The way to get ahead at the United Nations, Cain told me, is to prevent anything from happening. "They are incapable of executing or implementing. What they can do is demonstrate their righteousness," he said. "They are perfectly happy to release documents that promise or imply efforts to reform — and time after time it dies before the ink is dry."
Zaid's complaint has part of the key: The only way to screw up as a U.N. staffer is to get into trouble with the member nations — there's no accountability for anything else, and if doing the right thing requires upsetting a member nation, it doesn't get done.
Then, too, the vast majority of U.N. employees come from the elite back home — where they can likely avoid trouble or buy their way out of it. When they get to the United Nations, few want things to work any differently.
This is, after all, the organization that didn't have the will to prevent the slaughter of 1 million Rwandans; that established a "safe haven" at Srebrenica, then let the people there be murdered; that winked at massive corruptions in the Oil-for-Food program. Confronting sexual exploitation is really low on the priority list.
As Cain put it, "The United Nations promulgates human-rights standards to the whole world. But when you try to hold them to the very same standards, it's impossible."
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