David Pratt: UN drifts into irrelevance as bombs fall on Aleppo

As violence escalated, the United Nations hurriedly evacuated almost all of its personnel, only adding to the sense of panic among ordinary Haitians at the time and giving rise to my colleague’s quip.

It was to be some time, too, before the international body returned to Haiti with a peacekeeping force to restore order.

Over the years I’ve heard no shortage of such disparaging comments about the UN, and indeed have made some myself.

At this precise moment, though, as the organisation approaches the 70th anniversary of its foundation on UN Day on October 24, it is facing criticism and scrutiny perhaps as never before in its history.

This week, as both outgoing UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and US President Barack Obama made their final speeches at the annual General Assembly, they did so against a terrifying global backdrop.

In Syria and Iraq especially, there is mounting bloodshed.

Across the globe, there are escalating attacks by Islamist-inspired terrorists and millions of people are on the move as refugees and migrants.

Where is the UN in all of this, one consistently hears people ask? Others go further, questioning whether, in fact, the international body is still fit for purpose.

The first thing to say is that the UN still matters. In many ways, it matters more than ever. The former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, hit the nail on the head in a recent article when he pointed out the near subliminal role the UN plays as a stabilising factor in international order.

It’s so “factored in”, said Mr Rudd, that its contribution often doesn’t register on the radar quite the way we might expect.

To some extent that is indeed true but, as a global body, there is no getting away from the fact that the UN has been found seriously wanting, especially of late.

A huge part of the problem, of course, stems from the UN’s members themselves. You could sense that frustration in the parting tirade of secretary general Ban Ki-moon himself this week when he effectively called out half the leaders in the room around him at the General Assembly.

You want to talk about governance failures, then let me tell you, was Ban’s go-for-the-jugular approach. Taking one nation after another he let rip, from Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan to South Sudan, North Korea and Ukraine.

Ban said his message was clear: “Serve your people. Do not subvert democracy; do not pilfer your country’s resources; do not imprison and torture your critics.”

While no doubt it felt good for the UN leader to finally vent his spleen – and it did make for terrific television – one still felt stuck with the nagging questions of why it took him so long to say this so forcefully and can we expect it to be any different in the future?

The bombing of a UN humanitarian convoy trying to deliver aid to desperate Syrian civilians in Aleppo is a point in case.

Should it prove that the attack was carried out by warplanes from Russia, one of the UN’s own permanent members of the Security Council, then, understandably, you have to wonder where the organisation goes from here.

The Syrian conflict more than anything else has revealed the UN Security Council’s obvious drawbacks. Its founding premise of a world ordered by states is no longer a truism or workable.

Over the past few years I have covered conflicts in places such as Somalia, Nigeria, Syria and Iraq involving Islamist inspired terror groups including al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and so-called Islamic State (IS).

All of these have evolved from particular local circumstances but often have a reach and consequence way beyond this, both regional and global too. In response, the UN Security Council that was established to help prevent and arbitrate state-to-state conflict is simply out of step with an entirely different world and the threats it has thrown up.

New global fault lines threatening traditional patterns of stability and involving a new generation of lethal non-state players, principally in the form of violent jihadism, have changed the ground rules and subsequently the UN’s ability to respond.

For these new players, state-based systems mean little or nothing, as does international law. Faced with this, the UN shows signs of drifting into irrelevance. It’s also not just non-state players that pose a threat.

“Present in this hall today are representatives of governments that have ignored, facilitated, funded, participated in or even planned and carried out atrocities inflicted by all sides, ” Ban rightly pointed out, talking about Syria in his final speech this week.

As the need for his successor looms, the qualities needed in the next secretary general are becoming clearer by the day.

Whoever takes on this daunting task will need to be willing to give recommendations to the Security Council without fear or favour to its permanent veto-wielding members.

When it comes to conflicts like Syria's, they must also point the finger and single out those guilty of what Ban described as “feeding the war machine”. Remarks such as these need, of course, to be made from the outset of any secretary general’s appointment, not left to his departing speech.

Words too need to be backed up by real deeds: bold, robust and first and foremost in the interests of protecting human life.

Many of these changes and improvements do not require the UN charter to be rewritten; they are already stated within it. What is takes is political will. In such a process there is also no such thing as “one-off” reform but, instead, the need to respond alongside changing global demands and challenges.

The time has come for the UN to fully adopt a doctrine of prevention rather than a culture of reaction that has so undermined its position and led to the calamity of wars like those in Syria and Iraq.

A renewed emphasis on peacemaking, social justice, development and human rights would underpin this, given how eroded such founding principles have become within a UN so often lost in its own power brokering and bureaucratic maze.

No longer can the UN be “last in and first out” of global crises.

The time has come for it to listen to those ordinary people across the world; those who more often than not pay the most terrible price for its decisions – or indecision.