The Ultimate Crime: Who Betrayed the UN and Why [Hardcover]

Linda Melvern's fine 1995 book on the United Nations "The Ultimate Crime: Who Betrayed the UN and why" tells many familiar and unfamiliar stories about the United Nations over its first half century.

The initial chapter delineates the story of UN peacekeeping in Rwanda, the helplessness of the blue helmets to protect the Tutsi population from massacre at the hands of the Hutu majority. The UN took a lot of blame for that failure, blame that really belonged to the member states, in particular those states that make up the five permanent members of the Security Council. It bears repetition: The UN is not an organisation with agency of its own, and certainly has little enough resources. The members set the parameters of its actions (primarily the permanent five) and supply it with (or more generally don't supply it with) the resources to act.

Melvern then goes back to the beginnings of the United Nations, it's genesis during the Second World War, the founding conference in San Francisco, to the organisations physical manifestation in the city of New York. From practically day one paranoia and hatred of the UN are evident in large sections of the American right wing. The organisation lost many valuable internationaly minded members of U.S. provenance due to the fact that all US born staff (a third of the secretariat at that point) had to pass muster (via the State Department) with cross-dresser and reactionary par excellence J. Edgar Hoover. Senator Pat McCarran (photographed in this volume with fellow traveller General Franco) and his gang of racist southern senators also held a number of hearings to harass "reds" in the UN. This is one depressing example of the effects of what is misleadingly known as McCarthyism had beyond American borders. That the first secretary general of the UN the Norwegian Trygve Lie collaborated with this is despicable, that he was a Trade Unionist makes it all the more appalling.

The book covers a variety of other issues including tensions between the General Assembly and the Security Council (particularly so amongst the three western permanent members once de-colonisation had increased the size of the U.N. it was a problem especially during the 70's when attempts were made to address issues of global power and wealth in the General Assembly); the lack of funding including the large debts owed by the U.S. during the 80's and 90's; the Korean and Gulf War (1990-91); U.N. peacekeeping in the Balkans, the Congo, the Middle East and Somalia; the lack of independence in the USSR and Communist bloc's members of the UN secretariat; and the scandal when General Secretary Kurt Waldheim's role in Nazi Germanys war in the Balkans was revealed. This list is by no means exhaustive.

If there are any weaknesses in the book it is when Melvern deals with issues that go beyond the confines of the UN itself. On occasions her grasp of historical reality is dubious: an example of this is her coverage of the Middle East, in particular during the Suez crisis of 1956 where she appears completely unaware of the collusion between the British, France and Israel and suggests that the Suez War was a war of self-defence on Israels part. Her account of the Nakba is scarcely any better.

The UN is hardly an organisation of perfection; it expresses the will of a divided International Community with the resources that it decides to (or not to) allocate. This will can be derailed or re-routed (or plain ignored in the case of the Iraq War in 2003 by the US and Britain) by the privileged five permanent members of the Security Council. Neither is it the threat to individual liberty (as the Texas board of education has recently decided to inform the several million children under it's jurisdiction). It is imperfect, and if it has not achieved all that it could, or that was wished for at its foundation, then one ought to ask questions of its members.

Few institutions are so often scapegoated as the UN, or poorly understood and reported upon. Linda Melvern's interesting book is the antidote to this ignorance: it is a source of information about the UN, and asks questions that need to be asked about the powerful members of the international community who have by and large betrayed the hopes invested in that institution. A thought provoking and valuable book that is well worth reading.