Ineffective UN

A very good article in the New Zealand News about how the UN has sunk into an inertia that disables it from doing anything worthwhile to protect the poor and oppressed of the world that it was supposed to keep safe.

New Zealand News - Dialogue - Malcolm McPhee: UN just an excuse to do nothing

The United Nations was founded in the mid-1940s with the hope of avoiding "the scourge of war" and "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights".

But it has been pretty ineffective as terrors stretching from Iraq to Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya show.

Yet choruses calling for UN blessings on international actions abound, as well as talk of "international law". Only direct United States-led action stopped the internal butchery in Kosovo and Iraq.

Law on international sovereignty in fact shielded Saddam Hussein to pursue his horrors within the boundaries of his state.
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The UN was left incapable of doing anything more effective about Iraq's behaviour than pass resolutions numbers 600 (in 1990), 661 (1990), 678 (1990), 686 (1991), 687 (1991), 688 (1991), 707 (1991), 715 (1991), 986 (1995), 1284 (1999), 1382 (2001) and 1441 (2002). The last spoke of "serious consequences" for Saddam's defiance.
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And more: why did the French Government not seek UN approval to bomb the Rainbow Warrior and what account did it take of "international law" and New Zealand sovereignty?

By one reckoning only two "intervention" wars have had UN endorsement since its inception nearly 60 years ago - the Korean conflict and the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait.
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Ruth Wedgwood, a professor of international law at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, recalls that the UN Security Council did not bother to authorise interventions of the 1990s in civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone by west African states, including Nigeria and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Ghana.
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What did the UN do in July 1995 to prevent the separation by the Bosnian Serb Army of 7000 men and boys from their Muslim families and their slaughter around Srebrenica in Bosnia - the world's first United Nations Safe Area, scene of the worst genocide in Europe since World War II?