly anybody who is starting work at the UN – it should probably be the first book they read, because it both gives you an extremely good idea of why we need the UN and how the UN came to be what it is, and also that it can be fun working for the UN, that it is something worth devoting your life to.

And does the book offer any insight into what has gone wrong at the UN, things that maybe should have been done differently at the beginning?

What you become aware of – and I think anybody who works for the UN or has anything much to do with it becomes aware of this – is how much it does depend on the member states. The United Nations is essentially an association of governments. And sometimes a brave and brilliant man like Hammarskjold can improvise to some extent, he can work out what governments might be able to live with or agree on, and propose that. But I think a lot of people tend to say: “Why doesn’t the UN do this?”, “Why doesn’t the UN do that?” And the reason is generally very simple: it’s because one of its most powerful members – sometimes it’s Russia, sometimes it’s the United States or China, wouldn’t let it do that. And the way it’s constructed, particularly the fact you have these five permanent members with veto, means that it can’t do it. So the art of making the United Nations work is working out ways of getting governments to co-operate. It’s not about ignoring them and thinking you can do something just on your own, just because it’s the right thing. However nice that might be in theory, it’s never going to work in practice.

Kofi Annan (A Kofi Annan choice and recommended by Edward Mortimer - Former Director of Communications to Kofi Annan talks about need for reform, Camp David talks breaking down "the whole atmosphere in the organization became poison", and his boss. He picks the best five books on the UN)

by Frederic Eckhard (no photo)

Synopsis:

Tell me about your next book, Kofi Annan, which is not yet available in English, only in French.

Yes, in contrast to my first choice, this is a book that is hot off the presses. Fred explains that the reason he came to write the book is that he was the spokesman for Kofi Annan dealing with all the attacks: the oil-for-food scandal and so on. And at the end, (and I also was working as part of Kofi Annan’s team at that time) we wanted to try and define Kofi’s legacy and his achievements. And Fred asked me: “Well, have we actually got a list of the most important things that Kofi Annan has done in ten years as Secretary-General?” And we realized that we didn’t. So we started compiling a list, and in a way that list has grown into this book. And Fred has set about writing it in a quite interesting way, which is he did drafts of the various chapters, and then he sent them around to all his friends and colleagues and people who knew Kofi well and had worked with him. And he asked for their comments, and that of course stimulated pretty much all of us to write back saying: “Well yes that’s right” or “No, that’s not quite right, but what you haven’t mentioned is this…”. So the account gradually got filled out.

Chasing the Flame (A Kofi Annan choice and recommended by Edward Mortimer - Former Director of Communications to Kofi Annan talks about need for reform, Camp David talks breaking down "the whole atmosphere in the organization became poison", and his boss. He picks the best five books on the UN)

by Samantha Power

Synopsis:

Let’s go on to Samantha Power’s book on Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Now this is a very interesting book. Samantha Power is now working in quite a senior position in the Obama administration. She is in charge of multilateral affairs in the White House, the National Security Council. She became famous last year when she was on a tour selling this book.

At the time she was advising Obama and the struggle between him and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination was still going on.

And she was interviewed by The Scotsman and said that “Hillary is a monster,” adding afterwards: “That’s off the record.” But the journalists at The Scotsman were a bit brutal and said that for it to be off the record she would have to have said it was off the record before she said it, not after. So it got published.

And she had to resign, at least officially, from Obama’s campaign. But I think a number of people who knew her and knew him said: “Well that won’t last, and if he becomes president she’ll be back.” And sure enough she is back. And so that lends an extra interest to this book.

The other thing is that her previous book was about the United States and genocide, and particularly she wrote about Rwanda, and why everybody in Washington didn’t want to intervene in Rwanda, and why they allowed the genocide there to happen.

But in the course of her reporting and academic career, she had got to know this man, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was a Brazilian, brilliant UN official. He worked initially mainly on the humanitarian side, for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and he was particularly in Bosnia.

