If You Want the U.N. to Fail, Then Ban Ki Moon Is Your Man

Let it never be said that Ban Ki-Moon’s U.N. can’t fail at more than one thing at the same time. While North Korea’s attack on a South Korean warship goes unanswered at the U.N. thanks to Chinese obstructionism and weak U.N. leadership, North Korea’s refugee crisis goes unaddressed due to … Chinese obstructionism and weak U.N. leadership.

When it comes to North Korea, the U.N. has proved a highly effective instrument for China to prop up its puppet, and just about nothing else. To the extent UNSCR 1874 has helped us gain the cooperation of some nations, China has redoubled its efforts to undermine the sanctions that give the resolution teeth. Besides which, the cooperation inspired by 1874 leaves plenty to be desired. According to one recent U.N. report, more than 100 members of that oxymoron called the “international community” haven’t reported to the U.N. Security Council on how they plan to implement sanctions against North Korea.

Although 1874, on its face, contains some good, strong provisions, I said when it was passed that it would only be as good as its implementation. I’m not yet prepared to say that the implementation of 1874 is a failure — there have been some high-profile successes at Bangkok and in the Persian Gulf — but it clearly leaves much to be desired, and isn’t going to be sufficient by itself (sufficient to do what is another topic for another day).

I suspect that the Obama Administration’s new awareness of these limits explains why it’s taking a good, hard look at legal and financial authorities that China and Russia can’t veto. Four years ago, the usual suspects would have called this “unilateralism,” but these initiatives are no more unilateral than coalition-based foreign policy ever really is. All that these initiatives would really represent is a shift to a foreign policy that acts in concert with allies, and away from foreign policy that’s the hostage of people who see themselves as our enemies.

The Cheonan Incident

After all these years, Kim Jong Il still loves making a fool of Ban-Ki Moon:

North Korea on Tuesday rejected international findings that it sank a South Korean ship, warning at the United Nations the dispute could lead to war.

“A war may break out any time,” Ambassador Sin Son Ho said, accusing South Korea of “fabricating” the results of the investigation into the sinking of the Cheonan. [….]

“If the Security Council releases any documents against us, condemning or pressuring us … then myself as diplomat, I can do nothing. … The follow-up measures will be carried out by our military forces,” he said. [CNN]

A brief side note is appropriate here. There’s little new, I suppose, in North Korean diplomats behaving like buffoons in public, but news consumers deserve better journalism than that which manages to make a North Korean “Ambassador” look relatively mature:

Speaking in English, Sin showed a jovial side at least twice during his hour-long briefing, in which he fielded numerous questions from reporters, many of them Japanese and South Korean. He laughed heartily when asked how North Korea’s soccer team would perform in the World Cup in South Africa.

“This is not a place to be concerned about a soccer team,” Sin said with a big smile. “I am not in a position to give you any answer to your question, because your question is not directly related to the sinking of the South Korean warship.

He also pointed out that he’d probably be sacked if the Security Council decides to condemn Pyongyang for a crime he insists his country did not commit.

“If any action is taken by Security Council against us, I lose my job,” he said. [Reuters Global News Journal blog, Louis Charbonneau]

Which worries me substantially less than the fate of the World Cup team. So what are the prospects for that actually happening? Well, last week, they were saying maybe this week:

Speaking to reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York, Mexican Ambassador Claude Heller, the rotating chairman of the 15-nation council this month, said that he expects council members to begin discussing the matter next week, as they just wrapped up months-long discussions on imposing new sanctions on Iran for its suspected nuclear weapons programs.

“I’m consulting and I am in the process of having bilateral consultations on Korea in order that next week we will be able maybe to start a process of exchanging ideas among all the members of the Council,” he said. “This process of consultation has been very fruitful and we expect that next week, we will go on with this process, looking for a response in an appropriate manner by the Security Council.” [Yonhap]

This week, China is saying it might go along with some sort of resolution that
doesn’t actually name North Korea.

The U.N.’s inability to respond to rogue states, enforce peace, or prevent proliferation isn’t really an epiphany, and the U.N.’s failure to respond to the Cheonan Incident won’t by itself, mark the end of the U.N. as a global money pit, as an obstruction to better diplomacy, or as an enabler by default of aggression and anarchy. The primary effect of this incident will likely be that nations will turn to ad hoc coalitions to do the important work that the U.N. can’t.

We’re already seeing this to an extent, with President Lee’s more aggressive participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative and Japan’s move to allow its ships to search North Korean vessels on the high seas. As President Obama continues to follow the path charted by (gasp) John Bolton, regional and global coalitions are already forming to do the important work that the U.N. won’t. Both Japan and South Korea have also imposed their own unilateral sanctions, knowing in advance that they probably shouldn’t count on an effective response from Ban Ki-Moon’s U.N., either. Within the next ten years, we’re likely to see a regional coalition — something on the order of a Pacific version of NATO — rise as a counterweight to China’s military buildup. All of which is fine by me: let a hundred coalitions bloom.

