UN report condemns its conduct in Myanmar as a systemic failure | News from the world

A damning UN report on his conduct in Myanmar condemns the organization's "manifestly dysfunctional performance" over the last decade and concludes that there has been a systemic failure.

The report, seen by the Guardian prior to publication, was commissioned by Secretary General, António Guterres, as a result of accusations that the UN system would have ignored the warning signs of the war. an escalation of violence before an alleged genocide of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar.

The report, drafted by former Guatemalan Foreign Minister Gert Rosenthal, concluded that there were several damaging failures, including cross-agency strategies, a "culture of mistrust" in relations with the Myanmar government, and "mixed signals and incomplete from the field ". The report should be made public this week.

"Without a doubt, serious mistakes have been made and the United Nations system has lost opportunities through a fragmented strategy rather than a common plan of action," writes Rosenthal. "The overall responsibility was of a collective nature; in other words, it can truly be said that it is a systemic failure of the United Nations. "

The Myanmar army launched a crackdown against the Rohingya in Rakhine State in August 2017. The violence, described as ethnic cleansing and genocide by the UN, included the death penalty. murder of thousands of people, rape of women and children, shaving of villages. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled the border with Bangladesh.

Rosenthal's report highlights the harmful impact of competing strategies between some UN agencies and some individuals. The polarized approaches between quiet diplomacy with the Myanmar government and public condemnation of escalating human rights abuses have further escalated with the worsening situation in Rahkine, the report said.

"Even at the highest level of the organization, there was no common strategy," writes Rosenthal. As a result, the United Nations system was "relatively powerless to collaborate effectively with the Myanmar authorities to reverse negative trends in the area of ​​human rights".

The situation has degenerated into "unsuitable fighting" where "those who promote constructive engagement sometimes elicit anger from those who favor a stronger advocacy role and vice versa," the report says. "We can only speculate that [former] The Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, did not want or was unable to arbitrate a common position between these two opposing points of view. "

Rosenthal pointed out that he was not investigating any particular individuals, but his report addresses the controversial actions of the former resident coordinator for Myanmar, Renata Lok-Dessallien, accused of having minimized concerns about the escalation of violence against Rohingya as part of its development agenda.

Rosenthal's findings confirm what many have said, that "there seem to have been cases of deliberate defamation events in reports prepared by the resident coordinator".

Her report indicates that Lok-Dessallien was invited to advance a development program and that she "suddenly found herself in a situation with a strong political connotation", which was not her domain d & # 39; expertise. Despite requests for badistance, Lok-Dessallien was "understaffed and without clear instructions from headquarters".

Rosenthal writes that the Myanmar government "seemed to exploit the various stories they heard from different UN entities to play against each other" and to advance its own agenda.

A UN source in Myanmar reiterated this statement, saying that the relationship between the UN and the government remained unchanged: "It seems that the government and Myanmar's armed forces have a well-defined policy with senior United Nations, in which they are trying to determine who is hired, work with them as long as they play the ball, then cut the ties and demand their removal when they do something that they do not do. like not, as we saw with Knut Ostby, "he said. "The UN, of course, gives most of the time to their requests and the whole cycle starts again."

Ostby, the current Resident Coordinator, resigns as a result of government pressure on the situation in Rakhine.

According to Matthew Smith, chief executive of the NGO Fortify Rights, among those who have pointed out for years the dysfunction of the UN in Myanmar, the United Nations was reluctant to make public the internal report.

Smith is pleased that the report was written but criticizes its contents. "The report repeatedly states that it is difficult to badign responsibilities to individuals, which is ironically representative of the problem," he said. "Failures at the United Nations rarely lead to accountability. Who else could be responsible for a systematic failure that involved individuals?

"This report will be useful if it can push the UN in a better direction, but it seems to have evaded the most difficult task of uncovering what specifically went wrong in Myanmar. There is no easy answer, but a certain level of responsibility is needed. "

Former UN Deputy Secretary General Charles Petrie, who wrote a report in 2012 on similar UN failures in Sri Lanka during the last civil war, said he thought Rosenthal had "done a very good job", but said nothing new ".

"It's really a question of the fact that the system does not have the determination and the courage to implement the lessons that are so clearly clear," he said.