She was following the Bosnian war and she got to know him then. And eventually Kofi Annan sent him as the UN representative to Baghdad, after the American invasion in 2003. And he was blown up there, along with his staff, in an attack on UN headquarters in August of 2003. So it’s a tragic story.

But the interesting thing about it is that Sergio was a philosopher by training – someone who cared passionately about issues – but he was also tremendously practical and very good at getting things done. And, according to the precise role he was playing, his attitude to some issues changed. In some cases, especially in the earlier part of his career, he was functioning as a humanitarian and would basically say “I will negotiate even with the devil, in order to get supplies through and to relieve suffering.”

And he sometimes was prepared to go along with governments, or very unpleasant armed factions, in order to be able to help people who were in their power. Perhaps an extreme case was when he was repatriating refugees to Rwanda after the genocide, from Tanzania, and he pretty much violated what’s supposed to be a sacred principle of UNHCR, that people are only ever sent back of their own free will. And there was not much question that most of these people would rather have stayed in Tanzania. But the government of Tanzania didn’t want them.

And Sergio basically came to the conclusion that the best (or least bad) thing in the circumstances was to organize this in a humane and civilized way – and a lot of people felt he was going too far in sacrificing principle to realpolitik. But then I think, partly as a result of the different jobs he was given, and partly of his observation of what was wrong and why these terrible humanitarian problems arise, he came around more to thinking that human rights and the basic principles of the UN are very important and sometimes they trump the immediate, short-term humanitarian considerations.

So the book is very interesting because it’s about a very interesting man, who had a very interesting life, but also you feel that, in a way, it’s not only a book about Sergio Vieira de Mello, but also a book about Samantha Power; that she herself is wrestling with many of these dilemmas – about the relationship between power and idealism and how you get things right when you actually have responsibilities.

I keep wondering what’s she thinking now about Sri Lanka, or other places in the world where terrible things are happening? And if she were writing the book about herself, now, what judgments would she make?

And you can see that this is somebody who is quite honest and able to admit that problems are not simple and there often isn’t a straightforward black and white solution and you have to go for the lesser evil. And that’s pretty unpleasant when you’re dealing with a very unpleasant situation in which very large numbers of people are being killed or are in danger of being killed.

The Best Intentions (A Kofi Annan choice and recommended by Edward Mortimer - Former Director of Communications to Kofi Annan talks about need for reform, Camp David talks breaking down "the whole atmosphere in the organization became poison", and his boss. He picks the best five books on the UN)

by James Traub (no photo)

Synopsis:

Your next book: The Best Intentions.

This is written by Jim Traub, who is a New York Times reporter and feature writer. And he had done a profile of Kofi Annan quite early in his term of office, and was obviously interested in him as a person.

And then he thought, people will be interested when Kofi completes his term in some sort of insider’s account of what it was like. And so he essentially negotiated a deal with Kofi Annan, whereby he was kind of embedded in the Secretary-General’s office. Again, it’s quite a good read.

Of course I was one of the people that he interviewed, although for some reason he describes me as having a stammer, which I don’t think anybody else ever has, maybe I was intimidated by him to the point of stammering…but otherwise he’s quite nice about me in the book, and generally he’s nice about quite a few people around Kofi Annan, and mostly about Kofi himself. Although there are places where he seems to be suggesting that Kofi Annan is a bit of a cold fish and not really deeply affected by some of the tragedies he was involved in, like Rwanda, which I think is probably unfair. I think he mistook the natural reserve and dignity of the man for a lack of feeling.

One of the reviews I read said Traub’s book proves that “UN page-turner is not an oxymoron”.

Well that’s very high praise. I’m not the best person to make the judgment, because obviously if you’re one of the characters in the story you’re going to be turning the pages quite eagerly. I would say that for me Brian Urquhart’s book is a page-turner, and Samantha Power’s book too. So perhaps it’s not quite as much of an oxymoron as people think. It is true that it is hard, and a lot of the things you have to explain about the UN are in the classic category of things that make people’s eyes glaze over.

