Preview

Failure/Successes of the United Nations

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
552 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Failure/Successes of the United Nations
FAILURE OF UN Failure to prevent the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which resulted in the killings of nearly a million people, due to the refusal of security council members to approve any military action.
• Failure by MONUC (UNSC Resolution 1291) to effectively intervene during the Second Congo War, which claimed nearly five million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 1998-2002, and in carrying out and distributing humanitarian aid.
• Failure to intervene in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, despite the fact that the UN designated Srebrenica a "safe haven" for refugees and assigned 600 Dutch peacekeepers to protect it.
• Failure to successfully deliver food to starving people in Somalia; the food was instead usually seized by local warlords. A U.S./UN attempt to apprehend the warlords seizing these shipments resulted in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu.
• Failure to implement the provisions of UN Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1701 calling for disarmament of Lebanese paramilitary groups such as Fatah and Hezbollah.
• Sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers. In December 2004, during the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo, at least 68 cases of alleged rape, prostitution and pedophilia and more than 150 other allegations have been uncovered by UN investigators, all perpetrated by UN peacekeepers, specifically ones from Pakistan, Uruguay, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa and Nepal. Peacekeepers from three of those nations are also accused of obstructing the investigation.[
• Also, a French UN logistics expert in Congo was charged of rape and child pornography in the same month. The BBC reported that young girls were abducted and raped by UN peacekeepers in Port-au-Prince. Similar accusations have been made in Liberia and in Sudan. Yes. Almost everyone agrees that the UN ought to be reformed. The difference is just what type of reforms are needed.
Security Council- the SC permanent 5 members who have veto power (P5) are a throwback from 1945, and no longer

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Security Council, which led to lack of respect for the UN, which then led to lack of support…

    • 734 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Chapter one – Darfur Crime Scenes – explores, in graphic detail, the firsthand accounts of exactly what happened to refugees in Darfur. The violent murders, rapes and destroying of property are clearly shown from the interviews, charts and data that the research teams in Darfur collected. In chapter two, the authors go back in time and discuss one of the other most famous mass genocides, the holocaust. The history aspect is important information because it helps explain why so many people were against calling Darfur genocide, and would only call it a “crime of crimes” and “a crime against humanity” (Hagan, Rymond-Richmond). The chapter also gives a background in criminology and shows how much early criminologists aided in bringing to justice the criminals of the holocaust and other crimes against humanity. The third chapter discusses how much information the rest of the world did not have about Darfur and it was legitimately going unnoticed in many parts of the world. It was not being reported on, and nothing was getting done. In chapter four, Flip-Flopping on Darfur, the efforts by the rest of the world finally begin to focus on Darfur. It discusses he Atrocities Documentation Survey and what information it gave researches and the rest of the world. The chapter also discusses the disparities that the different…

    • 1569 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dallaire's Fax Analysis

    • 639 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Utilizing my background knowledge on the escalation of the Rwandan conflict into genocide, I was appalled by the UN’s inaction even after receiving Dallaire’s fax. Dallaire’s fax outlines some very important and specific details regarding the situation in Rwanda that explicitly showed that genocide was approaching, including:…

    • 639 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Rogerian Argument Outline

    • 461 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Innocent civilians in Nations such as Liberia and Sierra Leone endured decades of war. Only after massive intervention by the international committee were these conflicts resolved. The same can be said for Libya and currently in DR. Congo.…

    • 461 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Since the end of the Cold War, Africa has been a continent rife with violence mainly in the form of civil war. This can be attributed greatly to the halt of economic and political progress after the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, no longer needed to compete in Africa. Now that the rivalry has subsided neither country has any real reasons, economic or political, to have as large of a presence in the Post-Cold War era. Not only do these countries receive significantly less aid during this period of history, the governments in the continent have lost some of the already little control they had by no longer being able to pit Washington and Moscow against each other (Perlez, 1992). In July of 2003 Amnesty International first made reports on the conflict in Darfur, followed by International Crisis Group in December. Since this time the area has received a large amount of attention from the international community. Following the massive amount of media coverage, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, Mukesh Kapila named Darfur the "world's greatest humanitarian crisis." While there is an agreement of the international community that ethnic groups have been targeted and that crimes against humanity have occurred, there has been debate about whether genocide has or has not occurred, and it is this debate that the United States and the United Nations disagree on, which will be described later in greater detail after a brief history of the conflict.…

