U.N. Me: It’s Worse than You Think

The bad news is many United Nations officials are actively working to protect institutionalized injustice and corruption.  The good news is they all clock out at 5:00 on the dot.  Taking a page out of the Michael Moore playbook (and a few of his crew) Ami Horowitz and Matthew Groff rake the muck of Turtle Bay in U.N. Me (trailer here), a simultaneously hilarious and infuriating documentary opening this Friday in New York.

Unlike his pseudo-role model, gonzo-host Horowitz never ambushes receptionists or security guards.  A witty and seemingly guileless screen presence, he is out to confront the UN elite with the crimes committed under their watch.  Crime is indeed the right term, particularly in the first segment focusing on the sexual assaults perpetrated by so-called “UN peacekeepers.”   Traveling to the Côte d’Ivoire, the gauche Horowitz even has the temerity to ask the commander of the UN peacekeeping mission about an incident in which his forces fired on unarmed protestors.  It took a long time to snag that on-camera interview, but it sure doesn’t last long.

Horowitz and Groff revisit many of the organization’s greatest hits, like Oil for Food and the genocide in Rwanda, but each time it is clear the unofficial motto for UN should be “it’s worse than you think.”  As bad as the UN and Kofi Annan look in Roger Spottiswoode’s Shake Hands with the Devil, Horowitz and Groff make it clear then Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali is even more culpable, having deliberately misled the Security Council about the situation on the ground in Rwanada and previously brokering a major arms sales to the Hutu-dominated government while still with the Egyptian Foreign Affairs ministry.

U.N. Me is packed with jaw-dropping factoids, like eighty percent of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspection budget is spent on Canada, Germany, and Japan.  As for Iran, the agency’s former director general Mohamed ElBaradei tells Horowitz there is no reason to be concerned about their nuclear program.  Feel safer now?

Perhaps to avoid the temptation to dismiss the film as another salvo in the Israeli-“Palestinian” controversy, Horowitz and Groff make only passing mention of the notoriously disproportionate censure leveled at Israel and only Israel, the Middle East’s sole democracy.  As a result, potential critics are forced to deal with the inconvenient realities of UN policy with respects to Darfur.  It is not pretty.  Just ask Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams, who was rather rudely received by the Human Rights Council when she presented her honest findings.  Horowitz and Groff do exactly that, but they also try to follow-up with those same genocide-abetting diplomats.

The problems U.N. Me exposes are not merely anecdotal, but systemic and profound.  It is important to remember this jaw-dropping malfeasance is underwritten by our tax dollars.  Perhaps it is time to reconsider membership in an organization that makes no distinctions between free democracies and despotic regimes.   It is also clear the legacy media has been derelict in its duties covering the UN’s global scandals. 

One hopes the documentary will be screened for the current Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is not directly implicated in the film, beyond clearly not displaying any urgency addressing the organization’s persistent graft and dysfunction.  It moves along at a brisk pace, so any bureaucrat ought to be able to follow it, but do not hold your breath.  Nonetheless, the dismayingly funny U.N. Me highly recommended for anyone interested in the current state of the world.  It opens this Friday (6/1) in select theaters nationwide, including the AMC Empire here in New York.

Tribeca ’12: Baseball in the Time of Cholera (short)

The United Nations has long acted like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  In the case of Haiti, it is pestilence.  Allegedly thanks to the UN peacekeeping force, a deadly wave of cholera has swept the dysfunctional country.  Viewers witness the epidemic from the vantage point of a young ball player in David Darg & Bryn Mooser’s short documentary, Baseball in the Time of Cholera (trailer here), which screens as part of the Help Wanted programming block during the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.

Joseph Alvyns and his friends should simply be spending an innocent summer on the baseball diamond.  They play as often as they can, but it is impossible to ignore the post-hurricane chaos around them.  Yet, when Alvyns sees the devastation of the 3/11 hurricane and tsunami in Japan, he is compelled to reach out in a spirit of solidarity.  His efforts attract international attention, even earning him a VIP trip to Toronto, courtesy of the Blue Jays.  Unfortunately, when he returns, cholera strikes at the heart of his family.

Technically, Darg and Mooser do not conclusively establish the Nepalese “peace-keepers” are the source of the cholera outbreak.  Still, the sight of raw sewage spilling from their latrine into Haiti’s central river coupled with the Heisman the Nepalese commander gives their camera man constitutes a pretty convincing circumstantial case.  The film also asks legitimate question: why are there peace-keepers stationed in a country that has not been at war for centuries?  However, they largely let the successive authoritarian and socialist governments off the hook for bringing the Haitian state to the brink of complete failure.

