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They just won’t go home

There are those who think the United Nations does a good job of “nation building”. I’m among those who think otherwise and I’m happy to see there are those in “high places” who agree with me:

When foreigners come in with their international solutions to local problems it can create a dependency. For example East Timor is one of the poorest countries in Asia yet the capital is now one of the most expensive cities in Asia, local restaurants are out of reach for most the Timorees and cater to international workers who are paid probably something like 200 times the local average local wage. At the cities main supermarket prices are reportedly on a power with London and New York or take Kosovo a driver shuttling international workers around the capital earns 10 times the salary of the University professor, 4 years after the war the United Nations still run Kosovo by executive fiat. Decisions made by the elected local parliament are invalid without the signature of a U.N. Administrator and still to this day Kosovo ministers have U.N. overseers with the power to approve or disapprove their decisions. Now that’s just a different approach I’m not saying that maybe okay for Kosovo but my interest is to see if we can’t do it in a somewhat different way. Our objective is to encourage Iraqi independence by giving Iraqis more and more responsibility over time for the security and governance of their country.

I find myself in violent agreement with SecDef Rumsfeld yet again.

12 comments to They just won’t go home

  • George Peery

    Yes, on this issue Rumsfeld is spot-on. But then, even a stopped clock is right twice each day.

  • To give you an idea of how poor East Timor is:

    A friend-of-a-friend recently returned from East Timor. As an honoured guest at one village, she was offered the use of… the village toothbrush.

    We sponsor a child ( now a teenager – where does the time go?) in East Timor, and the last parcel we sent included a few dozen toothbrushes, plus other toiletries, brushes, toothpaste etc along with the usual gear.

  • A_t

    …so i guess US officials, & employees of US companies who work in Iraq will take local-rate salaries then, in order to avoid distorting the local economy. Or perhaps they’ll refrain from buying any local produce instead. Either way, how generous of them.

    & yeah, the *intention* is one thing; ” Our objective is to encourage Iraqi independence by giving Iraqis more and more responsibility over time for the security and governance of their country.”, but you do really believe that the UN people intended to make Kosovo into a protectorate, for themselves to run? However much you may dispise “tranzi” types, to ascribe megalomaniacal wannabe-dictator aspirations to them is perhaps going a little far.

    I’m not saying the US is doing a better or worse job for now; hopefully this is genuine “we’ll learn from others’ mistakes” talk, & not just distraction along the usual “look! someone else screwed up”, & “let’s bash the UN… maybe it’ll get us off the hook” lines again.

  • Only rent-seeking beaurocrats could possibly disagree. The UN and the left are worse than the old Victorian Colonialists in that they hide their contempt for the abilities of little brown men under the guise of liberal concern rather than blurt out the blunt racist truth.

  • A_t

    ” The UN and the left are worse than the old Victorian Colonialists in that they hide their contempt for the abilities of little brown men under the guise of liberal concern rather than blurt out the blunt racist truth. ”

    GROSS exaggeration. Is beaurocratic incompetence worse than massacring unarmed foreigners so that your country remains prosperous? Get some perspective, & get off your self-righteous rightist high horse.

  • Where I live in the deep south of London, it costs me not much more than half as much to go do the pub and have a pint of beer and something to eat as it does in, say, Chelsea. Different parts of London (and Britain) are filled with people of different wealth levels and prices of services and goods with a large labour component vary quite significantly because of this. (For some reason they do this much more than is the case in Australia). There is nothing inherently wrong with this. If a country like East Timor is going to get itself some modern infrastructure, then it is going to be necessary for some foreign engineers and the like to do at least some of the job of building it, and these people are going to want a western lifestyle while they are there, and this is going to mean that supermarkets and the like catering to that lifestyle are going to have to come into being, and they are going to be expensive because of the difficulty of importing those sorts of products into that sort of place.

    This is not to say that the jobs being done by most UN and NGO types running around the third world are useful – I think most are not – and that they do not distort the local economy in ways that are not entirely healthy and make some parts of the local economy dangerously dependent on the continuation of the gravy train – they often do. I simply find the “locals are suffering because restaurants and supermarkets are now too expensive for them” argument unconvincing. Typically in such cities I find that if I go a couple of blocks from where all the foreigners are hanging out, I will find an entirely different economy of markets and restaurants that is immensely cheaper, full of locals, and often a much more fun place to eat and shop.

    (Of course, in the long term a situation where locals and foreigners live in different economic universes in the same city is not desirable, either, which is why it is a good idea for locals to take over the important jobs as soon as can be reasonably be done. I think you can argue that the UN is often rather bad at ensuring this happens, so no, I am not really disagreeing with the core of the argument. You are, however, going to have at least some rich expatriates living in poor countries at most points if the countries are developing at all. This is desirable, even if it does lead to some of these sorts of effects. I think the real question is whether the expatriates are doing anything economically productive ).

  • Julian Morrison

    A_t: screw up once, stuff happens. Screw up twice, should pay more attention. Screw up three times, and it’s deliberate.

  • Sandy P.

    Don’t forget all those destructor of earth SUVs the UN/NGOs run around in.

  • A_t

    ” screw up once, stuff happens. Screw up twice, should pay more attention. Screw up three times, and it’s deliberate.”

    oho… so the US is *deliberately* causing chaos in Afganistan, not catching Bin Laden etc… i get it! 😛

  • Marcus Lindroos

    Fareed Zakaria (hardly a bleeding heart lefty) comes down pretty hard on Rumsfeld:

    http://www.msnbc.com/news/972911.asp?0cv=CB30

    Key points:

    * The UN is still managing Kosovo mainly because the US and EU have not yet decided whether the area should be an independent country or remain part of Yugoslavia.

    * UN taxi drivers earning much more than Kosovar professors is hardly odd, considering that Western employees working in poor countries *always* earn higher wages than the locals. E.g. one-star American generals in Baghdad make $10,000 a month whereas Iraqi professors earn about $200-300 a month…

    MARCU$

  • Zathras

    Actually, both the EU and the Clinton administration declared repeatedly their determination that Kosovo should remain part of Serbia. It is the Albanian Kosovars who want an independent country, something no one else thinks is a good idea.

    That is the crux of the issue in the Balkans. People who do not want to live together can be forced to live together by a local police state or an international police force, but left to themselves will immediately start fighting for territory and anything else they can think of. The problem is that Kosovars, Serb and Albanian, will eventually have to be left to themselves because the American military has commitments elsewhere and the EU will not sustain its deployment there without American participation.

  • Jacob

    “When foreigners come in with their international solutions to local problems…”

    The problem in Kosovo is that some problems do not have satisfactory solutions, local or international. It is not like a little bombing, a little nation building and some UN administration will solve the problems in a hurry. Generally it is a good idea to leave messy places alone unless they boil over and endanegr the whole neighborhood, or deteriorate into mass murders. The problems in Iraq will NOT be over any time soon, no matter what Rumsfeld, the Freanch or the UN do, or wether they stay there or go away. The current situation in Iraq is an enormous improvement over what it was before the invasion, but the low intensity turmoil may continue indefinitly. Nobody has wonder solutions, least of all the UN.