So Traub’s topic is UN-US relations: it does strike me that the US attitude towards it is the biggest challenge facing the UN; there are so many people, especially on the right, who really hate it and want to marginalize it.

I think that’s one half of it. The other half is that the rest of the world or much of it, thinks that the UN doesn’t stand up to the US nearly enough, that it essentially serves more to ratify and legitimize the very unequal distribution of power in the world, than it does to correct it. And certainly that is the big challenge for every Secretary-General – he wants to be seen as a champion of the small, the oppressed, the weak, the poor, the great masses of the world. But he knows that in order to achieve anything he has to work with the very powerful and of course in these times, and throughout the history of the UN, that has always included whoever is in power in Washington. And you’re all the time having to explain to the one, why the other’s view matters. And you do indeed find a lot of Americans who basically can’t see the point of the UN if it’s not directly agreeing with or supporting whatever America thinks should be done at any given time. Then there are a very large number of people elsewhere in the world, who say: “Well what’s the point of having the UN if it doesn’t stand up to the US?” And in my job, as Director of Communications, I found I was endlessly having to try to explain to each of those parties why we couldn’t ignore the other.

But what about the UN bureaucracy?

By the standards of bureaucracies, if you compare it to the US federal government, it’s tiny, I think it’s tiny even compared to the New York Fire Department. Now whether all the people working there are doing a useful job is a perfectly fair question and should be asked. But it’s not actually an enormous bureaucracy.

Does it need reform?

I think it does, and I think it always will. I think one of the clichés that Kofi Annan used to use from time to time is that “reform is a process, not an event”. But I also think that a lot of people who go on about UN reform are not really interested in that. The real problems are much more political than they are administrative.

A Billion Lives (A Kofi Annan choice and recommended by Edward Mortimer - Former Director of Communications to Kofi Annan talks about need for reform, Camp David talks breaking down "the whole atmosphere in the organization became poison", and his boss. He picks the best five books on the UN)

by Jan Egeland (no photo)

Synopsis:

So, your last book, A Billion Lives.

This is written by Jan Egeland, a Norwegian who has done various jobs, mainly in the humanitarian field. For the last three-and-a-half years of Kofi Annan’s mandate he was the emergency relief co-ordinator and head of the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian affairs. What’s interesting about Jan’s book is not so much the administration as the different conflicts that he was involved with. He’s obviously very idealistic, a classic Norwegian, Christian middle-class figure. There’s a lot about Darfur in the book. There’s a lot about the tsunami, which I think was on the whole a UN success, in that it did, by and large, pull together the relief effort after that major international catastrophe, in this case not a conflict, but a natural disaster.

And again, what comes out of this book, is the terrible dilemmas that often arise, the question of how far do you take account of political constraints? How far are you prepared to go along with people who are really very reprehensible, warlords and the like, in order to relieve people’s suffering? And also, when you take a stand on principle, how much you should publicize your views. For example, in the war in Lebanon in 2006, Jan Egeland was publicly and vocally critical of the Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon and the amount of damage it did to civilians. He did also go to northern Israel and see the shelters where Israelis were hiding from Hezbollah rockets. But he got quite a lot of flak from Israel and its supporters for taking a public stand on that. And some people said: “Well, he should just get on with the job and not make public statements.” But I think by and large Kofi Annan felt that making these statements was part of the job. Where there were problems, where it was difficult for his staff to get through, or where they were threatened, it was his job to speak up for them, and he did.

