Before the end of the millennium, there was a feeling among the sensible that if 1999’s music – Britney Spears and Ricky Martin – were anything to judge the future by, then we’d be well advised to start bricking it. But Y2K was a failed emergency, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe continued his form of the last 1 000 years by repeatedly referring to the United Kingdom prime minister as a “poof” in Durban and the rand traded into the new era at under seven to the United States dollar.

We were looking for clues for the future in the wrong places: what had happened in the 1990s to the United Nations (UN) was all the instruction we needed to sniff the great turbulence between countries and ideas that would find the world almost hopelessly divided two decades and change in.

The UN’s most spectacular failure – Rwanda – was sandwiched between two lesser failures, namely Somalia (1993) and Srebrenica (1995). These happened atop UN officials being implicated in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandals dating back to 1990.

More ineptitude would surface in Darfur three years into the new millennium, where, like Rwanda, a lack of resources and poor management ensured sparks of genocide – again. Seven years later in 2010, the UN was central to a cholera epidemic affecting 10 000 people in Haiti via contaminated sanitation (finally, in 2016, the institution accepted some culpability).

In all of South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, and Yemen, the UN repeatedly failed to acknowledge early signs of ethnic cleansing and failed to protect citizens despite mandates and swelling, generous budgets. By the mid-teens the organisation appeared to have lost its focus entirely – leaving both critics and defenders puzzled as to its contemporary purpose.

Can Get Worse

If things couldn’t get worse, 2017 had other ideas. Along came new Secretary General António Guterres, a Portuguese socialist of modest repute who had led that country for seven uneventful years before being shellacked in local elections. During his premiership he moonlighted as the president of Socialist International, a worldwide bloc of political parties centred upon grievance and the redistribution agenda.

The jury is still out on Guterres – which is possibly the kindest thing you could say about his leadership, due to expire at the end of this year. In as much as Security Council deadlocks paralyse options, the man who claimed a reformist’s agenda has failed: one of the most evident problems he inherited – stifling bureaucracy – has in fact augmented, and the UN is today even less efficient than it was when most of its criticism was aimed at its sluggish processes.

This was especially noticeable in Goma, in what was then Zaire, shortly after the Rwandan genocide, where up to a million Hutus fled. War reporters at the time commented on the bizarre behaviour of the UN and its agencies. Nature didn’t appear too pleased either: the Nyiragongo volcano, in the shadow of which stood the refugee camp, started erupting.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear that the UN is prepared to effect radical departure in the selection of its new boss. Only one of the shortlisted candidates inspires confidence if reform is genuinely being sought (the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Rafael Grossi). Even worse, Michelle Bachelet is there – and it's said to be between him and her.

Bachelet was the former President of Chile, who served two terms (2006 to 2010 and again from 2014 to 2018), exiting her second with a lowly 26% approval rating. Like Guterres at the UN, much of the criticism around Bachelet as president spoke to someone out of their depth, unable to think strategically, delegate, or act swiftly. This was evident during 2010’s earthquake, where she dithered in sending the army to secure the worst-hit areas. In her second term a family financing scandal embraced the two areas of public life she had campaigned the most against: privilege and access.

Bachelet failed, as people with her political credentials do, upwards. After her second term she joined the UN as the High Commissioner for Human Rights, as which she served as until the end of August 2022.

Astonishing

It's quite astonishing, looking at her public record of condemnation. The regimes in Zimbabwe, Somalia, Eritrea, and Burundi were scolded only once each for authoritarianism. She flatly refused to condemn Iran for its tyrannical hijab laws and stayed largely silent on the mass incarceration of China’s Uyghurs, with the exception of a visit in 2022, where she claimed that the encampments were “educational facilities”. She said nothing about the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny until he died.

But it wasn’t as if she was entirely mute. She attacked America, which has way more democracy via elections for judges and sheriffs and councillors than most countries, for its “version of democracy”. This she did no less than ten times, while Nicolás Maduro’s narcostate managed just seven appearances on her rap sheet. This was especially curious given that her own researchers in her own department documented a litany of abuse – including torture – in that country.

Bachelet turned a diplomatic role into one of girl-boss selective agitation, fashionably ideological. It was completely inappropriate and served no objective – but it did align to the organisation’s general direction of travel, namely decline.

One of the theories tracking the UN’s decline looks to the accommodation of falsehoods as standard truths – particularly the often repeated claim made inside the plenary that Israel is a racist state. At the same time, it has never examined the concept and practice of race laws in certain countries. In 2019, it sent its Special Rapporteur to Zimbabwe, but the scope of Hilal Elver’s research was strictly limited to food supply. Exactly why that food supply issue existed – its origins and impacts – had been determined by a Southern African Development Community tribunal in Windhoek in 2008, where 79 farmers obtained the relief sought that the confiscation of their land during the myth of “reform” was illegal.

Being obsessively identitarian, the UN is said to favour Bachelet “because she’s a woman”. Not an economist, business owner, philosopher, or writer – neither a skilled diplomat with experience in hot conflict who thinks independently of the hysterical orthodoxy nor someone seen as "efficient" (in direct contravention to resolution 79/327). She’s a woman with convenient views leading a captured, inherently deluded institution with an oversupply of irrational activists. And that’s – apparently – fine.