Fiddling while Somalia starves: The UN Secretary-General complains that the West has neglected Africa. But his own organisation has done nothing to help the continent, argues Alex de Waal

An official inside the United Nations this week told me the catastrophe in Somalia was 'the greatest failure of the UN in our lifetime'. It was an apt description. During the past 19 months, while the country has been plunged into the worst crisis in its history, with hundreds of thousands dead through famine and the prospect of an entire generation of young children starving to death, the UN has, in effect, been absent.

The UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, has castigated the Western powers for their preoccupation with Yugoslavia, the 'rich man's war'. It is true that the cabal of nations that controls the UN Security Council has been woefully indifferent to the plight of Somalia. But there is another malaise, equally fundamental to the UN, that has also been central to its shameful record.

The UN is probably the least accountable government-sized bureaucracy in the world - a main reason, not only for the cataclysm in Somalia, but for the persistence of famine throughout Africa.

Hundreds of thousands, even millions, of lives depend on famine relief. A lay person might believe that the international famine relief system, centred at the UN, is highly efficient, staffed by dedicated professionals of the highest calibre. Nothing could be further from the truth. The scale of incompetence, callousness, greed and sloth in the specialised agencies of the UN that deal with famine relief is horrifying. For the most part their operations are slow, wasteful, poorly planned and executed, and do as much damage as good.

Their record is never assessed. Every organisation makes mistakes; the difference is that the UN is never forced to learn from them. There are sincere and professional people at the UN, but they are rarely the ones who climb to the top of the greasy pole.

Following disaster in a Western industrialised country, there is a public commission of inquiry to allocate blame and propose remedies. At best, the victims then have judicial recourse and, at worst, they have the weapon of public embarrassment. Either way, they can call to account those whose negligence or recklessness was responsible for the disaster.

The same is not the case for the Third World, with a few important exceptions. After a famine, the best that can be hoped for are secretive in-house assessments that never see the light of day. The public is merely told that a natural disaster occurred and the UN did its best to help. We are not told about the incompetence, corruption and dereliction of duty within the aid bureaucracies. Each disaster for the UN agencies is presented as another success story.

An important reason why the 1984 famine in Ethiopia did not receive adequate relief was the culpable negligence of the World Food Programme of the UN. In early 1984, the Ethiopian government asked for 450,000 metric tonnes of relief aid, half of what it estimated was needed, but the most it believed it could get from donors. The WFP sent a mission to investigate, which estimated (erroneously) that Ethiopian ports could manage only 125,000 tonnes.

As a result the WFP mission stated Ethiopia needed only 125,000 tonnes - an underestimate of both the real needs and the port capacity by tenfold. Either the authors of the report were monumentally incompetent, or members of a conspiracy to deprive Ethiopians of food. The report contributed to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, but the officials responsible were never brought to court; instead they continued the inexorable rise of their careers.

In the depths of the southern Sudanese famine of 1988, the UN Children's Fund (Unicef) withdrew from two relief programmes in the stricken area, because of pressure from the Sudanese government, which was largely responsible for the famine because of how it was fighting the civil war. Unicef did not complain publicly. The following year, when domestic political pressure in Sudan, and unprecedented criticism from the US, led to the launch of 'Operation Lifeline' for the starving, Unicef led the way in a blaze of publicity and self-congratulation. The earlier debacle was never referred to, and the lessons in dealing with the Sudanese government were never learnt. As a direct result Operation Lifeline repeatedly ran into problems and finally became defunct. The only UN person disciplined in this episode was the official who offended the government by starting the 1988 relief programes - he was transferred.

These are but two examples; every UN agency (indeed, every major government aid institution and many voluntary agencies) has similar unpardonable stories. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has perhaps more than its fair share, but none is guiltless.

An agency such as Unicef objects to criticism on the grounds that it is doing a good job, and any adverse publicity will make the public stop donating. This is fatuous. Are the big aid agencies doing a good job?

In the worst crisis in the world today, Somalia, the UN agencies did absolutely nothing for one year, and then dithered and consulted, sending a few small shiploads of food for a further six months. No contingency plans were made in advance for launching the huge emergency operation that the International Committee of the Red Cross, among others, has been calling for since last year.

Today, the UN is still behaving as if the crisis were many months in the future, sending mission after mission to assess the situation, while several hundred Somali children die every day. The ICRC is spending half of its entire world- wide budget on the country, while the UN sits on its hands.

The UN agencies are not doing a good job, far from it. Their record is a disgrace, and a perfectly legitimate reason for the donating public to stop giving money to Unicef, or for governments to cease funding the WFP, UNHCR or UN Development Programme.

Relief experts agree the two most effective famine prevention programmes in the world are in India and Botswana. These two systems share one thing in common - they were built up on the basis of public examination of past record and accountability for that record. In both countries, elected representatives who let their constituents go hungry will not be re- elected, and government officials who are negligent face disciplinary action and even prosecution.

There are signs of change in the UN, such as the creation of the new post of Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. But this attempt to restructure the bureaucracy is doomed to failure unless there are far-reaching reforms of a wholly different kind.

Accountability is the key. Officials in the UN agencies who are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths must face the prospect of prosecution, not promotion. The UN must put its house in order. First, it must open up its files on all famine relief operations for public scrutiny, and commission an independent and public investigation into the disaster that is UN famine relief. Somalia must be the first item of inquiry. A cataclysm on this scale requires at least several charges of criminal negligence against senior officials - nothing less will ensure that the future record is better.

Second, the UN must legislate so that this glasnost is permanent, not a fleeting episode imposed from the outside. This means the victims of UN incompetence, negligence or callousness must have legal recourse. Refugees must be able to take the UNHCR to court, famine victims must be able to make claims against the WFP and Unicef. If instigating legal action proves difficult, there must at least be routine public inquiries after every UN relief programme.

Mr Boutros-Ghali is showing the inclination to be a Gorbachev in the UN's Kremlin. But too many of the nomenklatura are obstructing him in the middle ranks. He needs the support of the financiers of the UN to carry through the urgently needed reforms.

The author is associate director of the human rights organisation Africa Watch.

(Photograph omitted)