It wouldn’t be the UN, we could laugh about it. The theme chosen for the last session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York, was “Restoring confidence and reviving solidarity”. We can imagine the number of UN officials mobilized for days to develop this newspeak so out of sync with the state of the world. Two weeks after the close of this noble assembly, Hamas terrorists swept through Israel, spreading horror and death.
With the war in Ukraine getting bogged down, two years after Russian aggression, and this Israeli-Palestinian conflict reignited by the attack of October 7, we now understood that the UN was no longer just a “thing” disorder of dubious usefulness, but that the international organization had also become an echo chamber exploited by powers in search of a new world order.
It’s no secret that the sprawling organization is taking on water everywhere. The Security Council? At a standstill for a long time, totally paralyzed by the veto rights of its five permanent members and, above all, become irreformable, due to lack of consensus. His secretary general, António Guterres? Many words, few actions, from this 74-year-old Portuguese diplomat who accumulates blunders and has attracted the wrath of the Israelis, in particular by declaring: “It is important to recognize that the Hamas attacks did not occur in isolation.”
A vast household
Since then, Israeli anger has not subsided, and the latest current episode, the scandal affecting UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for aiding Palestinian refugees, is unlikely to help matters. Because for months the Israeli authorities have been criticizing the functioning of this agency at the head of 30,000 people, including 13,000 in the Gaza Strip. Remonstrances brushed aside by the agency’s boss, Philippe Lazzarini, who did not hesitate, in December, to qualify them as “disinformation”.
Except that, since January 26, UNRWA has been in the hot seat, accused of having employed around ten members of Hamas who took part in the attacks of October 7. Several countries, including the United States and France, have already suspended their financial contribution, jeopardizing the humanitarian aid provided by UNRWA to nearly 2 million Gazans. “That the agency concentrates on its mandate in a spirit devoid of calls for hatred and violence,” even specified the Quai d’Orsay. Cornered, the UN Secretary General launched an internal investigation.
In reality, it is a vast clean-up that would need to be carried out to restore the credit lost to the UN mysteries over the years, undermined by slowness, lack of transparency and inefficiency. How can we bear the fact that Iran took over the presidency of the Social Forum of the UN Human Rights Council in November? Or that Azerbaijan, the aggressor of Armenia, was elected to the vice-presidency of UNESCO? “The UN did not create paradise, but it avoided hell,” said the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld, second secretary general of the organization. It’s up to the New York institution to prove him right today.
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