Time boasts some unusually big names behind the camera, including executive producers Olivia Wilde and Tesla Motors entrepreneur Elon Musk, one of three POV figures in Chris Paine’s Revenge of the Electric Car, which screened at last year’s Tribeca.  To its credit, the film community has rallied to Haiti’s aide, yet there has not been a similar celebrity rush on behalf of Japanese recovery efforts.  Therefore, it is worth taking the time to note those wishing to follow Alvyns’ example can also donate to the Japan Society’s relief fund (details here).

For a short documentary, Baseball in the Time of Cholera nicely balances muckraking and heartrending tragedy.  It should screen at Turtle Bay, but instead it will screen again in lower Manhattan this Friday (4/27) and Sunday (4/29) as the Tribeca Film Festival continues throughout the weekend.

The UN at Work: The Whistleblower

Whether it was facilitating genocide in Rwanda as head of “peace-keeping operations” or ignoring the graft-ridden implementation of the now notorious oil-for-food program, Kofi Annan’s record at the United Nations has permanently stained the organization’s honor. Perhaps most damning, during Annan’s stint as Secretary-General, UN Peacekeeping forces have been plagued with charges of sexual abuse across the world, including deployments in Burundi, Haiti, Liberia, Sudan, and Bosnia. Inconveniently, whistleblowers Ben Johnston and Kathryn Bolkovac publically revealed the extent to which UN diplomats, military peacekeepers, and international police forces were involved with human sex trafficking in Bosnia, accusing Annan’s specially appointed representative Jacques Paul Klein of stonewalling subsequent investigations.

Unfortunately, the names of Annan and Klein are nowhere to be found in Larysa Kondracki’s The Whistleblower (trailer here), which presents Bolkovac’s story as merely a case of rogue cops, almost entirely ignoring the complicity of the UN proper in human rights abuses committed by its personnel. The result is a frequently infuriating but substantially problematic film, which opens this Friday in New York.

Bolkovac was a popular police officer in Lincoln Nebraska, but she needed the quick payday offered by a tour of duty with the UN’s IFP. Bolkovac had lost custody of her daughter (for reasons the film never bothers to explain, though it is repeatedly used to cast aspersions on her). With her ex-husband suddenly relocating and no transfer available, Bolkovac bit the bullet and headed to Bosnia.

Much to her surprise, she found she was one of the few legitimate professionals recruited for the IFP. The local Bosnian cops were just as dodgy, even though law enforcement was their ostensive job. Still, she is able to find one honest cop, whom she helps mount the first Bosnian wife beating investigation to end with a conviction. To its credit, Whistleblower tentatively suggests sexist attitudes prevalent amongst the country’s Muslim population exacerbated the trafficking problem, but never follows up as the narrative progresses.

Quickly Bolkovac learns nearly all her fellow international cops are implicated in the conspiracy, including several who are directly involved in the actual trafficking. She only trusts the Dutch officer whom she also becomes romantically involved with. Still, she has a champion in senior diplomat Madeleine Rees, who taps Bolkovac to head the Bosnian IFP’s office of women and gender issues, probably a dubious promotion in retrospect.

Whistleblower would have arguably been a stronger film had it played it straighter. Not content to make the corporate contractor (based on the real life Dyncorp) carry the scandalous load, Kondracki and co-screenwriter Ellis Kirwin redub them Democratica, just so we do not miss the irony. It also would have helped Whistleblower’s credibility had it been more equitable identifying the nationalities of the guilty. Aside from the Irish Liam Cunningham (who must have signed with Michael Caine’s former agent considering how much work he has been getting) appearing as corporate shark Bill Hynes, all of the heavies are naturally Yanks. Yet in the actual case, the alleged perpetrators were from several member countries, with two of the most notorious being Romanian.

Rachel Weisz is perfectly fine as Bolkovac, quivering on cue to express either moral outrage or mortal fear. Unfortunately, the striking Monica Bellucci is largely wasted as Laura Leviani, a duplicitous bureaucrat for refugee affairs, who comes the closest to being a genuine UN villain. Vanessa Redgrave shows a command of humanist platitudes as Rees, but given her incendiary prejudices, her very presence weighs the film down with further baggage. However, Romanian actress Roxana Condurache is absolutely devastating as Raya, a Ukrainian woman lured into slavery, surely a trying role to assume even in a dramatic context. Through her performance, the audience gets a visceral sense of the fear and degradation such women experience. Indeed, she is the film’s redemption.

Given the seriousness of human trafficking, a crime that continues to brutalize women, particularly from Eastern Europe, Whistleblower really ought to be better, smarter, and truer. Unfortunately, it represents only the tip of the iceberg in terms of crimes committed by UN personnel. Ultimately just an okay film that tantalizingly hints at what it might have been, The Whistleblower opens this Friday (8/5) in New York at the Landmark Sunshine.