The Daily Background

Somebody recently suggested that the United Nations has failed as a global organization because of the situation in Darfur and the fact that it hasn’t been stopped by the UN. I should really write more about Darfur on this blog. The following is what I replied.

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While I certainly agree with your belief that more should be done about the situation in Darfur, I do not think that your suggestion that the situation in Darfur can serve as any proof of “the U.N.’s failure as a global organization.”

If you want to look at one failure to prevent genocide and judge the entire United Nations based on that, then one might say that the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 is as good an example as any. However, in that case (as in this case), the problem was not the United Nations or the people who represent their various countries at the UN– it was the various countries themselves. In 1994, no countries were interested in supplying troops to stop the genocide that virtually everyone knew was going on.

In part, the refusal of the Clinton Administration to label the Rwandan situation a “genocide” which would then require the UN under its charter to intervene, resulted in a lack of motivation internationally. The Administration didn’t want to put troops on the ground in African again after the event which the film/book “Black Hawk Down” was based on, in Somalia the previous year.

Back to the present day however, and Darfur. It is not a failure of the United Nations to prevent genocide in Darfur, it is a failure of the individual nations to volunteer the troops needed to supplement the entirely ineffective African Union troops.

The United States, which would normally be responsible for the bulk of the force (because the United States has the most powerful military in the world), is not working to donate forces to stop the genocide. This is entirely the fault of the Bush Administration, although it isn’t so much because they’re unwilling to donate forces (although this may be the case as well), it is more that there simply are no extra American forces to deploy.

Huge shocker, this was reported only weeks ago, but the American strategic military reserve is almost entirely depleted by the ongoing war in Iraq. According to a recent Congressional investigation, “there is not a single non-deployed Army Brigade Combat Team in the United States that is ready to deploy.” The report concluded “The bottom line is that our Army currently has no ready, strategic reserve.”

Food for thought. The lack of intervention in Darfur does not indicate a failure of the United Nations, but more a failure of certain member states (the United States among them) to donate troops to a peacekeeping force (which has already been mandated by the UN itself), as the UN has no standing army. The UN itself has ordered that a force be sent into Darfur to supplement AU forces, but nobody is donating troops.

Not a UN failure– a member-state failure.

Filed under: Darfur Related, Z-TDB Blog