Rohingya Muslims Fear The UN Failed Them

The United Nations was an organization created with a noble aim: uniting the world's people around a single legislative body and preventing a repeat of the war crimes committed before and during World War Two. This, however, is a promise it has failed to live up to.

Fundamentally, the UN simply functions as a large bureaucracy, guided mostly by politics and the whims of its powerful permanent Security Council members, rather than any lofty humanitarian principles. In the past years, it has been accused of not just being ineffectual at preventing human rights abuses but also turning a blind eye towards abuses carried out by its very own peacekeepers.

After achieving effectively nothing in Syria, the UN's latest crisis is the situation in Rakhine State in Myanmar, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims are being ethnically cleansed from their homes by a majority Buddhist population who consider them illegal 'Bengali' immigrants. And once again the UN appears to have already failed the people it purports to protect.

This report by Jonah Fisher with the BBC shows how the UN for many years promoted a culture of silence regarding the conditions in Myanmar. It shows how the organization failed to listen to those who warned of imminent or escalating ethnic violence, and instead cynically pursued a 'long-term strategy' of engagement with country's government. Now, with the situation exploding, over 1000 dead, and half a million refugees, the question must be asked: What is the cost of such silence?

And furthermore, if the UN is prepared to act as cynically as nation-states, what reason is there for it to exist at all?