United nations

The United Nations Security Council was designed to, in a phrase, keep the peace. Life didn’t have to be brutish and short; if the great powers got into a room, they could wield their collective might and solve any problem.  The Security Council’s top priority—“the maintenance of international peace and security”—would prevent a third Great War from killing millions of people. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a utopian fantasy land. It turns out that the Security Council, populated by fifteen different countries with their own set of interests, can be just as dog-eat-dog as the world in which it represents. And in the age of Donald Trump, the top UN body is an even more divisive place.

The first instinct of many people towards Tendayi Achiume, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights who finished her 11 day visit to Britain yesterday by claiming that Britain is in the grip of a Brexit-related upsurge in racial intolerance and discrimination, will be to tell her to keep her nose out of our affairs. I am not going to fall into the trap of offering material which could be used to try to prove her point.

The United Nations Security Council has major responsibility in its job description: to maintain international peace and security. It is spelled out in Article 24 of the U.N. Charter, a tall task in normal circumstances but one that nonetheless underscores the core of the council’s very existence. Without it, the Security Council might as well be simply another distinguished debating society – a place where interesting, intellectually stimulating conversation occurs but where people leave without finding much consensus. On the subject of Syria, the top U.N. body has been anything but distinguished. Nor is there serious debate going on in the room.

A Times investigation has uncovered the terrible fact that women and possibly young girls in Haiti have been exploited by the very people paid to keep them safe: the staff of Oxfam, which sucks up £300 million a year from us in public and private money.  It’s a shock — and it’s not. Under the cover of moral superiority, out of sight and out of the media, all manner of NGOs, charities, and the saintly UN have committed some of the most disgusting crimes against the world’s most vulnerable women and children, and got away scot free. Not even the hyper-sensitive  #MeToo movement seems to give the shadow of a damn.

In the early hours of this morning, the tired-looking Secretary General of the UN took to the stage in Switzerland to announce the first major failure of his tenure. "I'm very sorry to inform you that despite the very strong commitment and engagement of all the delegations and different parties, the conference on Cyprus was closed without an agreement being reached," said Antonio Gutteres. The week-long talks in the mountain resort of Crans-Montana were the culmination of two years of negotiations to try to stick Cyprus back together. It is a daunting task: although tiny, with an area less than half the size of Wales and a total population of 1.2 million, the island is deeply divided.

 Kenya I met Dr Tom Catena in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains — the site of an African war and famine few have even heard about — in a hospital overflowing with children. I saw bombs had ripped away their arms, flying shrapnel had taken out a baby’s eye, anti-personnel mines had shredded legs to jagged bone and ribbons of gangrenous flesh, infants suffering kwashiorkor and the other horrors of malnutrition. Inspired by St Francis of Assisi, ‘Doctor Tom’ has worked almost every day, all day, since he arrived as the only surgeon for the Catholic hospital in Nuba nine years ago. I asked him: ‘Why do you stay?’ He replied: ‘There’s no other option. You leave and abandon everyone here or you stay and keep going.