    • 2388 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Twenty years after the Rwandan genocide, some of those responsible are still wreaking havoc in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, where they are terrorising the local population and profiting from the area's rich natural resources. The BBC's Grainne Harrington reports on the UN's attempts to persuade them to lay down their weapons and return home.…

    • 469 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    ^ Democratic Republic of the Congo. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (April 2006). Retrieved on 2008-04-27. The IRC Welcomes New U.S. Law on Congo. International Rescue Committee (January 5, 2007). Retrieved on 2008-04-27.…

    • 12427 Words
    • 50 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Human Rights Dbq Analysis

    • 591 Words
    • 3 Pages

    To elaborate, despite the UN’s clear outline as to what constitutes a genocide, the UN refused to provide help to the Cambodians who were being “...executed in the hundreds of thousands…” due to the fact that they were considered “intellectuals” (Doc 4). This illustrates how the UN disregarded their proclamation of what defines a genocide, and would not react against the apparent human-right violations, as well as the mass killings caused by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Furthermore, the UN would not intervene with the Rwandan genocide, in which Hutu extremists brutally slaughtered the majority of the Tutsi population; the UN decided to “[not] reinforce the small and lightly armed UN blue helmets already in Rwanda…”(Doc 7). The withdrawal of funds and supportive equipment for the Rwandan UN soldiers goes to show that the UN refused to acknowledge the atrocious genocide that was taking place in Rwanda. It also illustrates that the United Nations acted as more of a peanut gallery by pleading ignorance than a peace group that halts genocidal…

    • 591 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    We think that communism and fascism represented something new in history because they caused tens of millions of deaths and had totalitarian ideologies that censored all dissent. We forget that tens of millions of Africans had already died under colonial rule. Colonialism could also be a totalitarian – what, after all, was more so than a forced labor system? Censorship was tight: an African in the Belgian Congo had no more chance of advocating freedom in the local press than a dissident in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Colonialism was also justified by an elaborate ideology, embodied in everything from Kipling’s poetry and Stanley’s lectures to sermons and books about the shapes of skulls, lazy natives, and the genius of European civilization. And to speak, as Leopold’s officials did, of forced laborers as libertés, or “liberated men”, was to use language as perverted as that above the gate at Auschwitz,…

    • 9124 Words
    • 37 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    United Nations Department of Public Information, 50 Years of United Nations Peacekeeping Opeations, Panel Discussion (United Nations Headquarters, 11 June 1998),…

    • 2704 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Rwanda, 1994, during the space of 100 days, one million Tutsis and Hutus were murdered. This happened because the Hutus accused the Tutsis of shooting down the president’s plane and killing him. The leaders urged the Hutus to go out and kill the Tutsis. They were supported by local politicians who gave them places to do the killing. In many cases, people were killing their neighbors.…

    • 380 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Genocide in Darfur

    • 1499 Words
    • 43 Pages

    Preble, Christopher. "Don 't Intervene in Darfur, Let the African Union Do It." ReasonOnline 13 04 2006 02 12 2007 <http://www.reason.com/news/show/117426.html>.…

    • 1499 Words
    • 43 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Kurdish Genocide

    • 1569 Words
    • 7 Pages

    The genocide of the Kurdish population in the northern portion of Iraq by Saddam Hussein and…

    • 1569 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Child Soldiers Inhumane

    • 1117 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Sexual violence and abuse is very common in most countries. But many of these child soldiers are very venerable to these sexual situations. Rape at such a young age can cause mental and physical trauma the rest of their lives. 30% of child soldiers are girls. These girls are usually used for sexual purposes, and are very often used as commanders or leaders wives. In Rwanda rape has been used as a weapon to destroy community ties or are used to start conflict. These poor children are extremely venerable to these situations. Soldiers and marines have been extremely troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them and in some cases they were placing them as commanders of villages. We also do very little to interfere with these situations. Not every country is as privileged as the United States, thus making sexual acts such as rape, forced marriage and molestation very common in these poverty filled…

    • 1117 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Security Council is made up of 15 member states, consisting of five permanent members and ten non-permanent members. The permanent five are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The remaining Security Council members are elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms. Each member of the Security Council is given one vote and the votes of nine members are needed for action to be taken. All five permanent members have to agree with the course of action, which is called…

    • 578 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays