Polishing the Tarnished Image

Abstract

Peter Maas, the author of the quote above, was actually wrong. The UN had lost its integrity, and its credibility, long before the debacle of peacekeeping in Bosnia. The honeymoon only lasted for about 20 years after the organization was established. By then, in the late 1960s, the core group of powers that created it was a tiny minority in an organization that they still controlled but whose rhetoric proclaimed that there was some semblance of equality among nations. In addition, the major event of international relations – the Cold War – served to show how circumscribed was the UN’s power in relation to the states that ran it.

Our world would be a better place if there was an unbiased organization that functioned as an arbiter of national interests, that acted according to principles rather than interests. In my younger days – an era that I realize ended when I first stepped foot in Bosnia – I had thought, like many others, that the United Nations might fulfill this role after the Cold War. We learned in Bosnia that the U.N. flag deserves no more trust than any of the national flags in front of its New York headquarters. Integrity is like virginity; you can’t get it back once it is gone, and the U.N. lost it in Bosnia.¹