Well it’s a reality of living in America that you can’t say anything about that conflict without being accused of being “anti-Israel”, and the UN is certainly perceived as being anti-Israel…

I think it’s one of the most difficult things that the UN has to deal with. The views about it are so polarized around the world; it’s perhaps of all the conflicts in the world, the one that has most repercussions beyond the geographical area where it’s happening. As you say, there are a lot of people in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Europe, who instinctively side with Israel and feel that it’s being unfairly criticized. Equally there are very large numbers of particularly Muslim people who feel the opposite. But it’s not only Muslims, because by and large the developing world tends to sympathize instinctively with the Palestinians, which it sees as the people that have suffered colonization, as most of the developing world has.

It was noticeable to me that the first years for Kofi Annan were on the whole the easiest, especially looking back on them afterwards. And I think one of the reasons for that was that that was the period of the Oslo peace process, when there was a temporary lowering of tension in the Middle East, and a relatively hopeful atmosphere. But when the second intifada started at the end of 2000 and the Camp David talks broke down, then the whole atmosphere in the organization became poison. Of course it wasn’t the only thing, there was also the Iraq war, but it was very noticeable. It made life difficult. The last couple of years I was there I was supposed to liaise with the American Jewish organizations. Kofi Annan certainly cared about Israel and he cares about Jews. His wife is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the man who saved large numbers of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust before the Soviet army took him prisoner and he was never seen again.

So Kofi certainly has a strong sensitivity about the terrible things that have been done to the Jewish people, and feels that they have a right to a hearing and that Israel is also a member of the UN and is entitled to the same rights and treatment as other member states. Which it often doesn’t get. But, on the other hand, he to some extent had to try and stand up for the Palestinians, and had to stand up to his own staff, who were sometimes targeted by Israel. And he was also answerable to the membership as a whole, which includes a majority of states that are much more pro-Palestinian and very critical of Israel. While we were fighting a battle with American public opinion on the one hand, and as you say, one of the accusations against us was that we were anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic, through much of the Arab world we were seen as being much too soft on Israel, and much too willing to do what the US told us. So in a sense you can’t win with that kind of conflict. The only thing you can do is try to stick to your principles and try to make fair judgments about both sides. But that’s a lot easier said than done.

I would also like to thank Five Books for the work they do and from which we got the five recommendations and commentary by Edward Mortimer.

Link: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/edwa...

Act Of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations : A Story of Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies, and Their Quest for a Peaceful World

by Stephen C. Schlesinger

Synopsis:

In Act of Creation, Stephen C. Schlesinger tells a pivotal and little-known story of how Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and the new American President, Harry Truman, picked up the pieces of the faltering campaign initiated by Franklin Roosevelt to create a "United Nations." Using secret agents, financial resources, and their unrivaled position of power, they overcame the intrigues of Stalin, the reservations of wartime allies like Winston Churchill, the discontent of smaller states, and a skeptical press corps to found the United Nations.

The author reveals how the UN nearly collapsed several times during the conference over questions of which states should have power, who should be admitted, and how authority should be divided among its branches. By shedding new light on leading participants like John Foster Dulles, John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Nelson Rockefeller, and E. B White, Act of Creation provides a fascinating tale of twentieth-century history not to be missed.

An upcoming book:
Release date: December 1, 2022

In the Beginning: Secretary-General Trygve Lie and the Establishment of the United Nations

by Ellen Ravndal (no photo)

Synopsis:

This book reviews the formative years of the United Nations (UN), the world's most important intergovernmental organisation, under its first Secretary-General Trygve Lie. This welcome appraisal shows how the foundations for an expanded secretary-general role was laid during this period, and that Lie’s contribution was greater than has later been acknowledged. The interplay of crisis decision-making, institutional constraints, and the individuals involved thus built the foundations for the UN organisation we know today. Addressing important wider questions of IGO creation, governance and autonomy, this is an incisive account of how the UN moved from paper to practice under Lie.

Jerome, you really shouldn’t tempt me. My TBR List is at an unmentionable number … I dare not get interested in any book that’s not on my TBR List for fear it will go into terminal shock!
Warm Regards,
Andrea

Thank you Jerome and Andrea for posts and adds.