Detractors often call the United Nations a “talking shop,” home to 192 nations and where, it’s memorably been said, “no issue is too small to be debated endlessly.”
But the real UN, almost invisible to the general public, is an action-oriented UN. This real UN feeds 90 million people in more than 70 countries — a thin blue line between hungry people and starvation. It wipes out debilitating diseases like smallpox and polio and vaccinates 40 percent of the world’s children. It provides $2 billion annually in emergency disaster relief and maintains the second-largest army in the world — a global peacekeeping force of 120,000 brave men and women who go where others can’t or won’t go.
In my travels, often to the world’s most difficult places, I always try to meet the faces behind these facts and figures. At a film festival in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, I recently introduced a few of them to Hollywood screenwriters and directors who wanted to learn more about the UN.
One was a young Canadian woman from UNICEF, the UN agency dedicated to the protection, well-being and rights of children the world over. Her name: Pernille Ironside. Her job: To go alone, with a small team, into the eastern wilds of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). There she confronts warlords and demands that they give up their “child soldiers,” boys and sometimes girls as young as 8 or 10 who have been recruited or kidnapped to fight in the country’s long-running guerilla wars. Often as not, she succeeds. Over the past few years, the UN mission in the DRC has secured the release of 32,000 of an estimated 35,000 such children.
Another was Kathi Austen, a UN arms-trafficking expert who has spent much of the past decade tracking illegal weapons smugglers operating in the DRC and other conflict zones across Africa. Partly as a result of her dogged efforts, the alleged leader of one of the world’s largest trafficking networks, Viktor Bout, was recently arrested on terrorism charges in Thailand.
In my job I meet many other faces of this real UN, seldom so famous but no less selfless or dedicated. As for the Talk Shop on Turtle Bay, site of UN headquarters, let us remember that talking sometimes achieves things, too.
It’s the talk that put UN peacekeepers on the ground in 18 countries on four continents. It’s the talk that raises the money and mandates the programs that feed so many of the world’s hungry. It’s the talk that marks the world’s first steps toward dealing with climate change, the global food crisis and a daily array of humanitarian crises.
The convening power of the UN, today, is the ultimate “soft power” on the globe.
— Ban Ki-moon is secretary-general of the UN.
