Accountability             "Conventionally 'internationalist' administrations… are too inclined to see the IMF and the World Bank as ends in themselves, as signs of enlightenment and virtue, however much a mess they make of things. It is quite right to ask … whether these bodies need to exist at all, exactly what purpose they are intended to serve, and just how well they are discharging their duties, whatever these may be."

"Reforming the Sisters", The Economist, February 17th,  2001, pp. 20-21.

[Note: these are certainly continuous, core questions for the UN as well]

Accountability?           "Ideally the UN, foreshadowing a future world government, ought to be run by a global meritocracy -- rule by the best.  In practice, it is the opposite. Any state that can be legally defined as one can join the UN -- it is a club having no rules of probity or morals. …  The result is failure and graft.  UN officials are not answerable to bodies like Congress or the U.K.'s Parliament, which would be sure to track down, expose and punish gross abuses and manifest failures.  No senior UN official has ever gone to jail.  It's rare for anyone to be sacked or removed.  The top brass resist any kind of investigation, on principle.  The oil-for-food inquiry is unique in that it has taken place at all and seems to be garnering results.  But will any punishment be meted out?  Will any serious reforms be pushed through?  Of course not. …"

Paul Johnson, "The UN is for talk, not actions," Forbes (US), March 14, 2005.

Accountability’s importance, then and now        “[A free people has] an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge,  I mean, of the character and conduct of its rulers.”

                                    John Adams, second American president, 1797-1801

“Adams had in mind the ministers of the British crown in the reign of King George III, and presumably he knew that the knowledge  in question was interactive, moving mostly in the direction of the man being discovered as a thief but also toward the man afraid of finding out that he’s been robbed.”

                                                Lewis Lapham, “Uncle Sam”, Harpers’ Magazine (US), January 2007, pp. 7-9.

Acronyms       "An anarchy of abounding acronyms."

Title of an article by Anne Applebaum on the jumbled mass of UN system agencies, commissions, programmes, offices, and other units located in Geneva, in The Spectator (UK), 12 November 1994, pp. 9-11.

Alphabet soup             "The home of Alphabet Soup:

CGPRT    Regional Coordination Center for Research and Development of Coarse Grains, Pulses, Roots and Tuber Crops in the Humid Tropics of  Asia and the Pacific

UNGEGN    United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names  …."

A tiny sampling of extremely ponderous and lengthy UN unit and group names,  as quoted in Newsweek, "United Nations: Prizes and parking tickets", October 30, 1995, p. 21.                                                                                       

Ancient wisdom          "Facta non verba"

Latin, literally means "Deeds, not words", from Eugene Erlich, Amo, amas, amat and more, Harper & Row, New York, 1985.

Appearances, I            "The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities … They are often more influenced by things that seem than by things that are."

                                                Niccolo Machiavelli                                            

Appearances, II           "With the commission's move …., a classic European compromise is taking shape, analysts said, in which appearances and stated intentions count for more than the exact letter of the law. 

'Everyone will feel they've won something out of this', said an observer.

Eric Pfanner, "France wins extra year to fit its budget into EU guidelines", International Herald Tribune, October 22, 2003.                                              

[Note: this nicely-phrased comment on the handling of very serious issues concerning violations of the EU's stability pact also nicely summarizes much of the UN's decision-making.  Both processes beg the question of whether 'something for everyone' really serves the public's and the situation's needs.]                        

As time goes by                      "[Secretary-General Kurt] Waldheim's tenure was to be dense with irreproachable statements on global peril, and punctuated by referrals of critical questions to governmental bodies whose inaction was assured ….  In 1972, the first year of his incumbency, Waldheim called on the General Assembly to discuss the question of terrorism.  (In December, 1985, having considered the matter for thirteen years, the Assembly agreed  --  as the New York Times reported  --  to the adoption of 'a landmark resolution … that condemns all acts of terrorism as 'criminal.'')  In 1973, the Times noted that a U.N. body 'has been trying to find a definition for the word 'aggression' for 23 years.'  The Times article concluded, however, by endorsing a favored U.N. view: 'In the words of Charles Yost … a former representative here, 'just existing is perhaps the most important quality of the United Nations."

