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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a deeply human story, with the feel of Michael Herr’s 70’s m, 14 Oct 2003
This book is not recommended reading. That is, not if you wish to emerge with your innocence intact. Linda Polman is a Dutch journalist who covered all the global trouble-spots in the Nineties. In 'We Did Nothing' she reveals what actually happens when the UN is charged with tidying up unfinished wars without any real power or authority, and how truth gets manipulated to cover the savagery and horror that actually goes on. Polman’s text is punctuated by newspaper cuttings, offered without comment, reporting the same events she experienced on the ground in the worlds’ number-one misery locations. The contrast is alarming. Her principal aim is too show how the UN is bound to fail: it has neither will nor teeth of its own, being directed by the interests of the most powerful member-states which comprise it, and who routinely withhold their subscriptions. Recently, its impossible role has been to sort out the mess after the mass-psychosis in Rwanda and whenever the triumphant US army scored another TV war victory. In the aftermath, the only nations willing to maintain troops anywhere near the ‘post‘-conflict zones are those who need the pay - like Bangladesh and Zambia - for supplying their own ill-equipped ‘blue-helmets’. A similar backdrop could currently apply to the UN in Iraq, should they get the job. In Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti, Polman visits these troops and their supply lines at work, frequently risking her life and witnessing horrors that will doubtless effect her forever. Her account is likely to break (or possibly confirm) your assumptions on the benefits of ‘democracy’. It reveals that military might, in partnership with private supply and rebuild companies, is the force which penetrates the third world and leaves it reeling. After a shaky start, the book hits the reader in a similar way.
But its delight is its cast of characters. There’s Captain "Smile-and-Wave" Max (straight out of Apocalypse Now) who has managed to conquer and control North West Haiti with nine Rambo-style US Special Forces. He broadcasts his own up-beat evening hour to the starving, and makes things work - for now. "People tend to cooperate if you put a machine gun to their heads" he explains. Or Morris, the sharp-as-needles Australian wheeler-dealer, making a fortune selling vegetables to blue-helmets in Mogadishu, who gets shot by tribal henchmen, impatient for their money, while he waits for his UN invoices to be settled. The scary thing is that these characters are not fictional, yet they make We Did Nothing a deeply human story, with the feel of Michael Herr’s 70’s masterpiece Dispatches. Let us hope it has an effect.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Impotence exposed!, 11 Jan 2006
By A Customer
This book exposes the sheer impotence of the UN and the dark and bloody consequences of its confused identity. This book is a good read as an insight into the really nasty and grey world of international peacekeeping. Read the whole book from the start through to the end.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
How The U.N. blunders blithely on., 1 Oct 2006
Internally displaced persons ( Or I.D.P,s) is the U.N/ given name for refugees/victims fleeing from war and genocide. It is politically correct ( The U.N. is very politically correct) jargon and helps to mask the greater truths behind the rather antiseptic words themselves , and as such is a perfect encapsulation of their mandates(s)
This book boils down to three separate accounts of I.D.P,s( Though the account of Haiti is less about displacement than how conflict affects a trapped indigenous people) and how they were handled by the U.N. and was written by Dutch freelance journalist Linda Polman ( one of the accounts written about Kibeho in Rwanda was originally published in "Granta" magazine) who spent time with the U.N. forces on three missions in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda .
The three accounts reveal an organisation emasculated by the fact that the five key members -The U.S., U.K, Russia, France, and China- have the right of veto over any decisions made in the Security Council and invariably make those decisions in their own, rather than the country they are supposedly trying to help, favour. In effect if they don't want to do something they don't, leaving it up to poorer less powerful member states. More pertinently when they blather on about having a U.N. mandate what they are really saying is we acted in our own best interests.
Most appallingly the U. N, s strict code of non-intervention is revealed for the impotent shambles it really is. Polman witnesses thousands of innocent civilians slaughtered under the noses of the frustrated U.N. troops (As happened in Sebrenica and Kibeho) who can do nothing but observe.
These three accounts show the full incapacity of U.N. dictates and Polman relates the full horror and squalor that she found in precise, for the main part , remarkably un-emotional terms which is something considering the situations she found herself in, particularly in Rwanda.
Frustratingly, as a seasoned observer she offers no solutions though there are tantalising hints to were she thinks the answers may lay (referring to her experience in Haiti) and that is surprisingly with direct military action, carried out with sensitivity and empathy to the victims and ultimate force to the perpetrators.
Meanwhile no doubt the U.N. will continue to blunder on, repeating the same mistakes, stymied by a lack of real political will, squandering the money contributed by member states, many who cannot really afford to pay, and in the end achieving less in months than a single organised military presence achieved in one day in Haiti.
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