Actor-activist Ron Silver.
The LA Times features this article today about Ron Silver’s new documentary on the UN, Broken Promises. We’ve had the chance to see Broken Promises, which is an extraordinary account of the UN’s many failures - particularly throughout the 1990’s.
The film first takes audiences through a brief, encapsulated history of the UN as it arose from the ashes of two World Wars. The film revisits the heady days of the immediate, post-World War II years when it appeared that international cooperation could head-off major global conflicts, prevent wars, or mediate local strife. Broken Promises identifies this as the enormous promise or potential of the UN - a potential that has never yet been realized. Instead, the film identifies an early tendency - exemplified by the UN’s early handling of clashes over Kashmir, and over the founding of Israel - to conflate aggressors with their victims. This studied ‘neutrality’ of the UN - really a mask for its own weakness or lack of resolve - carried over for decades into later humanitarian disasters in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia/Serbia.
Particularly chilling are the film’s first-hand accounts from those who experienced the Rwandan and Bosnian/Serbian massacres firsthand, and accounts from UN aid workers who were themselves betrayed by higher-ups. What one gleans from these extraordinary interviews is the scale of the problem with the UN - the immensity of its incompetence and corruption. One UN translator, for example, describes how Dutch UN ‘peacekeepers’ in Srebrenica knowingly delivered his own family to slaughter at the hands of the Serbs - in a moment that recalled Jews being packed into box-cars for shipment to Nazi death camps. The look of betrayal on this poor man’s face is almost too much to bear.
Broken Promises is an absorbing, enlightening, and infuriating documentary that has the potential to alter the debate about the UN as it reaches its 60th anniversary. Many of the people who participated in the documentary were the crucial UN operatives on the ground during some of the UN’s most notorious humanitarian catastrophes. Their experiences are difficult to ‘refute’ in the glib, off-handed manner so many liberals dismiss criticism of the UN. To listen to refugee Eugenie Mukeshimana, for example, talk about the relatives she lost during the Hutu killing-spree in Rwanda is nothing short of heart-wrenching. More than that, it’s something like a glimpse at hell on earth. Why did the UN do nothing? Why were Canadian General Romeo Dallaire’s warnings ignored (he’s also interviewed in the film)? These questions only hint at the vast and systemic failures of the UN - the institution many still believe was more ‘competent’ to handle the threat of Saddam Hussein than was the U.S. military.
Hint to LIBERTAS readers: there might just be a way to see this film on the big screen here in LA come late October …