Shirley Hazzard, "Breaking faith  -- Part II", The New Yorker, October 2, 1989, 74-96 (74).                                                    

As time goes by   (30 years later)         "The Famine Early Warning Systems Network … monitors the threat of mass hunger in some of the poorest parts of the world.  FEWS Net has published an inquiry into the world's failure to respond to food shortages in Niger and the rest of the Sahel.  The report is entitled simply: 'What went wrong?'  That is the right question to ask.  But what is surprising, and disconcerting, is that the report was written in 1997, not 2005.  This illustrates two things: Niger's present nightmare is a recurring one; and whatever went wrong in 1997 was not put right by 2005. 

"Famine relief: Starving for the cameras", The Economist, August 20th, 2005, pp. 10-11.                                                        

Babel             "In those days the world teemed, the people multiplied, the world bellowed like a wild bull, and the great god was aroused by the clamor.  Enlil heard the clamour and he said to the gods in council, 'The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel.'  So the gods agreed to exterminate mankind."

--The Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest version of the Great Flood myth, introductory quote in Garrett Keizer, "Sound and fury: The politics of noise in a loud society", Harper's Magazine, March 2001.

Blah  blah          “They all said they would help us.  But all they did was blah, blah, blah.”

[A 58-year year old Burmese man, speaking on condition of anonymity, on statements by the United Nations and other countries that condemned the ruling junta’s violent crackdown.  Newsweek International, Perspectives,  November 5, 2007.]

Brain dead?                “[The] endless cycle of resolutions ‘recalling,’ ‘reiterating,’ and often in large part simply repeating previous resolutions --  which makes up a high proportion of the business with which delegates occupy themselves in the General Assembly and other UN ‘governing’ bodies – prompted one experienced Asian diplomat flatly to assert, at a closed seminar in England in 1988, that ‘the UN is brain-dead.’”

Rosemary Righter, Utopia lost: The United Nations and world order, Twentieth Century Fund, New York, 1995, p.378.                                     

Breath of life                "…Western politicians should not continue to speak of 'breathing life' into the UN.  For the UN is not a 'dead' organization; we only thought it was dead because we were not interested in its fate.  In fact, it has been alive and even growing for a long time  --  living and breathing according to the fashions of another age."

Anne Applebaum, "Is the UN really necessary?", The Spectator (UK), 31 July 1993.                                                                                         

Bureaucracy               "The UN bureaucracy is completely indestructible, and reigns supreme.  Always the first target of any reform, it manages to override each and every assault on it with a consistency and strength which perplexes the best and the brightest.  No matter how diligently and thoroughly the UN is trimmed, reshaped, or redirected, the bureaucracy in the end rules all, and defeats all."

Steven Roswick, "UN-Believable, UN Dictionary", Secretariat News (New York), May 1992, p. 19.                                                   

Caesar’s wife              “Failing seismic amendments to the [UN] Charter, there is still a lot that can be done to improve today's rather sorry state of affairs: the further reduction of overlapping agencies; a greater insistence on the quality of incoming UN officials; less rigid emphasis on rotation; and greater consistency regarding standards when applying … UN policies.  The same recommendations also apply to the Secretary General's office itself;  like Caesar's wife, it has to be above suspicion, a house of rectitude, efficiency, and fairness.”

Paul Kennedy, The parliament of man: The past, present, and future of the United Nations, Random House, New York, 2006, pp. 271-272.

"Candidates for cutting The key to reform … is not adding posts, but getting rid of them.  The U.N. needs a sunset law to eliminate units that have outlived their usefulness.

    --   The Trusteeship Council, a holdover from the post-World War I League of Nations, was set up to supervise the administration of trust territories.  Its function has shriveled to almost nothing, yet it continues to employ 13 professionals.

    --  The moribund Military Staff Committee, with delegates from 39 nations, meets regularly for splendid lunches, but has never played a meaningful role, not even during last year's Gulf War."

Excerpted from Bonnie Angelo, "The U.N. today: New responsibilities", Time, February 3, 1992, in UN Special (Geneva), March 1992, pp. 9-10.

Career anthem for the many UN diplomats who dream of becoming UN-ocrats?    

