When I was a kid, growing up in the ’60s, I thought the UN was a good thing. It was, I thought, a body with enough clout (essentially all nations belonged to it) to stop genocide, to stop a Hitler, hopefully by peer pressure, perhaps, if needed, by force.
Genocide as defined by the United Nations in 1948 means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, including:(a) killing members of the group (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
I found this interesting web page: The History Place – Genocide in the 20th Century
The author lists the following 20th century genocides, in reverse chronological order
Bosnia-Herzegovina: 1992-1995 – 200,000 Deaths
Rwanda: 1994 – 800,000 Deaths
Pol Pot in Cambodia: 1975-1979 – 2,000,000 Deaths
Nazi Holocaust: 1938-1945 – 6,000,000 Deaths
Rape of Nanking: 1937-1938 – 300,000 Deaths
Stalin’s Forced Famine: 1932-1933 – 7,000,000 Deaths
Armenians in Turkey: 1915-1918 – 1,500,000 Deaths
Some of the numbers are estimates and some people have other estimates for the same events. That’s not really my point.
The UN was formed at the end of the second world war. Notice how the numbers don’t stop there?
If they can define it, why can’t they stop it?
At the millenium boundary, I thought about this a lot. Of all the things that happened, and all the things that didn’t, in the 20th century, this was the most monumental. Not the Y2K bug. This. This failure to stop genocide. To stop sociopathic mass-murderers of civilian populations. Why didn’t they stop
- Pol Pot in Cambodia.
- Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania
- Sadam Hussein in Iraq
- Milosovic in the former Yugoslavia
Isn’t this one of the most important things the UN was formed to do? Did they stop most such people in the world? Many? Any? I can’t think of a single one. Hussein was captured by the Americans. Cioucescu by fellow Roumanians. Milosovic by civil authorities in his country after regime change, long after the attrocities he committed. Pol Pot died in his sleep after civil authorities agreed to turn him over to an international tribunal, 20 years later.
I can’t think of one time the UN intervened in a timely fashion. To me, this is the worst failure of the 20th century. Why can’t the UN do better?