For now, China may be able to place barricades in the U.N. today and extract high tolls for every obstruction it lets us pass. But the eventual result will be that the U.N. generally and the Security Council in particular will lose influence, and its seat on the Security Council is one of the biggest cards China has to play. To those of us who would like to see the gradual decline of the U.N. into something that does whatever the U.N. actually does reasonably well, this isn’t an entirely bad thing.

Now, if someone would just remind me what the U.N. does reasonably well ….

Human Rights

Vitit Muntarbhorn, the former Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in North Korea, may have been the only U.N. official in that institution’s recent history who seemed sincerely interested in the welfare of the North Korean people. Vitit is gone now, and his replacement has been named:

The U.N. Human Rights Council appointed Marzuki Darusman of Indonesia as its new special rapporteur on the North’s human rights in Geneva Friday (local time). Darusman, 65, will succeed Vitit Muntarbhorn who has served in the job since its creation in 2004.

The new envoy, a former attorney-general who also served as chairman of Indonesia’s national human rights commission and a legislator, has been a co-chairman of the Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism. ASEAN refers to the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

“Rapporteur Darusman is expected to perform his duties excellently in light of various activities he has engaged in to promote human rights not only in Indonesia, but also in Asia,” the ministry said. [Yonhap]

Chris Green has also written a good profile of Darusman for the Daily NK.

In the end, even Vitit’s strong words were of no real consequence, not even within the U.N. itself. For example, they weren’t enough to get the UNHCR or the Secretary General to really push Beijing on refugee policy. But then, the choice between confrontation and complicity is never hard when you’re Ban Ki Moon.

Between 30,000 and 300,000 North Korean migrants remain in limbo in China, according to different estimates, most of them women. “Some remain in hiding for a lifetime while others seek brokers or activists who will guide them along their journey out,” said LiNK Global, a US-based group helping the refugees inside China. [….]

As the United Nations High Commission for Refugees marks World Refugee Day today, it lists no North Korean refugees in China, though it designates them as “˜persons of concern’.

Got that? Nearly two decades into the North Korean refugee crisis, the UNHCR still hasn’t acknowledged that there is even a problem. And former UNHCR head Mary Robinson, who oversaw the worst of this failure, is still a darling of the global news media. I mean, what do you have to do? Break into a UNHCR office? Fat chance of that now. Beijing, in contravention of its obligation to grant the UNHCR “unimpeded access” to refugees, surrounded the mission with guards after that one. It keeps the refugees out and pens the UNHCR workers in:

The UNHCR has requested access to the North Koreans many times since they began flooding across the border nearly 20 years ago during a famine that was estimated to have killed more than one million people in their homeland. North Korea now has a population of about 23 million.

China continues to label the North Koreans “˜economic migrants’, refusing to grant them refugee status and repatriating those caught by the police.

Kitty McKinsey, an East Asian regional spokesperson for UNHCR, said her organisation was “quite disturbed” by reports of trafficking, sexual exploitation and other abuses of North Koreans in China. It also believes China should not send back North Korean migrants, she said. [Herald Scotland]

Perhaps because nationalism is so pervasive among Koreans, many of them have been slow to recognize the true extent of Ban Ki-Moon’s apathy about how some of them suffer. Take this group of defectors, who want to meet with Ban and tell him a lot of things he already knows:

Defectors who survived torture and near-starvation in North Korean prison camps say they want to meet the UN chief to press him to investigate crimes against humanity.

Their request, made on Monday, was supported by former South Korean president Kim Young-Sam and former Norwegian prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik.

Kim Tae-Jin, representing 105 petitioners, said in a letter to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon they were seeking his advice about potential remedies for rights abuses “so that our families, friends and neighbours still in North Korea will not have to suffer as we did”. [AFP]

You can read the text of their open letter to Ban here.

My guess is that China will tell Ban not to meet with these folks — or at best, to meet with them, smile politely, and say nothing of substance — and that Ban will do as he’s instructed.

It would be sufficient to earn Ban a place of revulsion in Korean history that he oversaw a series of South Korean abstentions from U.N. resolutions condemning North Korea’s human rights atrocities. But then, Ban could at least argue that he was, after all, a long-time career civil servant who was merely following the orders of his president. Today, Ban is the chief executive of an organization with a fixed tenure, and at least ostensibly, he doesn’t work for Hu Jintao. You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. If Ban Ki-Moon gave a damn about the murder and suffering of his fellow Koreans, he’d have spoken out and shamed Beijing into changing its contemptible enabling of Kim Jong Il years ago. This is one area where the U.N. isn’t impotent. It’s maddening to think that innocent people are being sent back to Kim Jong Il’s gulag now, and that in all probability, Ban could put an end to it all with a few strong speeches.

As badly as these failures reflect on Ban, they ought to mean an existential crisis of confidence for the U.N. itself. The whole point of establishing the U.N. to begin with was to preserve peace and prevent crimes against humanity. If that institution has become this useless for either purpose, why even have a U.N. at all? What does the U.N. still do that other institutions couldn’t do better?