“The Lord above gave man an arm of iron
So he could do his job and never shirk.
The Lord gave man an arm of iron - but
With a little bit of luck, With a little bit of luck,
Someone else'll do the blinkin' work!
With a little bit...with a little bit...
With a little bit of luck you'll never work!”

                                    “With a little bit of luck,” from the musical comedy

                                                “My Fair Lady”

Career suicide             "Any staff member who criticizes his boss on the record has destroyed his UN career prospects."

A senior UN official in the late 1980s, informally advising a diplomat at a UN mission in New York who sought an organizational transfer for a countryman who had been punished for objecting to his boss's actions

Caterpillar, lipstick         “[A year ago, then-US Ambassador John Bolton explained the US rejection of plans for a] … supposedly more credible [UN] Human Rights Council.  … ‘We want a butterfly,’ he said.  ‘We don’t intend to put lipstick on a caterpillar and call it a success.’  Mr. Bolton, now in enforced retirement … may feel vindicated as the ludicrously painted creature creeps along, seemingly doomed never to metamorphose and take wing. …  [As its latest session ended] … on March 30^th, the 47-member group again failed to address many egregious human-rights abuses around the world.”

“Human rights: Bad counsel: The UN adrift on human rights”, The Economist, April 7^th, 2007, pp. 56-57.

Climate change obstacles        “[In the climate change negotiations,] … we must confront the fact that the world is far from a single country.   This creates three huge problems:  collective (in)action, perceived injustice; and indifference. …  If they are to tolerate radical change in energy use, people must first be frightened and then they must be offered a good way out … or the cause, in all probability, will be lost.  Our children and grandchildren will then find out whether it was a real wolf or not.”

Martin Wolf, “Why the climate change wolf is so hard to kill off”, Financial Times (UK), December 4, 2007.

Conceal/reveal                        " UN documents can usually be rated on a scale somewhere between uninspiring and awesomely tedious, so he has to winnow stacks of paper to get the grains of information concealed inside.  'Diplomats measure success by how much information they conceal -- journalists by how much they reveal,' he aphorises."

"Weekly digest finds a niche", article on the International Documents Review, a weekly  newsletter on the UN, and its publisher, Bhaskar Menon, a 20-year veteran of the organization, in the Secretariat News (New York), July 1991, p. 16.

Cookies and sex                     "No senior UN official will ever be punished unless he is caught with his hand flagrantly in the financial cookie jar, or in an abusive sexual act,  and even then only if those actions have appeared in, or might appear in, the press"

A veteran UN administrative insider at headquarters in New York in the mid-1990s

Core issues concisely stated               "There is a culture of secrecy that characterizes not only the World Bank, but most of the vital international organizations -- including the United Nations.  Unless these public entities establish independent oversight, external auditing of managerial and financial controls and safe channels for reporting wrongdoing, scandalous harm will continue to weaken them and only compound the grief suffered by the billions of needy people they are mandated to serve."

Melanie Beth Oliviero, "More transparency", International Herald Tribune, February 26-27, 2005.                                                                                 

Corrupted  by comfort and cash            "Senior U.N. officials have been corrupted: not by power and ambition but by their tax-free salaries and their comfortable lives.  Servants and secretaries help them get through the day and perform their non-existent jobs.  All they want is for this to continue until they retire.”

                                Tom Bethell, National Review (US), August 28, 1995.                                

Corruption at the UN      “There was corruption within the United Nations at a critical management point.  There was exposure of important administrative and control weaknesses … The Committee believes: first, 'professional disciplines' at the United Nations are weak and eroded …; second, there appears to be a pervasive culture of responsibility avoidance and resistance to accountability; third, there was … an absence of suitable administrative infrastructure; and fourth, there was an absence of adequate and independent control and auditing capacity."

The "Volcker Panel”), "The Management of the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme", September 7, 2005, Volume I, pages 9, 13.

Corruption is insidious       “Corruption is a cancer that steals from the poor, eats away at governance and moral fiber and destroys trust.”

Robert Zoellick, new president of the World Bank, in Steven Weisman, as quoted in “New world bank head will continue fight on corruption”, International Herald Tribune, June 26, 2007.

Credibility lost                         “We must make sure that [the United Nations’] work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.”

