United Nations: It may not be perfect, but it's the best hope the world currently has

A few days ago, as BBC's Radio 5 treated its listeners to A Day in the Life of the United Nations, an interviewer rather glibly asked me: "So how does the UN feel about being seen as the 'i' word, irrelevant?" He was about to go on when I interrupted him. "As far as we're concerned," I said, "the 'i' word is 'indispensable'."

It was not just a debating point. Those of us who toil every day at the headquarters of the United Nations have become a little exasperated at seeing our institutional obituaries in the press. The present contretemps over Iraq has led some to evoke comparisons to the League of Nations, a body created with great hopes at the end of the First World War, which was reduced to debating the standardisation of European railway gauges the day the Germans marched into Poland. Some have suggested that the UN's irrelevance is beyond dispute, and that all that remains is the mode of its demonstration: whether we will confirm our irrelevance by obliging the United States or ensure our irrelevance by failing to oblige the US.

Such concerns are, to say the least, grossly overstated. First, reducing the Iraq issue to a question of whether the world organisation is obliging the US or not overlooks the key message of President George Bush's appearance before the UN General Assembly in September last year. In calling on the Security Council to take action against Iraq, he framed the problem not as one of unilateral US wishes but as an issue of the implementation of United Nations security council resolutions. The UN and the earlier decisions of its security council remain at the heart of the case against Iraq.

Second, the League of Nations analogy does not apply. By the late Thirties, two of the three most powerful countries in the world at the time – the United States and Germany (the third being Great Britain) – did not belong to the league, which therefore had no influence on their actions. The league died because it had become irrelevant to the global geopolitics of the era. By contrast, every country on earth belongs to the UN, including the world's only superpower, the United States. Every newly-independent state seeks entry almost as its first order of governmental business; its seat at the UN is the most fundamental confirmation of its membership in the comity of nations. The United Nations is now seen as so essential to the future of the world that Switzerland, long a holdout because of its fierce neutrality, decided by referendum in 2002 to end its isolation and join. No club that attracts every eligible member can easily be described as irrelevant.

Third, the authorisation (or not) of war in Iraq is not the only gauge of the security council's relevance to that situation. Just four years ago, the Nato alliance bombed Yugoslavia over its Government's conduct in Kosovo, without the approval of, or even reference to, the security council. My interviewer's "i" word was heard widely in those days; Kosovo, it was said, had demonstrated the UN's irrelevance. But the issue of Kosovo returned to the security council, not just when an attempt to condemn that bombing failed, but when arrangements had to be found to administer Kosovo after the war. Only the security council could approve those arrangements in a way that conferred international legitimacy upon them and encouraged all nations to extend support and resources to the enterprise. And only one body could be entrusted with the responsibility to run the civilian administration of Kosovo: the United Nations.

I am not suggesting the UN will be offered, or would wish to take on, such a task in a post-war Iraq. But it is important to remember that this would not be the first time it had been written off during a war, only to be found essential to the ensuing peace.

In penning the premature epitaphs for the UN, let us not forget the soaring aspirations the framers of the UN Charter set themselves as they created the world body from the ashes of the Second World War. The relevance of the United Nations does not stand or fall on its conduct on one issue alone. No doubt what happens in the security council on Iraq is of vital importance to the UN's role in maintaining international peace and security.

But when this crisis has passed, the world will still be facing (to use Secretary General Kofi Annan's phrase) innumerable "problems without passports", problems of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the degradation of our common environment, of contagious disease and chronic starvation, of human rights and human wrongs, of mass illiteracy and massive displacement. These are problems that no one country, however powerful, can solve on its own, and which are yet the shared responsibility of humankind. They cry out for solutions that, like the problems themselves, also cross frontiers. The United Nations exists to find these solutions through the common endeavour of all States. It is the one indispensable global organisation in our globalising world.

And no, it is not perfect. It has acted unwisely at times, and failed to act at others; one need only think of the "safe areas" in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda for instances of each. It has sometimes been too divided to succeed, as appears to be the case in the security council today. But the United Nations, at its best, is a mirror of the world: it reflects our divisions and disagreements as well as our hopes and convictions. Sometimes it only muddles through. As Dag Hammarskjold, the UN's great second Secretary General, put it, the United Nations was not created to take mankind to paradise, but merely to save humanity from hell. As it attempts to do so, the United Nations provides an indispensable forum to bring states together to tackle the great problems of our time.

