The United Nations Had a Tough Year in 2014

2014 ended with both a bang and a whimper at the United Nations this week when Palestine pushed for a vote on a much-awaited but ultimately doomed Security Council resolution seeking Israel's withdrawal from occupied territory.

It was a fitting close to one of the UN's most tumultuous years, which saw it play host to bickering over conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq while it assisted unprecedented numbers of needy people around the world and weathered a peacekeeping scandal that cut to the core of its mandate.

UN Security Council rejects Palestinian resolution to end Israel's occupation. Read more here.

The year started with embarrassment. In January, soft-spoken UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stepped out of his comfort zone and invited Iran to Syrian peace talks in Geneva. The move proved disastrous when it was quickly made clear that Ban had either been misled by the Iranians, or that he misunderstood them. Tehran would not agree to the central tenet of the talks — that any brokered agreement in Syria would involve regime change.

As Ban made his ill-fated announcement, the first signs of West Africa's Ebola crisis were surfacing. An internal World Health Organization document obtained by the Associate Press later found that "nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall." The WHO cited "politically motivated appointments" in Africa that played a role in a breakdown in the response to the virus, which has now infected more than 20,000 people and claimed the lives of nearly 8,000.

Russia's annexation of Crimea in March prompted a flurry of heated Security Council sessions. French UN representative Gerard Araud — who now serves as the country's ambassador to the US — called Moscow "a pyromaniac fireman." Russian UN representative Vitaly Churkin vetoed a US-sponsored Security Council resolution that deemed Crimea's referendum on secession from Ukraine illegal. It was the first of two vetoed resolutions this year; in May both Russia and China blocked referral of the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court.

UN Security Council holds unprecedented hearing on human rights in North Korea. Read more here.

Meanwhile, pressure built against North Korea's government throughout 2014. In February, a UN human rights inquiry found "systematic widespread and gross human rights violations" in the country. North Korean officials described the report a naked attempt at regime change by the US, and charged that it couldn't be trusted because its author was homosexual. At a hearing concerning the report's findings in October, North Korean officials speaking among themselves were overheard calling Botswana's ambassador — whose delegation had co-sponsored the hearing — a "black bastard."

But for all their intransigence, the case against North Korea moved forward, culminating in an unprecedented Security Council session in December on the human rights situation in the country.

Though China stands in the way of ICC referral for North Korea, the Security Council was able to find a common enemy in the Islamic State. The extremist group, which captured large swaths of Syria and Iraq this year, was cited by top UN officials almost weekly for a litany of horrors, including rape, murder, and enslavement — actions widely reviled as crimes against humanity.

United Nations report accuses Islamic State of 'staggering' crimes against civilians in Iraq. Read more here.

In November, during a funding crisis that would temporarily halt food vouchers to Syrian refugees in neighboring countries, the UN's British humanitarian chief Valerie Amos announced that she would resign. It soon emerged that UK Prime Minister David Cameron was pushing Ban to replace her with Andrew Lansley, a Conservative member of Parliament who before being sacked from his post as health secretary oversaw an overhaul of the British medical system that the Guardiancharacterized as "the death" of its socialized National Health Service.

Lansley's selection served to illustrate the tacit division of power at the UN, one that sees its various branches split up between world powers. Herve Ladsous, a Frenchman, heads peacekeeping; Yuri Fedotov, a Russian, oversees the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime; Chinese doctor Margaret Chan serves as WHO chief; Ertharin Cousin, an American, runs the World Food Program.

Despite an initial uproar over Lansley's selection owing to a dispute over his qualifications, his nomination for the post was confirmed this week.

Ladsous, the enigmatic peacekeeping chief, had a busy year. The UN deploys more than 100,000 peacekeeping "blue helmets" across 16 missions. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN in 2013 deployed a widely lauded Force Intervention Brigade to defeat rebels in the country's east. Today, it deploys drones along lake Kivu to track armed groups, and is considering further missions for the brigade.

But in 2014 failures outnumbered successes for UN peacekeepers.

In the Golan Heights, UN forces were forced to retreat into Israeli-controlled territory after the Syrian civil war spilled into the demilitarized zone they were meant to protect.

Violent attacks across Central African Republic highlight limitations of international response. Read more here.

In the Central African Republic, UN peacekeepers arrived at less than full strength nearly a year after whispers of genocide were first heard. The international presence there was unable to prevent the wholesale ethnic cleansing that expelled the country's longstanding Muslim population from the south.

In South Sudan, peacekeepers continue to be overwhelmed by more than 100,000 people seeking shelter at their bases,displaced by a stubborn civil war that many observers predicted, but which the international community failed to avert.

But the UN's inability to protect civilians was most glaring in Darfur. In April, a former spokesperson for UNAMID, the joint UN-African Union mission in the region, leaked internal documents and communiques that painted the mission as chronically failing to protect civilians and investigate human rights abuses.

Ban eventually appointed investigators to launch an inquiry, only to have its findings called a "cover up" by former UNAMID spokesperson Aicha Elbasri, who had leaked the documents. Less than a week after the review team released its report in October, Sudanese soldiers engaged in a days-long mass rape of possibly more than 200 women and girls in the Darfuri town of Tabit.

UN mission in Darfur accused of improperly investigating mass rape. Read more here.

The UN took several days to reach Tabit, only to report that "none of those interviewed confirmed that any incident of rape took place." The mission failed to convey a heavy Sudanese presence during their visit — which they later acknowledged — and bizarrely went on to describe relations between locals and Sudanese forces as cordial.

VICE News confirmed with human rights officials that rapes took place on a massive scale. Two months later, the UN still has yet to do so. UNAMID, meanwhile, is beginning a process of retrenchment among its forces there.

Much of the work the UN does, including feeding displaced people in Syria, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan, goes largely unnoticed. For all the criticism of its ineffectiveness in brokering diplomacy, untold millions would simply die if the multilateral organization were to pull the plug on those efforts.

The UN says that it will need a massive infusion of some $16.4 billion in 2015 to finance its humanitarian programs around the world, which it hopes will reach more than 57 million people. Many of its funding calls went unheeded in the past year, however.

As a thinned out UN press corps gathered for Tuesday's Security Council session on Palestine, many reporters wondered why Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would insist on a vote mere days before new Security Council members, likely with more sympathy for his cause, would take their place in the chamber. In the end, the Palestinian resolution failed to muster even the nine votes that would have forced a US veto — but the attempt might have just been a stepping stone.

The following day, Abbas ratified the International Criminal Court's Rome Statute. For months, negotiations at the UN had involved earnest efforts by several non-Arab member states to reach a consenus document to present to the Council. The closely watched, 11th-hour vote turned out to be almost procedural, a move the Palestinians wanted out of the way before turning toward the ICC — and away from the UN.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons