In the summer of 1995, I was irritated by a dismissal of the UN made by Ann Applebaum in the Daily Telegraph. Against this tendency to see the UN only as a corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy, I wrote this article about the United Nations Association, a voluntary organisation and some of its elderly advocates. Published in the Guardian, 1 July 1995
THE United Nations is not in good shape. Great hopes were entertained when the Berlin wall came down in 1989, but these have given way to global half-heartedness, evident in the caveats hedging tributes paid this week in San Francisco, where the UN Charter was signed 50 years ago.
The genocide in Rwanda contributed to this disillusionment - as did the impotent UNPROFOR tanks of Sarajevo, already called beached white whales several years before the Bosnian Serbs purloined some, thereby completing the humiliation. From Angola to Chechenia, the news mocks the UN’s pastoral symbolism of white doves crowding the sky…
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