Some say the Security Council is too much in thrall to its most powerful member. The debates over Iraq have proved that is not always the case; but even if it were, it is far better to have a world organisation anchored in geopolitical reality than one too detached from the verities of global power to be effective.

A United Nations that provides the vital political and diplomatic framework for the actions of its most powerful member, while casting them in the context of international law and legitimacy (and bringing to bear on them the perspectives and concerns of its universal membership) is a United Nations that cannot be anything but relevant to the world in which we live.

Large sections of the world's people require desperately needed help from the United Nations to surmount problems they cannot overcome on their own. As these words are written, civil war rages in Côte d'Ivoire and sputters in the Congo, and long-running conflicts may be close to permanent solution in Cyprus and Sierra Leone. The arduous task of nation-building proceeds fitfully in Afghanistan, the Balkans and East Timor. Twenty million refugees and displaced persons from Palestine to Liberia and beyond depend on the UN for shelter and succour. Decades of development in Africa are being wiped out by the scourge of HIV/Aids, and the Millennium Development Goals, agreed with much fanfare in the largest gathering of heads of government in human history, the UN's Millennium Summit of September 2000, lag behind the pace needed to fulfil them.

The resources needed to eliminate poverty, to bring girls into school, to promote health and clean drinking water, have simply not been made available at the levels required. None of these goals can be met without the support of ordinary people around the world, the informed publics who sustain the political will of their Governments. And yet they hear little about these issues, whose feeble echoes are drowned out in the drumbeat over that other "i" word: Iraq.

The media bears a vital share of the responsibility for this. The cliché about television news is supposed to be: "If it bleeds, it leads". Today, radio, TV and even the print media appear to be working on the presumption that: "If it might bleed tomorrow, it must lead today." No wonder that, in the single-minded obsession with just one issue on the UN's vast agenda, a reporter can presume to speak of the UN's putative irrelevance. When I hear that "i" word I am reminded of an old story about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam finds Eve is becoming a bit indifferent to him. So he asks her: "Eve, is there someone else?"

One could well ask the same question about the United Nations. Is there any other institution that brings all the countries of the world together to pursue collectively the security and welfare so essential to our common humanity? This is why I am proud to use the other "i" word, and to affirm the UN's indispensability as the only effective instrument the world has to confront the challenges that will remain when Iraq has passed from the headlines.

Shashi Tharoor is the award-winning author of seven books about his native India, including three novels. He has served the United Nations since 1978, and is under-secretary general for communications and public information. These are his personal views.

The UN weapons inspectors in Iraq

FEBRUARY 1991: UN weapons inspectors are sent to confirm Iraqi disarmament, stipulated in the ceasefire resolution 687 that ended the Gulf War. The chief inspector, Rolf Ekeus, expects his task to take six months.

1991-1995: Despite destroying Iraq's chemical and biological weapons facilities and tons of munitions, the inspectors suspect Iraq is lying about banned weaponry. A key defector in 1995 confirms the extent of the germ warfare and nuclear programme.

1996-1997: As the inspectors test Iraqi concealment attempts, they are blocked by standoffs. But the UN agrees to Iraqi guidelines limiting inspections of so-called "sensitive" sites.

OCTOBER 1997: Iraq demands Americans on UN inspection team leave; they return a month later. Spying row intensifies, and in December inspectors are barred from "presidential" and "sovereign" sites.

FEBRUARY 1998: UN Secretary general Kofi Annan meets Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. The UN and Iraq agree on palace inspections.

NOVEMBER 1998: Faced with Iraq's continued failure to co-operate, the UN inspectors are pulled out hours before the US and Britain launch military strikes in Operation Desert Fox.

DECEMBER 1999: The inspections regime is replaced by a new body called Unmovic.

AUGUST-OCTOBER 2002: Talks start between the new chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and Iraq on inspections.

NOVEMBER 2002: UN inspectors return to Iraq under resolution 1441 to verify the complete disarmament of Iraq.

DECEMBER 2002: Iraq submits a 12,000-page "full, final and complete" declaration which repeats Iraq no longer has any weapons of mass destruction.