                                    Winston Churchill, 1946, as cited in Dore Gold, Tower of Babble, 2004.

Cronyism        "Life in the UN Secretariat is really all about 'jobs for the boys.'"

A long time diplomatic observer and participant in UN affairs, in the late 1990s.

[Note:This central point has several corollaries:

The boys are predominantly old, since it takes a lengthy diplomatic career to reach the lofty levels from which one can grab a senior UN job;

When the boys are established in their posts, they bring in, insofar as possible, their assistants, secretaries, companions, relatives, and friends;

In the most extreme cases, jobs are even tailor-made for powerful national diplomatic or political figures;

The process indeed involves 'the boys', since women still do not fare well in seeking senior UN jobs;                       

Some of the most vociferous diplomatic critics of UN personnel policy are those who failed to get the high-level Secretariat jobs they thought they deserved.]

Cowboys        "The rules and inspiration for UN reporting on its performance may well have come from the old American cowboy ballad 'Home on the range'  --  'where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.'"

A longtime observer of 'transparent" UN reporting in the early 2000's

Culture, dysfunctional         “If you don’t have a culture of integrity and responsibility in an organization, one can audit day and night and all you do is uncover a modest percentage of abuses,’ … [accountability expert Ted Galen Carpenter] said.  ‘What’s lacking in the United Nations is that culture of integrity and responsibility.’”

Fred Lucas, “UN still a management mess, government reports say”, Cybercast News Service, January 28, 2008.

Dangerous                  " …. I learned as an adult what I had learned as a child, which is that the world is a dangerous place  --  and learned also that not everyone knows this."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan with Susanne Warner, A dangerous place, Atlantic Monthly, Little, Brown, Boston, Toronto, 1978.

[Note: The quote is from the opening chapter of the book, which covers his service as U.S. Ambassador to the UN in 1975-1976.]

Déjà vu           "Neglected implementation:        It is seldom possible to use the word 'new' about proposals for reorganization or better coordination in the UN system.  They are almost always repetitions from an earlier round."

Erskine Childers, with Brian Urquhart, "Renewing the United Nations System", Development Dialogue, 1994:1, Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Uppsala, Sweden, 1994, p. 34.

Democracy’s merits         “Democracy is reasonably good at some things: pushing scoundrels out of office; checking their worst excesses by requiring openness; and simply giving large numbers of people the feeling of having a voice.”

Tyler Cowen, International Herald Tribune, February 2008.    [Note: The UN always exhorts countries toward such democratic goals, but in its own global operations has had very little success in these three key areas.]

Dialogue         "stating the obvious to the oblivious"

                        "no platitude is left unsaid"

                        "disguise and survive"

                        "it makes you feel like a mushroom -- kept in the dark and fed a diet of manure."

Some wry general commentaries on General Assembly speeches and the associated Secretariat reports.           

Dinosaurs       "We were like a dinosaur: they'd whack us on the tail, and three weeks later we'd feel it in our brain."

[comment by an executive of a once-dominant multinational corporation, whose 'smug, massive' bureaucracy was forced into a major restructuring and downsizing after being overtaken by its more dynamic competitors, as quoted in Joint Inspection Unit, Chapter II.D., "Accountability for accountability," in "Management in the United Nations: Work in progress", UN document A/50/507,1995, p. 22.                                                             

Diplomacy                  "Diplomacy means the art of nearly deceiving all your friends, but not quite deceiving all your enemies.  --  Kofi Busia

Diplomats are useful only in fair weather.  As soon as it rains they drown in every drop. --  Charles de Gaulle.

All diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means.  --  Zhou Enlai

A diplomat's life is made up of three ingredients: protocol, Geritol and alcohol.  --  Adlai Stevenson

Apart from a good mind, the two most important assets for a United Nations diplomat are a good tailor and a strong liver.  --  Richard Woolcott

An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.  --  Henry Wotton

Diplomats were invented simply to waste time.  --  David Lloyd George

Diplomacy is to do and say, The nastiest things in the nicest way. --  Isaac Goldberg"

"Thoughts on the business of life", Forbes Magazine, January 3, 2003.

Diplomatic delicacy                 "Conduct which is wily and subtle, without being directly false or fraudulent, is styled 'diplomatic.